26 Urban Commons, Ecologies and Environmentalisms

Ashima Sood

epgp books

 

 

Introduction

 

What do we talk about when we talk about the city? Is it the sum total of the built-up space and man-made infrastructures? What role if any do natural processes and the non-human world play in shaping the urban environment? In fact, in what sense can we speak of an “urban” “environment”?

 

Cities and the “country” – or nature – have often been seen as polar opposites. This contrast even underlies Ebenezer Howard’s reconciliation of city and country in the garden city programme (Module 3.1). Yet, in recent times, scholars have turned away from this dichotomous framing of city and nature in favour of one that recognizes nature in the city.

 

In this module, we consider how sociologists and other social scientists have theorized and understood the relationship between human and natural forces in the urban. To start our overview of relevant paradigms, we begin with Roseland’s (1997) enumeration of scholarly and practice-oriented attempts to connect the city and nature as habitats and systems. Some of these are programmes for action and praxis, and have met with varying degrees of success and longevity.

 

  1. Urban ecology and the eco-city movement, founded in 1970s Berkeley, California in the United States (US) seeks to shape cities based on “ecological principles” (p 197)
  2.   Social ecology, the study of human and natural ecosystems, and their interactions, has been widely employed in urban contexts, as the studies cited in this module show.1
  3.  Bioregionalism espouses the bioregion– “a life-territory, a place defined by its life forms, its topography and its biota, rather than by human dictates; a region governed by nature, not legislature” (Sale 1985 quoted p 199) — as its object of study. It has been an influential movement that views the naturally determined river basin or watershed as the most appropriate unit for political and economic organization.
  4.   Sustainable development has proved to be a powerful idiom in policy circles, most recently with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, even though it remains conceptually rather vaguely defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Urbanization, WCED quoted on p 200).

 

Note, however, that Gaston (2010) takes a broader view of the term “urban ecology”, tracing it to the recognition that the planet’s ecosystems are now dominated by humans, and more particularly by urban agglomerations. Gaston’s survey of the literature distinguishes two distinct conceptions of “urban ecology” – “ecology in urban areas” ie, ecological forces in urban areas; and “ecology of urban areas”, which views the city as a whole ecosystem unto itself.

 

In this module, our focus remains on social science scholarship, which has evolved tremendously in the two decades since Roseland’s article appeared. Starting with an introduction to the notion of urban metabolism, which derives from the disciplines of industrial ecology and ecological economics, we turn to the social science paradigms of urban political ecology, bourgeois environmentalism and the emerging literature on the urban commons in India.

 

It is worth noting here two broad intellectual antecedents of the literature on these themes. One of these strands builds upon the Marxian (and Engels’) prescient insight that “antithesis between nature and history is created” only when “the relation of man to nature is excluded from history” (Harvey 1993, p 26). In particular, the Marxian notion of urban metabolism, discussed in the next section, has increasingly found new resonance in studies of industrial ecology and ecological economics. Scholars such as Neil Smith have extended these ideas to draw attention to the ways in which “nature” is “socially produced”, laying the foundations for the urban political ecology framework.

 

A second strand follows from the work of Elinor Ostrom and her co-authors on the commons (1999; also Ostrom et al 1999). Though originally applied to common property resources such as fisheries, timber and non-timber products and water, the notion of the commons has been fruitfully harnessed to examine urban ecosystems in Indian cities (Gidwani and Baviskar 2011; Maringanti 2011). The key contribution of Ostrom’s work lies in delineating forms of governance that help avoid the Tragedy of the Commons, ie, the congestion and overexploitation of CPRs (Foster 2011).

 

1  As Heynen et al (2006) note, the earliest usage of the term “social ecology” by the Chicago School sociologists was entirely “denatured”.

 

Urban Metabolism

 

Urban metabolism is one of the foundational concepts in recent research on human-nature interactions and one that has been variously adopted and translated in the social science frameworks discussed in the following sections. In a paper in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, Broto et al (2012, p 851) define urban metabolism as “the exchange processes whereby cities transform raw materials, energy, and water into the built environment, human biomass, and waste.” Despite its origins in the disciplines of industrial ecology and ecological economics, it is not surprising that the term has come to the centre of debates around sustainable development. Enriched by a multidisciplinary literature, the concept has proved successful in incorporating understandings of how socio-economic arrangements mediate the flows of resources and outputs through the city.

 

Broto et al outline six major thematic clusters within the interdisciplinary conversation around urban metabolism (p 852):

 

(1)  the city as an ecosystem,

(2) material and energy flows within the city,

(3)  economic–material relations within the city,

(4)  economic drivers of rural–urban relationships,

(5)  the reproduction of urban inequality, and

(6)  attempts at resignifying the city through new visions of socioecological relationships.

 

Of these, the last three have been especially hospitable to theorizations of resource use and distribution and environmental politics, according to Broto et al (2012). Studies that look at “economic drivers of rural–urban relationships” through an urban metabolism lens cast cities as “centers of capital accumulation and dissipative structures… with an ever-increasing demand for resources from the periphery, contributing to structural inequality between the core and the periphery in the world system” (p 855-856). These analyses, exemplified by the work of Martinez-Aliers (2016) and others, foreground inequalities produced through urban metabolic processes and place them at the root of resource conflict.

 

The term metabolism in fact goes back to Marx, who described it as “the material exchanges and interdependent relationship between human society and nature occurring through the labor process” (p 856). Marx saw urbanization as a cause of “metabolic rift” — the estrangement of humans from the natural conditions of their existence under capitalism – both because of migration from rural areas and ever-lengthening trade routes. This strand of the literature has been particularly attentive to the transformations produced by neoliberal reforms, for example in Argentina’s urban fisheries, where it led to “overfishing, internationalization of capital, and flexible production based on the establishment of a precarious labour force” (p 856). Thus, increasing urban metabolism through fishery flows is accompanied by increasing labour exploitation.

 

The urban political ecology (UPE) literature, which sometimes deploys concepts of social and urban metabolism, lies in one of these cluster. Studies in this strand have made incisive contributions to the politics of urban water supply in particular, showing how “infrastructure networks reflect socioeconomic inequalities both in the [global] south and the [global] north” (p 857). More broadly,UPE framings of urban metabolism recognize infrastructure networks, lying at the interface between nature and society, as key to metabolic circulation. Often hidden, these networks nonetheless powerfully shape both material flows and social relations. For example, in the American city of Pittsburg, Broto et al (2012) note that sewerage networks were first built to cater to affluent constituencies but the access charges were levied on all city residents.

 

The next section has much more to say on the UPE body of work but suffice to note here that its “key observation is that metabolisms have the potential to express peoples’ drives, desires, and imaginations” (p 858).

 

Marxian and neo-Marxist UPE theorizations do not form the basis of all studies of social and urban metabolisms. A pertinent example is Mehta et al’s (2013) paper, which “develops a metabolic framework for domestic water use in Bangalore” and “treats the city as a tightly-coupled social-ecological system” (p 40). More than social inequalities, these authors’ model highlights the spatial disparities in groundwater availability, taking account of both resource flows and waste flows, as well as “return flows (flow of used water to the underground aquifers) and leakage flows from imported river water brought into the city” (p 48). In comparison with the literatures we discuss below, Mehta et al (2013) provide a basic edifice for tracing the impacts of various policy scenarios, including privatisation, rainwater harvesting and others. Their work thus provides a useful example of how the technical model of urban metabolism can be deployed for social and policy analysis.

 

Recent work such as Martinez Aliers et al (2016) expounds on the technical accounting methods of material flow analysis in the Indian context and looks at, among other Indian case studies, the social metabolism of waste flows in Delhi.

 

Urban Political Ecology

 

In setting out the scholarly and practice gaps that impelled the formulation of the urban political ecology (UPE) framework, Heynen et al (2006) underscored two in particular. First was the challenge of “renaturing” urban theory, which since the late 19th century had become thoroughly “denatured”, ie, inattentive to the intersections of urban and natural worlds. Second, there was an equal neglect of cities in environmental theory and praxis, which tended to focus instead on problems on the global scale such as deforestation or global warming.

 

Responding to these ruptures, Heynen et al (2002) defined the agenda of UPE thus: “To the extent that cities are produced through socio-ecological processes, attention has to be paid to the political processes through which particular socio-environmental urban conditions are made and remade.” The UPE aims to conceptualize the urban as an arena not only of the built and social form, but also of biological and physical processes (Cadenasso et al 2006).

 

At the heart of this scholarly turn is the idea of the “social production” of nature, first set out by Smith (1984), which posits that “natural or ecological conditions and processes do not operate separately from social processes, and that the actually existing socio-natural conditions are always the result of intricate transformations of pre-existing configurations that are themselves inherently natural and social” (Swyngedouw 1999: 445). The UPE perspective allows then an interesting answer to our question about what is “urban” about an “environment”. Heynen et al (2006) argue that “the environment of the city (both social and physical) is the result of a historical-geographical process of the urbanization of nature” (p 6).

 

Zimmer (2010) suggests that the conceptual apparatus of the UPE rests precisely on this neo-Marxist framing of “production of nature” delineated by Neil Smith (1984) and David Harvey (1993), whose famous assertion that there is nothing “unnatural about New York City” provides the central mantra for the UPE paradigm. Second, scholars using the UPE approach are increasingly intrigued as much by covert contestations that underlie the “normal” as much as overt conflict.

 

Together, these propositions imply that the social production of nature is not a neutral enterprise, but one that creates winners and losers by favouring certain groups and classes over others. This is one of the main contributions of the UPE framework. Authors such as McFarlane (2013) suggest that a “metabolic lens” proves useful because it allows an expansion in “potential sites of intervention, from water pipes, drains and power stations to laws, policies and officials, widening the objects of analysis and the epistemology of social change” (quoted in Demaria and Schindler 2015: 4).

 

Following on the previous discussion of urban metabolism, it is useful to understand how UPE scholars have bent the concept to their purposes. In this literature, “modes of regulation” and consumption are central to analyses of metabolism. UPE expands the conceptual territory of metabolism to include dimensions of “political changes, the critique of capitalism, social factors and the agency of nature” (Zimmer 2010, p 348).

 

It is important to strike a critical note. Authors such as Demaria and Schindler (2015) represent an important strand of scholarship within UPE that interrogates the positioning of capital as the primary and sole determinant of urban metabolisms. In their study of waste-to-energy incinerators, they return their focus to the material flows that underlie Delhi’s waste economy, and argue that materiality and political economy evolve together to shape urban metabolisms.

 

A proliferation of thematically varied studies in field sites in the global North and South (fewer) have helped ground these ideas. Scholars have empirically as well as theoretically analysed aspects of water and air, wooded areas, parks and lawns, land use, urban environmental politics and food (Zimmer 2010). Although very few in number, studies in Indian cities illustrate how a UPE framework enriches our understanding of nature in the city and the ways in which it is constituted through social relations.

 

In a comparative study of Tooleville in California’s Central Valley and Bommanahalli outside of Bangalore, Ranganathan and Balazs (2015, p 404) highlight the disparate ways in which water access, state practice, and political agency are negotiated in the “broader geography of water marginalization in fringe urban spaces”. Their analytical approach combines UPE with environmental justice scholarship. For example, they highlight how agency in struggles to access water is read through a “rights-based” framework in the US case but through the lens of claim-making in India. While rights have legal backing, “claims” lack legally enforceable support.

 

Against this backdrop, Zimmer’s (2014) account of urban parks in Gujarat’s Navsari agglomeration raises important concerns about who directs and controls the location and uses of nature in the city, and how such “ownership” comes to be shaped by partnerships between public and private actors. In Zimmer’s telling, the construction and sustenance of the parks system in the towns has been a project of middle class ambition from its very origins in the displacement and relocation of slum populations to urban peripheries in order “to constitute a particular, elite, urban aesthetic at the heart of the city” (p 6). Even as these spatial logics have tended to locate uses valued by elites in the most financially and symbolically prized land, they have moved less valued populations and uses to the margins of the “socio-spatial order” (p 10-11).

 

Such issues of sponsorship, management and governance of urban nature have been further exacerbated in two of the parks being run under a public-private partnership model. Lastly, Zimmer (2014) also highlights how the parks have become arenas of conflict between different groups of users: one, implicit class contestation between respectable middle class users and non-elite visitors, and second, as settings for normative discourse for gender relations, especially young unmarried couples. Local elites have therefore introduced restrictions to park access through a boundary wall, and limited opening hours, calling once again into question the extent to which these parks can be called “public spaces” (Module 6.7).

 

Veron (2006) deploys the UPE paradigm to analyse the environmental governance of air quality in Delhi, noting that even though air quality is not traded on the market, it does command a premium on real estate markets. In this way, it is no longer open access but in fact a scarce resource. This is the context under which the matter of who pays for clean air becomes relevant. Veron contends that the environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and judiciary that have shaped Delhi’s air pollution policies show a distinct bias for middle class environmental interests.

 

Although incredibly disparate, both Zimmer and Veron’s work, even while resting on the UPE foundation, shows undeniable parallels with the preoccupations flagged by Baviskar’s conceptualization of bourgeois environmentalism in the Indian city. This is the scholarly framework we turn to next.

 

 

Bourgeois Environmentalisms

 

Mawdsley (2004), surveying the then incipient literature on the middle classes and the environment explored the reasons why this group was such a central actor in environmental debates. Middle classes exerted considerable say in these discussions first through their power as consumers, and second through their sway in “the media, politics, scientific establishment, NGOs, bureaucracy, environmental institutions and the legal system” ( p 81). Moreover, Mawdsley argued that an emerging environmental consciousness had become evident in middle class engagement with matters ranging from pollution to green spaces to waste management.

 

Exploring the discourses surrounding the rise of environmental activism among the middle classes, Mawdsley contrasted such involvement to traditional high caste disregard for civic cleanliness and public spaces more generally among middle class groups. Mawdsley acknowledged the diversity of motivations driving such activism in the contemporary period; her survey nonetheless found cause to buttress a growing concern in the literature that “the current increase in certain forms of environmental concern amongst the middle classes may have negative consequences for the poor” (p 93). Key to this dynamic was the tendency of middle class actors to attribute environmental damage to population growth and thereby, growing number of the poor. Starting with the Emergency in the mid-1970s, this was coupled with an advocacy of punitive and restrictive measures-  slum demolitions and others – to discipline the poor. 7

 

These trends underpinned Baviskar’s influential coinage of “bourgeois environmentalism” — an increasing propensity for urban space to be organized around upper-class dispositions on “aesthetics, leisure, safety, and health”. Baviskar’s formulation owed its genesis to an incident in mid 1990s Delhi when the conflict over the use of public space literally and tragically turned fatal (See also Module 6.4). In 1995, Dilip, a young man from a jhuggi or shanty cluster was clubbed to death by police and residents in the middle class locality of Ashok Vihar because they suspected him of using the neighbourhood park for defecation.

 

The necessary background for this episode: the nearly 10,000 households of Dilip’s jhuggi “shared three public toilets, each one with eight latrines, effectively one toilet per 2083 persons” (p 89). In Dilip’s killing, thus, two understandings of the neighbourhood park came face-to-face: the middle class residents’ view of it as an oasis of trees and nature, and the jhuggi-dwellers’ desperate resort to it as an open air toilet. Deploying this analytical frame, Baviskar (2003: 97) argued that state making in Delhi “includes interventions aimed at improving the environmental quality of life for Delhi’s bourgeoisie”, and at the expense of non-elite groups.

 

Ghertner (2011) took Baviskar’s argument further in his dissection of the legal and popular discourses around the Delhi government’s “Clean Delhi, Green Delhi” campaign. According to him, elite groups in Delhi – government agencies, resident welfare associations, even the Courts — “tied deficiencies in environmental well-being and appearance to the presence of slums, largely through the legal category of ‘nuisance’” (p 286). As such, environmental questions came to be equated with, and arguably reduced to matters of aesthetics, with the very “appearance of filth or unruliness” becoming the legal basis for slum demolitions and evictions (p 287). Some of the contradictions inherited in this framing become apparent in Ghertner’s opening account of the legal battles over the privately developed Vasant Kunj mall to be built on the South Delhi Ridge, a protected green space according to the Delhi MasterPlan. Despite legal action by several environmental groups, the mall’s construction was given the Court’s go-ahead as a “world-class” commercial complex”, even as a neighbouring slum settlement, which conformed with land use regulations according the masterplan, was demolished on grounds of being a nuisance (p 281).

 

Elsewhere, Arabindoo (2011) demonstrates the way in which rainwater harvesting, first proposed as a low impact and indigenous solution to chronic water shortages in Chennai, became another environmental movement for bourgeois environmentalism to play out. This study also underlines the paradoxes inherent in bourgeois environmentalism – “in spite of its seemingly middle class agenda, rainwater harvesting overlaps with the spread of more profligate uses of water by the city’s middle classes, whose changing patterns of consumption … undermines efforts at water conservation” (p 6).

 

Other authors such as Mawdsley et al (2009), McFarlane (2008) and Follmann have examined how bourgeois environmentalism manifests itself in settings as diverse as visitors to protected areas, to the making of Delhi’s Yamuna riverfront. As we have seen, the notion of bourgeois environmentalism shares in common several surmises with the UPE framing. However, whereas UPE is more formally an analytical approach, bourgeois environmentalism describes a pronounced and enduring dynamic in the way social actors conceive of and act upon the urban environment.

 

Here, UPE studies such as Demaria and Schindler’s (2015) recently published investigation of the struggles around waste-to-energy plants in Delhi call into question the conclusions of a reading based on bourgeois environmentalism alone. Documenting the opposition of two different and important groups – waste-pickers and their allied organizations and middle-class residents to the waste-to energy technology – they show how these groups formed an “uneasy alliance” (p 13). Although these authors are interested in nuancing the usage of urban metabolism in UPE, their evidence does suggest possible departures in existing paradigms of environmental action in India.

 

Urban Commons

 

As an antidote to bourgeois environmentalism’s “fetishization of nature”, scholarship on the city-nature relationship in Indian cities has turned its “attention to the commons” (Parthasarathy 2011, p 55-56). The introductory section of this module has laid out Ostrom’s pioneering elucidation of governance issues surrounding the commons. Though the commons as a conceptual framework had been applied hitherto largely in rural settings, a special issue of the Economic and Political Weekly’s Review of Urban Affairs collected several papers that elaborated on the meanings and practices associated with the commons in urban India.

 

In the introductory essay, Gidwani and Baviskar (2011:42) offer a wide-ranging definition of the “urban commons” (Module 6.7): …public goods: the air we breathe, public parks and spaces, public transportation, public sanitation systems, public schools, public waterways, and also the less obvious: municipal garbage that provides livelihoods to waste-pickers; wetlands, waterbodies, and riverbeds that sustain fishing communities, washerwomen, and urban cultivators; streets as arteries of movement but also as places where people work, live, love, dream, and voice dissent; and local bazaars that are sites of commerce and cultural invention.

 

In contrast to the idea of the “public”, which lies “firmly within the ambit of the state and law”, Gidwani and Baviskar emphasize that the commons lie at the “frontiers, or within the interstices,” of the “territorial grid of the law” (2011: 42). The commons, both ecological and civic commons, “stand opposed to ‘commodity’” in scholarly discourse, although as the authors note, capitalist expansion around the world and especially in India has increasingly places them in jeopardy. Second, unlike an idealized “nature”, the ecological commons do not exist a priori but are produced through practices of “commoning”, that is through “communities of people willing to create, maintain, and protect them” (p 42).

 

Other papers in the collection take up these themes. An important case study of the history and contestations surrounding the urban commons comes from the work of Amita Baviskar in the issue. Speaking to the material and symbolic presence of the Yamuna river in Delhi, Bavisakar (2011) limns the commingled natural-cultural meanings the river inscribes and delineates the trajectory of the riverbank as an urban commons. For the old Delhi denizens of Jamna Bazar, for example, “the Yamuna offers a respite from urban congestion, from a life constantly crowded with people, sounds and things” (p 47). The riverbank plays many informally regulated roles, as farmland, wetland, dhobi ghat as well as open-air toilet. Yet, these ancient commons are increasingly besieged by circuits of commodification, as the floodplains have been taken over by the Commonwealth Games “village”, Akshardham temple and sundry real estate projects. In a pattern characteristic of the “enclosure” of the commons, bastis such as Yamuna Pushta were torn down.

 

A conflict between “world-class” visions and ecological rhythms underpins the significance of the Yamuna riverbed as an urban commons (Baviskar 2011). Political and real estate players have envisaged “world-class” riverfront projects to domesticate the Yamuna on par with the Thames in London or the Seine in Paris. Yet the viability of such a project to convert the riverfront into a “public space” remains doomed first by the scale of displacement it would entail and second, by its sponsorship and development by corporate interests to cater to “private and elite public modes of consumption” (p 52) such as high-rises and gated and priced attractions. More importantly, though, the Yamuna’s seasonal ebb and flow is driven by the monsoons to such an extent that the dry season expanse is both deceptive and highly flood prone. Thus, the Yamuna as commons resists incorporation into real estate logics even as it falls prey to them.

 

The diverse uses and ecological dynamics of waterbodies have rendered them a notable area of study for scholars interested in the urban commons. Studies in this strain include Maringanti (2011), Sundaresan (2011), D Souza and Nagendra (2011), and others. Scholarly debates have engaged with two important themes: first, a widespread narrative that blames urbanization for the loss of the commons. Second: the transformations in uses that accompany processes of enclosure of the commons, through assignment to either public or private property.

 

Regarding the first dimension of the debate, the effects of urbanization are especially potent in peri-urban areas, which have witnessed a real estate boom post-liberalization (Narain and Vij 2016). Narain and Vij report evidence from three fast-growing urban centres – Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Bangalore. In the rural peripheries of Gurgaon, for example, acquisition of private agricultural as well as commons land deprived Dalit cattle-herders of grazing lands and increased women workload in fodder collection. In both Hyderabad and Bangalore, urban growth and real estate development has struck the death knell for intricate systems of lakes and waterbodies, once again disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable.

 

In a close inquiry into the transformations surrounding the system of over 3000 man-made waterbodies dotting the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority area, Maringanti (2011) interrogates this received wisdom about the hazards posed by untamed urbanization to the commons. Under a regime of ambiguous land records and informally ascribed customary land rights, these waterbodies in Hyderabad have been laid open to creeping encroachment and occupancy processes over decades, leading in time to commodification and land use conversion, i.e., a process of enclosing the commons. Thus, Maringanti (2011) argues that the right to the city, first envisaged by Lefebvre in the “capitalist urban space of north America and western Europe”, and exercised in Indian contexts through subaltern claims on urban space, often appears to stand in opposition to the right of urban commons.

 

Maringanti’s argument requires an unpacking of the idea of the “commons” to recognize that Hyderabad’s waterbodies have been produced over long periods of time through the informal accretion of usage and “appropriation” rights that go beyond formal ownership with public or private actors. Against this backdrop, rescuing the waterbodies as commons calls for the assembly of new communities based on critical knowledge production, in other words, through a renewed effort at commoning.

 

In a case study in Bangalore, Sundaresan (2011) shows how “the unmaking and the making of Rajapalaya Lake as an urban commons occurred at the interface between the making and unmaking of communities, their political networks…” (p 78). The development of a new planned housing layout helped create a new community of concern for the lake, even as older rural communities of use were rendered less effective.

 

Once again, this account of commoning contrasts with work by D Souza and Nagendra (2011) on Bangalore’s Agara Lake, which reiterates the ways in which processes of urbanization compromise the commons. These authors however also highlight how the change in governance from village community to the government has served to transform usage patterns and shift perceptions of the lake to an arena of “pristine nature”. Traditional activities such as fodder collection, fishing and clothes-washing have come to be aggressively policed.

 

Parthasarathy’s (2011) paper in the Economic and Political Weekly’s Review of Urban Affairs special issue explores precisely the seemingly incongruous livelihoods of hunters, gatherers and foragers that subsist on the vestiges of the urban commons remaining in Mumbai metropolis. The waterbodies and the sea, increasingly susceptible to real estate pressures, support a variety of fisherfolks, including the Kolis. Although publicly owned, areas such as the Sanjay Gandhi National Park as well as the salt pans continue to perform some of the livelihood functions of resource commons, supporting primary sector activities such as salt panning and hunting, gathering and foraging.

 

Garrett Hardin’s famous tale of the tragedy of the commons casts a long shadow on the international literature on the urban commons. Hardin’s thesis asserts that any “open access” resource would be vulnerable to over-exploitation because of the difficulty of excluding potential users who lack the incentive to use the resource sustainably (Foster 2011). It is only recently that scholars have begun to theorize if and how this tragedy plays out in the urban context.

 

The empirically rich Indian literature on the urban commons represents a major advance in this relatively new body of work. Supporting the observation that both aggressive nationalization and privatization of the urban commons have failed (Foster 2011), it provides a valuable nuanced and critical evidentiary base to the modes and effectiveness of collective active in the urban sphere. In this, Indian studies on the urban commons make a significant contribution to Harvey’s (2011) call to “find creative ways to use the powers of collective labor [sic] for the common good.”

 

 

In Brief

 

This module has attempted to provide an overview of the social science approaches to understanding the actors, discourses and mechanisms that mediate and explicate the relationship between the “urban” and “environment”. This survey is far from comprehensive – for example, we have not considered Mawdsley’s (2009) reworking of the idea of “environmentality” in the context of Delhi’s bhagidari scheme. It also does not do justice to recent studies by authors such as Marie-Hélène Zérah and Frédéric Landy on the urban-protected area interface in places like Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park or to a rich literature on waste as resource (Reddy 2012; Gidwani 2013). It also bypasses the burgeoning policy literature on sustainable development and does not critically engage with emerging notions of “resilience”.

 

This module has tried to establish that far from being a value-neutral and marginal dimension of the urban, natural processes and resource flows are central to constituting politics and power relations in the city. If, as Broto et al (2012) state in their survey of UPE-inspired studies of urban water distribution networks, “cities have different parallel metabolisms for the same resource,” the choice of metabolic channels also coincides with shifting power relations (p 856). Policy biases such as neoliberal reforms can then lead to fragmented resource economies. In different ways, the three major paradigms discussed here – urban political economy, bourgeois environmentalism and urban commons – all indicate productive directions and an ample evidentiary foundation for policy and collective action. In this manner, the welding together of empirical scholarship with praxis is a major dimension of scholarship on the city and its ecologies.

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For further reading

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  • Baviskar,  A  (2003):  “Between Violence  and  Desire:  Space,  Power,  and  Identity in  the  Making of Metropolitan Delhi,” International Social Science Journal, 55(175): 89–98.
  • Baviskar, B.S. (2001). NGOs and Civil Society in India. Sociological Bulletin,50(1): 7–8.
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  • Chatterjee, Partha (2004): “Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois At Last?” in The Politics  of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World by Partha Chatterjee
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  • Fernandes, Leela (2004): “The Politics of Forgetting: Class Politics, State Power and the Restructuring of Urban Space in India,”  Urban Studies. 41 (12): 2415-30.
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