{"id":170,"date":"2018-08-03T09:09:52","date_gmt":"2018-08-03T09:09:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/socp07.epgpbooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/?post_type=chapter&p=170"},"modified":"2019-01-02T05:27:33","modified_gmt":"2019-01-02T05:27:33","slug":"urban-commons-ecologies-and-environmentalisms","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/socp07\/chapter\/urban-commons-ecologies-and-environmentalisms\/","title":{"rendered":"Urban Commons, Ecologies and Environmentalisms"},"content":{"raw":"
\"epgp<\/a>\r\n<\/span><\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIntroduction<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

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 \u201curban\u201d \u201cenvironment\u201d?<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Cities and the \u201ccountry\u201d \u2013 or nature - have often been seen as polar opposites. This contrast even underlies Ebenezer Howard\u2019s 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<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

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\u2019s (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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    \r\n \t
  1. Urban ecology and the eco-city movement, founded in 1970s Berkeley, California in the United States (US) seeks to shape cities based on \u201cecological principles\u201d (p 197)<\/li>\r\n \t
  2. \u00a0 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 <\/span>show.1<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  3. \u00a0Bioregionalism espouses the bioregion\u2013 \u201ca 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\u201d (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 <\/span>political and economic organization.<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t
  4. \u00a0 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 \u201cdevelopment that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs\u201d (World Commission on Environment and Urbanization, WCED quoted on p 200).<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n
    \r\n\r\n \r\n

    Note, however, that Gaston (2010) takes a broader view of the term \u201curban ecology\u201d, tracing it to the recognition that the planet\u2019s ecosystems are now dominated by humans, and more particularly by urban agglomerations. Gaston\u2019s survey of the literature distinguishes two distinct conceptions of \u201curban ecology\u201d \u2013 \u201cecology in urban areas\u201d ie, ecological forces in urban areas; and \u201cecology of urban areas\u201d, which views the city as a whole ecosystem unto itself.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    In this module, our focus remains on social science scholarship, which has evolved tremendously in the two decades since Roseland\u2019s 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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\u2019) prescient insight that \u201cantithesis between nature and history is created\u201d only when \u201cthe relation of man to nature is excluded from history\u201d (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 \u201cnature\u201d is \u201csocially produced\u201d, laying the foundations for the urban political ecology framework.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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\u2019s work lies in delineating forms of governance that help avoid the Tragedy of the Commons, ie, the congestion and overexploitation of CPRs (Foster 2011).<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n1\u00a0 As Heynen et al (2006) note, the earliest usage of the term \u201csocial ecology\u201d by the Chicago School sociologists was entirely \u201cdenatured\u201d.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

    \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nUrban Metabolism<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

    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<\/em>, Broto et al (2012, p 851) define urban metabolism as \u201cthe exchange processes whereby cities transform raw materials, energy, and water into the built environment, human biomass, and waste.\u201d 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nBroto et al outline six major thematic clusters within the interdisciplinary conversation around urban metabolism (p 852):\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n(1)\u00a0 the city as an ecosystem,\r\n\r\n(2) material and energy flows within the city,\r\n\r\n(3)\u00a0 economic\u2013material relations within the city,\r\n\r\n(4)\u00a0 economic drivers of rural\u2013urban relationships,\r\n\r\n(5)\u00a0 the reproduction of urban inequality, and\r\n\r\n(6)\u00a0 attempts at resignifying the city through new visions of socioecological relationships.\r\n\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201ceconomic drivers of rural\u2013urban relationships\u201d through an urban metabolism lens cast cities as \u201ccenters of capital accumulation and dissipative structures\u2026 with an ever-increasing demand for resources from the periphery, contributing to structural inequality between the core and the periphery in the world system\u201d (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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    The term metabolism in fact goes back to Marx, who described it as \u201cthe material exchanges and interdependent relationship between human society and nature occurring through the labor process\u201d (p 856). Marx saw urbanization as a cause of \u201cmetabolic rift\u201d --- the estrangement of humans from the natural conditions of their existence under capitalism \u2013 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\u2019s urban fisheries, where it led to \u201coverfishing, internationalization of capital, and flexible production based on the establishment of a precarious labour force\u201d (p 856). Thus, increasing urban metabolism through fishery flows is accompanied by increasing labour exploitation.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201cinfrastructure networks reflect socioeconomic inequalities both in the [global] south and the [global] north\u201d (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.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

    \r\n\r\n \r\n

    The next section has much more to say on the UPE body of work but suffice to note here that its \u201ckey observation is that metabolisms have the potential to express peoples\u2019 drives, desires, and imaginations\u201d (p 858).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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\u2019s (2013) paper, which \u201cdevelops a metabolic framework for domestic water use in Bangalore\u201d and \u201ctreats the city as a tightly-coupled social-ecological system\u201d (p 40). More than social inequalities, these authors\u2019 model highlights the spatial disparities in groundwater availability, taking account of both resource flows and waste flows, as well as \u201creturn flows (flow of used water to the underground aquifers) and leakage flows from imported river water brought into the city\u201d (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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nUrban Political Ecology<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201crenaturing\u201d urban theory, which since the late 19th century had become thoroughly \u201cdenatured\u201d, 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    Responding to these ruptures, Heynen et al (2002) defined the agenda of UPE thus: \u201cTo 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.\u201d 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).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    At the heart of this scholarly turn is the idea of the \u201csocial production\u201d of nature, first set out by Smith (1984), which posits that \u201cnatural 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<\/em> social\u201d (Swyngedouw 1999: 445). The UPE perspective allows then an interesting answer to our question about what is \u201curban\u201d about an \u201cenvironment\u201d. Heynen et al (2006) argue that \u201cthe environment of the city (both social and physical) is the result of a historical-geographical process of the urbanization of nature\u201d (p 6).<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

    \r\n\r\n \r\n

    Zimmer (2010) suggests that the conceptual apparatus of the UPE rests precisely on this neo-Marxist framing of \u201cproduction of nature\u201d delineated by Neil Smith (1984) and David Harvey (1993), whose famous assertion that there is nothing \u201cunnatural about New York City\u201d 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 \u201cnormal\u201d as much as overt conflict.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201cmetabolic lens\u201d proves useful because it allows an expansion in \u201cpotential 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\u201d (quoted in Demaria and Schindler 2015: 4).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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, \u201cmodes of regulation\u201d and consumption are central to analyses of metabolism. UPE expands the conceptual territory of metabolism to include dimensions of \u201cpolitical changes, the critique of capitalism, social factors and the agency of nature\u201d (Zimmer 2010, p 348).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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\u2019s waste economy, and argue that materiality and political economy evolve together to shape urban metabolisms.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    In a comparative study of Tooleville in California\u2019s 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 \u201cbroader geography of water marginalization in fringe urban spaces\u201d. Their analytical approach combines UPE with environmental justice scholarship. For example, they highlight how agency in struggles to access water is read through a \u201crights-based\u201d framework in the US case but through the lens of claim-making in India. While rights have legal backing, \u201cclaims\u201d lack legally enforceable support.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    Against this backdrop, Zimmer\u2019s (2014) account of urban parks in Gujarat\u2019s Navsari agglomeration raises important concerns about who directs and controls the location and uses of nature in the city, and how such \u201cownership\u201d comes to be shaped by partnerships between public and private actors. In Zimmer\u2019s telling, the construction and sustenance of the parks system in the towns has been a project of <\/span>middle class ambition from its very origins in the displacement and relocation of slum populations to urban peripheries in order \u201cto constitute a particular, elite, urban aesthetic at the heart of the city\u201d (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 \u201csocio-spatial order\u201d (p 10-11).<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

    \r\n\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201cpublic spaces\u201d (Module 6.7).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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\u2019s air pollution policies show a distinct bias for middle class environmental interests.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    Although incredibly disparate, both Zimmer and Veron\u2019s work, even while resting on the UPE foundation, shows undeniable parallels with the preoccupations flagged by Baviskar\u2019s conceptualization of bourgeois environmentalism in the Indian city. This is the scholarly framework we turn to next.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nBourgeois Environmentalisms<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201cthe media, politics, scientific establishment, NGOs, bureaucracy, environmental institutions and the legal system\u201d ( 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201cthe current increase in certain forms of environmental concern amongst the middle classes may have negative consequences for the poor\u201d (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-\u00a0 slum demolitions and others \u2013 to discipline the poor. 7<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    These trends underpinned Baviskar\u2019s influential coinage of \u201cbourgeois environmentalism\u201d -- an increasing propensity for urban space to be organized around upper-class dispositions on \u201caesthetics, leisure, safety, and health\u201d. Baviskar\u2019s formulation owed its genesis to an incident in <\/span>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 <\/span>jhuggi or shanty cluster was clubbed to death by police and residents in the <\/span>middle class locality of Ashok Vihar because they suspected him of using the <\/span>neighbourhood park for defecation.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

    \r\n\r\n \r\n

    The necessary background for this episode: the nearly 10,000 households of Dilip\u2019s jhuggi \u201cshared three public toilets, each one with eight latrines, effectively one toilet per 2083 persons\u201d (p 89). In Dilip\u2019s killing, thus, two understandings of the neighbourhood park came face-to-face: the middle class residents\u2019 view of it as an oasis of trees and nature, and the jhuggi-dwellers\u2019 desperate resort to it as an open air toilet. Deploying this analytical frame, Baviskar (2003: 97) argued that state making in Delhi \u201cincludes interventions aimed at improving the environmental quality of life for Delhi\u2019s bourgeoisie\u201d, and at the expense of non-elite groups.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    Ghertner (2011) took Baviskar\u2019s argument further in his dissection of the legal and popular discourses around the Delhi government\u2019s \u201cClean Delhi, Green Delhi\u201d campaign. According to him, elite groups in Delhi \u2013 government agencies, resident welfare associations, even the Courts -- \u201ctied deficiencies in environmental well-being and appearance to the presence of slums, largely through the legal category of \u2018nuisance\u2019\u201d (p 286). As such, environmental questions came to be equated with, and arguably reduced to matters of aesthetics, with the very \u201cappearance<\/em> of filth or unruliness\u201d becoming the legal basis for slum demolitions and evictions (p 287). Some of the contradictions inherited in this framing become apparent in Ghertner\u2019s 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\u2019s construction was given the Court\u2019s go-ahead as a \u201cworld-class\u201d commercial complex\u201d, 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).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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 \u2013 \u201cin spite of its seemingly middle class agenda, rainwater harvesting overlaps with the spread of more profligate uses of water by the city\u2019s middle classes, whose changing patterns of consumption \u2026 undermines efforts at water conservation\u201d (p 6).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    Here, UPE studies such as Demaria and Schindler\u2019s (2015) recently published investigation of the struggles around waste-to-energy plants in Delhi call into question the conclusions of a reading\u00a0based on bourgeois environmentalism alone. Documenting the opposition of two different and important groups \u2013 waste-pickers and their allied organizations and middle-class residents to the <\/span>waste-to energy technology \u2013 they show how these groups formed an \u201cuneasy alliance\u201d (p 13). Although these authors are interested in <\/span>nuancing the usage of urban metabolism in UPE, their evidence does suggest possible departures in existing paradigms of environmental action in India.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

    \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nUrban Commons<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

    As an antidote to bourgeois environmentalism\u2019s \u201cfetishization of nature\u201d, scholarship on the city-nature relationship in Indian cities has turned its \u201cattention to the commons\u201d (Parthasarathy 2011, p 55-56). The introductory section of this module has laid out Ostrom\u2019s 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\u2019s<\/em> Review of Urban Affairs <\/em>collected several papers that elaborated on the meanings and practices associated with the commons in urban India.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    In the introductory essay, Gidwani and Baviskar (2011:42) offer a wide-ranging definition of the \u201curban commons\u201d (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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    In contrast to the idea of the \u201cpublic\u201d, which lies \u201cfirmly within the ambit of the state and law\u201d, Gidwani and Baviskar emphasize that the commons lie at the \u201cfrontiers, or within the interstices,\u201d of the \u201cterritorial grid of the law\u201d (2011: 42). The commons, both ecological and civic commons, \u201cstand opposed to \u2018commodity\u2019\u201d 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 \u201cnature\u201d, the ecological commons do not exist a priori but are produced through practices of \u201ccommoning\u201d, that is through \u201ccommunities of people willing to create, maintain, and protect them\u201d (p 42).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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, \u201cthe Yamuna offers a respite from urban congestion, from a life constantly crowded with people, sounds and things\u201d (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 \u201cvillage\u201d, Akshardham temple and sundry real estate projects. In a pattern characteristic of the \u201cenclosure\u201d of the commons, bastis such as Yamuna Pushta were torn down.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    A conflict between \u201cworld-class\u201d visions and ecological rhythms underpins the significance of the Yamuna riverbed as an urban commons (Baviskar 2011). Political and real estate players have envisaged \u201cworld-class\u201d 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 \u201cpublic space\u201d remains doomed first by the scale of displacement it would entail and second, by its sponsorship and development by corporate interests to cater to \u201cprivate and elite public modes of consumption\u201d (p 52) such as high-rises and gated and priced attractions. More importantly, though, the Yamuna\u2019s seasonal ebb and flow <\/span>is driven by the monsoons to such an extent that the dry season expanse is both deceptive and highly <\/span>flood prone. Thus, the Yamuna as commons resists incorporation into real estate logics even as it falls prey to them.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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    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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201ccapitalist urban space of north America and western Europe\u201d, and exercised in Indian contexts through subaltern claims on urban space, often appears to stand in opposition to the right of urban commons.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    Maringanti\u2019s argument requires an unpacking of the idea of the \u201ccommons\u201d to recognize that Hyderabad\u2019s waterbodies have been produced over long periods of time through the informal accretion of usage and \u201cappropriation\u201d 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    In a case study in Bangalore, Sundaresan (2011) shows how \u201cthe unmaking and the making of Rajapalaya Lake as an urban commons occurred at the interface between the making and unmaking\u00a0of communities, their political networks\u2026\u201d (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.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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    Once again, this account of commoning contrasts with work by D Souza and Nagendra (2011) on Bangalore\u2019s 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 \u201cpristine nature\u201d. Traditional activities such as fodder collection, fishing and clothes-washing have come to be aggressively policed.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    Parthasarathy\u2019s (2011) paper in the Economic and Political Weekly\u2019s Review of Urban Affairs<\/em> 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    Garrett Hardin\u2019s famous tale of the tragedy of the commons casts a long shadow on the international literature on the urban commons. Hardin\u2019s thesis asserts that any \u201copen access\u201d 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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\u2019s (2011) call to \u201cfind creative ways to use the powers of collective labor [sic] for the common good.\u201d<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn Brief<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

    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 \u201curban\u201d and \u201cenvironment\u201d. This survey is far from comprehensive \u2013 for example, we have not considered Mawdsley\u2019s (2009) reworking of the idea of \u201cenvironmentality\u201d in the context of Delhi\u2019s bhagidari scheme. It also does not do justice to recent studies by authors such as Marie-H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Z\u00e9rah and Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Landy on the urban-protected area interface in places like Mumbai\u2019s 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 \u201cresilience\u201d.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    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\u00a0in the city. If, as Broto et al (2012) state in their survey of UPE-inspired studies of urban water distribution networks, \u201ccities have different parallel metabolisms for the same resource,\u201d 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 \u2013 urban political economy, bourgeois environmentalism and urban commons \u2013 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.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
    you can view video on Urban Commons, Ecologies and Environmentalisms<\/strong><\/td>\r\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/tbody>\r\n<\/table>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nFor further reading <\/strong>\r\n
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