Urban Matters has opened a call to contribute to an upcoming edition entitled “Nature in the City: problems, politics, and possibilities.” Read more below, and please note that the deadline for abstract submission is June 15th.
This Urban Matters special issue aims to critically engage the productive overlap between environmental studies and urban studies. Of course, an interest in the environmental dimensions of urban change, and the urban dimensions of environmental change, are not new on the intellectual agenda. However, the scale, speed and qualities of these interactions continue to evolve, requiring constant engagement and critical reflection. Indeed, such an exploration has never been more relevant as the world continues to grapple with the worsening challenges of global environmental change, such as biodiversity loss and climate change, and the persistence of multi-dimensional inequalities in income, wealth and health outcomes. These challenges are interlinked through processes of development and urbanization, relations between city and countryside, priorities and modes of governance and the proliferation of social movements aiming to conserve the environment while enhancing human well-being.
To pay ample recognition to the complexity of these interactions and the variety of possible perspectives from which to view them, this special issue invites theoretically diverse contributions that highlight and critically assess the conceptual and practical ways humans approach nature in the city. This includes the environmental urban politics that determine whose values will be prioritized as well as the possibilities that emerge when we start to think and act differently about the relationship between cities and the natural environment. We invite contributions based in more well-established conceptual and theoretical approaches for studying urban-environment interactions, such as sustainability science, social-ecological systems theory, urban political ecology, governance of urban climate and biodiversity, and landscape ecology and green infrastructure, as well as contributions that adopt new or counter-perspectives which challenge these more prominent approaches to investigating the problems, politics and possibilities of nature in the city.
Thematically, problems of nature in the city can include a wide variety of issues. For example, how cities impact nature relates to habitat loss, pollution creation and management and the complex effects of urban development on biodiversity. They can also include how nature impacts cities, such as natural hazards like heat waves and floods as well as the challenge of implementing context-appropriate nature-based solutions and adaptation strategies. They can furthermore engage with problems related to current management approaches, controversial development decisions, persistent challenges of environmental quality and access, among many other issues.
Politics of nature in the city, like problems, can mean many things. To start, there is a need to critically engage with the formal politics and decision-making processes that underpin dominant and emerging urban governance approaches that dictate how nature fits into the city. They can also examine the politics of managing conflicting interests and visions for the future. Politics can also be informal, including the activities and advocacy of interest organizations and citizen-led initiatives, as well as the many unsanctioned activities that occur in the “darker corners” of urban environments, such as guerilla gardening.
Possibilities are also many, bolstered by the burgeoning interest in new ways of thinking about nature in the city, for example recent attempts to extend the capabilities approach to urban biodiversity conservation planning. Here, there is a need to highlight those best practices for managing nature in the city that have been shown to be effective in balancing the needs of ecosystems and human inhabitants. There is also a need to explore the merits of new and innovative perspectives and plans which have the potential to reshape human-environment interactions in the city now and in the future. Finally, there is much need to elaborate the many potential alliances between fragmented interest groups and actors struggling for a better city for both humans and nature.
We welcome researchers, master’s students, practitioners, and activists who focus on local (i.e., Malmö), regional, national, or international contexts to send abstracts of up to 250 words to Chad Boda, visiting editor, at chad.boda@mau.se.
Article types include:
- Original articles (2-4000 words)
- Photo essays (ca. 1-2000 words)
- Interviews (2-4000 words)
- Commentaries (1000-2000 words)
- Book reviews (500-1000 words)
Max 6000 for any type.
All contributing authors are expected to follow Urban Matters style guidelines.
