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Bickersta�, K. and Bulkeley, H. and Painter, J. (2009) 'Symposium : justice, nature and the city.',
International journal of urban and regional research., 33 (3). pp. 591-600.

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 1 

Symposium on Justice, Nature and the City  

 

Karen Bickerstaff, Harriet Bulkeley and Joe Painter 

 

Rationale  

In his 1996 work, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (JNGD), David Harvey 

brought together a series of debates – including those concerning environmental values, the 

politics of social and environmental justice, and the future of cities - which are rarely 

articulated within the same analytical framework.  Harvey‟s work established foundational 

concepts for understanding how space, time, place and nature are constituted and 

represented through social practices - not as separate elements but in relation to each other.  

JNGD called for „critical ways to think about how differences in ecological, cultural, economic, 

political, and social conditions get produced … and we also need ways to evaluate the justice 

/ injustice of the differences so produced‟ (1996: 5).  Crucially, for our purposes, Harvey 

highlights the production of geographical differences as fundamental to the exploration, and 

indeed resolution, of contemporary urban problems. 

A decade later, and taking Harvey‟s work as a starting point, this IJURR symposium - 

which emerges from a session at the 2006 meeting of the RGS-IBG - examines how concepts 

of justice and nature in urban places are being constructed, reworked and contested - and the 

extent to which common ground between concerns for social and environmental justice can 

and is being forged in the city.  While concerns for social justice and the social life of cities 

have long been a mainstay of geographical work, the linking of environmentalism to problems 

of the city and associated processes of urbanization remains a relatively underdeveloped 

arena of geographical inquiry (Schweitzer and Stephenson Jr., 2007).  Indeed, in 1996 

Harvey referred to the integration of the urbanization question into the environmental-

ecological question as a sine qua non for the twenty-first century (429).  The relative neglect 

of such work is perhaps more surprising given that it is in urban areas where transformations 

of nature are most visible – both in physical expression and in socio-ecological consequences 

(Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003) – and which are becoming increasingly important strategic 

sites for an array of different forms of environmentalism (White and Wilbert, 2006).  Issues of 



 2 

urban political ecologies and environmental inequalities have only recently begun to gain 

analytical purchase (e.g. Heynen et al., 2006; Keil, 2003; Walker and Bulkeley, 2006).  Keil 

(2003), for instance, has identified four „strongholds‟ of the emerging Urban Political Ecology 

(UPE) project – an exercise which, although carrying the perils of any such categorisation, 

does usefully describe this body of work and the central issues and challenges being tackled 

around the concerns of justice, nature and urban life that we return to below.  The first of 

these strongholds consists of work focused on the political ecology of the Los Angeles / 

Southern Californian region.  Los Angeles, with its volatile and violent environment, has 

captured the imagination of many urban writers (Keil, 2003: 731) - with authors (such as 

Davis, 1998; Wolch, Pincentl and Pulido, 2002; Gottlieb, 2001; Walker 2007) offering rich 

accounts of the history and geography of LA‟s socionatural environment(s) and through these 

recasting the way we see the (South Californian) urban landscape.  The second body of work, 

particularly influenced by the work of Erik Swyngedouw, has two primary, and related, 

interests: i) the articulation of a Marxist theorisation of UPE (Swyngedouw et al., 2002; Kaïka 

and Swyngedouw, 2000; Castro et al., 2003) and ii) the political ecology of urban water – 

how, through water, nature and society are tied in the production of a sociospatial fabric that 

privileges some and excludes many (Swyngedouw, 1997: 329).  Work in the latter field - now 

marked by its geographical breadth, covering many cities of the global South as well as North 

- includes Swyngedouw (1997; 2004) on hydrological modernisation in Guayaquil, Ecuador; 

Bond (2002) on water resource management in Johannesburg and residual apartheid 

ecologies; Gandy (2008) on the particularities of capitalist urbanisation and state formation in 

India, which have given rise to Mumbai‟s current water infrastructure crisis; and Castro 

(2004), Loftus (2007) and Bakker (2007) on the consequences (for Mexico City, Durban, and 

Jakarta respectively) of neoliberal policies, based on the commodification of water resources, 

for exacerbating existing conflicts and inequalities.  A third body of research (originating 

predominantly from the UK) is directed at a critical engagement with urban and regional 

environmental and economic policy, including discussion on the political ecological 

complexities of ”local sustainability” (e.g. Gibbs and Jonas, 2000).  Finally, the work of a 

group (predominantly US and UK based) concerned with the UPE of environmental justice 

(e.g. Agyeman, Bullard and Evans, 2003; Agyeman, 2005; Sze, 2007) addresses issues of 



 3 

sustainability, justice and the discourse on rights and democracy. Taking our lead from such 

work, this collection of papers will address and debate the everyday urban nature(s) of 

environmental in/justice (which have often evaded sustained inquiry), the fundamentally 

spatial and political basis to claims of injustice and the implications of this work for developing 

socio-ecologically „just‟ cities.  

The concept of environmental justice (EJ) is a useful starting point for exploring this 

nexus of ideas: it is a term that captures the differential exposure to environmental bads and 

access to environmental goods experienced by different social groups (Schweitzer and 

Stephenson Jr., 2007).  Sociologist Robert Bullard was one of the first academics to study the 

relationship between the location of hazardous sites and the social characteristics of nearby 

communities.  He found that virtually all landfills in Houston, Texas were located in or near 

African American neighbourhoods (Bullard, 1983).  Many studies followed his initial work – all 

highlighting the socio-spatial inequities inherent in urban environments and citing practices of 

urban segregation and housing discrimination as direct contributors to environmental injustice 

(for an overview see Szaz and Meuser, 1997).  The concern of EJ research and activism with 

the consequences of environmental hazards for marginalised communities brings together 

questions of social and ecological justice, and in doing so expands our understanding of the 

„environment‟ – away from unspoiled „natural‟ areas to include populated urban spaces 

(Schweitzer and Stephenson Jr., 2007).  In this way, EJ work has succeeding in making 

issues of race, class, culture and gender integral to the discourse and politics of 

environmentalism, as well as highlighting the ways in which physical environments can affect 

the quality of life of those who reside in urban places. Other authors have raised concerns 

about this body of work and the implicit constructions of „urban‟, „nature‟ and „justice‟ 

contained within it – issues that run through this introduction and the subsequent papers.   

Firstly, attention needs to be paid to the ways in which EJ is defined.  Here, we must 

recall that much EJ work has been framed by the specifics of the environmental justice 

movement in the US (Walker and Bulkeley, 2006).  Although the terminology of environmental 

justice has travelled well beyond the States (for instance Debbané and Keil, 2004; Walker and 

Bulkeley, 2006) its meaning has remained problematic and heavily contested.  In generalised 

terms we can see EJ either as being closely tied to the movement‟s origins and a focus on the 



 4 

socio-spatial distribution of pollution, toxicity and other forms of socio-ecological harm or as 

being linked to a more encompassing (and perhaps even indiscriminate) set of concerns or 

principles associated with the multiple sites, forms and processes of injustice – articulated in 

particular through a sustainability lens (Walker and Bulkeley, 2006; Agyeman, 2002). 

Related to this point, we see something of a conflation of environmental and social 

justice issues, leading many to argue (some would suggest mistakenly) that the solution to 

the latter is a necessary prerequisite to any attempt to address the former.  Whilst the relative 

lack of agreement and specificity in the terminology and principles of EJ genuinely offers a 

level of flexibility – and as such a powerful rhetorical resource – it has arguably limited the 

concept‟s power as a guide to policy and action.  It is a tension between the need to keep 

things open and fluid – to allow for particularity - and the need to make them solid and 

categorical - that is, to universalize - that Harvey (1996) himself grapples with.  He asks 

whether it is possible „ever to talk about justice as anything other than a contested effect of 

power within a particular place at a given time' (Ibid, 329) but simultaneously recognizes 

justice as „a foundational concept that is quite indispensable in the regulation of human 

affairs' (Ibid, 332).  It is precisely these sorts of conceptual ambiguities that have led authors 

such as Debbané and Keil (2004), developing a critical engagement with urban environmental 

policy, to reject the search for a universal notion of environmental justice - instead advocating 

an understanding that is contextually situated.  It is a position which acknowledges the far-

reaching political, economic and ecological networks that create specific instances of 

environmental injustice, and is one with which we are broadly sympathetic in this symposium. 

The second set of issues raised, and linked to the conceptual underpinnings of 

environmental justice work, rest on the fact that whilst urban environments have been (and 

continue to be) the focus of much EJ activism and research, few studies have been situated 

within the larger context of urbanisation and urban research (for an exception see Sze 2007 

on New York City).  In this respect, a number of authors, many working within what Keil 

(2003) describes as a Marxist UPE tradition (e.g.  Heynen et al., 2006) have been critical of 

environmental (justice) theory for (largely) ignoring the urban political ecologies that influence 

many environmental problems.  The praxis concerns of environmental justice research can be 

traced in a literature that remains rooted in local political activism and distributional issues to 



 5 

the relative neglect of theoretical engagement with the historical structural processes leading 

to uneven urban environments (Heynen, 2006: 501).  Lines of critical research, addressing 

the UPE of environmental justice, have emerged and are becoming more established (see 

Pellow and Brulle, 2006; Agyeman et al., 2003; Pulido, 2000).  Sze (2007: 9), in a finely-

grained history of environmental justice in New York City, argues that the rise of activism is 

crucially a racialised and local response to the „the politics of neoliberalism‟ - economic and 

development policies that favour deregulation, privatization, and free market approaches - 

currently shaping the urban ecology of postindustrial global cities.  Her focus on the histories 

and effects of particular urban policies for affected communities in terms of their racial and 

community identity, eschews narrow debate over “race versus class” and overt discriminatory 

intent (cf. Pulido, 2000).  Notwithstanding such examples in the literature, there remains a 

rather diminished conceptualisation of the socio-ecological and fundamentally political 

processes that generate environmental and social injustices in urban spaces.  The 

symposium therefore provides an important contribution to this work, and prompts a stronger 

engagement between EJ research and many of the conceptual questions - centring on 

politics, social power, institutional configurations, discourses and belief systems - that drive 

UPE.  Swyngedouw (this issue), for instance, is particularly concerned to theorise the 

„political‟ as a fundamental condition for addressing questions of urban environmental 

injustice.  We might add that the issue of scale in the production and identification of in/justice 

is far from comprehensively addressed in environmental justice research (for some important 

exceptions see: Heynen, 2003; Debbané and Keil, 2004; Towers, 2000).  Indeed, this is a 

topic that a number of authors in this symposium address.  Scale is central to Hillier‟s account 

of the folded, networked spaces – the connections of presence and absence – which 

constitute a singular form of „just‟ (or unjust) decision in the context of planning processes 

(taking the example of debate around the so-called ghost ships of Hartlepool, North-East 

England), and to Whitehead‟s exploration of the ordinary environmental injustices produced 

by a large scale urban forest. 

Thirdly, in empirical terms, the focus of the environmental justice movement and the 

wider research literature has been on particular kinds of pollution – toxics, dangerous 

contamination and the effects of major environmental hazards such as Hurricane Katrina in 



 6 

2005 – relying heavily upon symbolic politics and powerful media icons of pollution and 

disaster (Harvey, 1996).  The consequence, we would suggest, is a relative neglect of more 

mundane and chronic forms of injustice manifest in the urban environment.  It is a form of bias 

in the choice of targets that has led some critics to charge that the concerns of the movement 

are misplaced, that its politics are based on an iconography and politics of fear, and that its 

claims have  

more to do with moral outrage than the science of impacts (Harvey, 1996: 338) 

Returning to the urban, Heynen (2006) comments on the relative absence of the 

issue of access to natural resources in the environmental justice literature – which he argues 

is a common injustice for marginalized urban populations.  Whitehead (this issue) similarly 

calls for a move away from the environmentalism embodied by much of the EJ literature, 

which he argues leads to a narrow framing of the spaces of urban environmental injustice in 

terms of the dramatic and spectacular.  Although there is work that goes some way to 

responding to this characterisation in the US (Brownlow, 2006; Heynen, 2003) and in the UK - 

where we arguably see a stronger research focus on the everyday features of urban 

landscapes (Stephens et al., 2001; Lucas et al., 2004) - there remains a persistent absence of 

engagement with the mundane and banal landscapes of in/justice.  This is a challenge that is 

taken up very directly by authors in this symposium.  Whitehead and Dooling, in particular, 

seek to refocus attention on ordinary forms of socio-ecological in/justice in their accounts of 

access to different kinds of urban nature. 

In seeking to address these issues, the papers in this symposium bring together 

research from very different social, historical, political and ecological settings.  In this regard, 

the collection offers a timely insight into the processes, practices and relations by which 

socio-ecological in/justice is produced, mobilised and contested.  Although the collection 

discusses only the developed world, it does bring together a varied scholarship that focuses 

on the social and ecological facets of urban environmental in/justice.  The papers offer a 

range of novel theoretical frameworks for rethinking and extending our understanding of 

socio-ecological justice in urban places.  In so doing, the authors raise and seek to address 

some profoundly important questions about the social and material production of 

environmental in/justices, as well as the politics and governance of socio-ecological harm 



 7 

across different spaces, places, scales and times.  In the remaining sections of this 

introduction we explore three overarching themes – on the theorisation, hybridity and spatial 

politics of socio-ecological in/justice - that run through the contributions to this collection, and 

consider their implications for arguments about the relationships between justice, nature and 

the city.  

 

Theorising socio-ecological in/justice and the city 

 

Authors in this collection are concerned to engage, critically, with the ways in which 

contemporary environmental injustices are produced, identified and addressed within 

distinctly metropolitan contexts.  Each paper develops different, in many cases  

situated, notions of nature, justice and the urban (also Debbané and Keil, 2004). 

Swyngedouw, taking the cue of political philosophers and theorists like Žižek, Rancière and 

Badiou, amongst others, approaches the necessary conditions for tackling questions of urban 

socio-ecological injustice through the theoretical lens of the „properly political‟.  Here, he 

stresses the need for a move away from a condition of environmental polic(y)ing (or a mode 

of consensus policy-making where disruption and dissent are minimized) to an environmental 

politics that enables articulation of (and engagement with) radical dissent and rupture.  

Dooling uses Agamben's notion of bare life to explore the disconnection between notions of 

home articulated by homeless people living in Seattle‟s green spaces and the ideological 

constructions of home, homeless and public green space espoused by planning agencies and 

(housed) citizens.   She uses this analysis to propose the concept of ecological gentrification, 

which is explicit in its recognition of the tensions between goals of ecological and social 

justice.  The concept captures the ways in which planning agendas linked to green spaces 

can lead to the displacement or exclusion of the most economically vulnerable human 

population – homeless people – whilst simultaneously espousing an environmental ethic.  

Hillier offers a distinctly relational approach to theorising socio-ecological justice through a 

Deleuzo-Guattarian cartography which traces the assemblies, multiplicities and trajectories 

through which dismantling the 'ghost' ships in Hartlepool (UK) was constructed and contested 

as an issue of social and ecological injustice.  Finally, in an analysis of ordinary environmental 



 8 

injustice in the Black Country Urban Forest (located in a wider – UK - region marked by a high 

level of urban dereliction), Whitehead, drawing on a Lefebvre-inspired interpretation of 

everyday life and banality, addresses the assumed connection between urban ecological 

improvement and the achievement of social and environmental justice goals.  Like Hillier, he 

stresses the often problematic mobilisation of concepts of urban social and ecological 

injustice – which, he suggests, can unwittingly militate against the more everyday concerns of 

ordinary environmental justice. 

In each of these papers, an engagement with novel theoretical approaches for 

understanding socio-ecological in/justice raises questions about how we conceptualise 

nature, the city, the subject, and various facets of justice, including rights and responsibilities.  

The collection demonstrates the rich potential for taking the study of EJ beyond the confines 

of existing analyses of struggles over the distribution of environmental goods and bads, and 

in particular the significance of thinking about in/justice in terms of a „more complex ethical 

field of inter-material relations‟ (Whitehead, this issue). 

 

Hybrid urban environments / environmental justices:  

 

Terms like „nature‟ and „environment‟ are, of course, inherently contingent and need 

to be situated within the wider set of conditions and relations that give rise to them.  Harvey 

(1996: 119), points to a pervasive anti-urban bias in much ecological rhetoric – citing the 

essentially arbitrary distinction made between the built environments of cities (as un-natural) 

and the humanly modified environments of rural regions (as natural).  In this vein he talks 

about New York City as a „created ecosystem‟ – stressing that human activity cannot be read 

as external to ecological processes.  Indeed, environmental issues have emerged that are 

specific to the ecologies of urban places (Ibid: 186).  The corollary to this, in the context of 

geography‟s engagement with nature and the environment, is the now widespread recognition 

of (urban) natures as simultaneously socially and materially produced (Heynen et al., 2006; 

Braun and Castree, 1998; Castree, 2005; Gandy, 2002; Harvey, 1996; Keil, 2003; 

Swyngedouw, 1999).  Debate has therefore moved away from the interaction of nature and 

society towards an approach that recognises that society is constituted through the 



 9 

transformation of nature and that nature is equally constituted through social change and 

social labour (Heynen et al., 2006).  As a consequence, it is no longer possible, as the 

authors in this symposium make clear, to talk about the urban and the natural as antagonists. 

In this regard, one of the key insights shared by urban political ecologists, and by the 

authors in this collection, is that „the material and symbolic, the natural and the cultural, the 

pristine and the urban are not dual and separate realities but rather intertwined and 

inseparable aspects of the world we inhabit‟ (Keil, 2003: 728).  In a similar vein, Swyngedouw 

(2006) argues for the use of metaphors of the metabolism and circulation of nature, 

developing ideas of Haraway and Latour on cyborgs and „hybridity‟ to politicize processes of 

urbanisation in a fashion that is complementary to political projects of socio-ecological justice.  

The papers in the collection work to decentre universal assumptions about (urban) nature and 

justice and offer more complex understandings which interweave social and material 

processes.  In Whitehead‟s discussion of the West Midlands‟ Black Country area and the high 

levels of land dereliction in this region -  a legacy of long-term industrial decline - ordinary 

injustices are not simply a product of the concentration of unwanted environmental 

externalities.  Rather, „ordinary injustice is produced at the intersection of these two 

processes‟ (Whitehead, this issue).  The authors in this collection demonstrate how the 

hybridity of socio-ecologies demands not only analytical perspectives which are sensitive to 

the substance of nature as integral to social, economic and political processes, but also an 

understanding of the diversity of possible relations.  The recognition of hybridity also 

destabilises the taken for granted boundaries around which in/justice is thought to accrue.  

Dooling makes this point very effectively in her analysis of the use of notions of home 

articulated by homeless individuals in urban green spaces – arguing that it is only in 

„conceptualizing green spaces as complex habitats for non-human and human inhabitants, 

that the narrow conceptions of home implicit in the design and management of shelter and 

housing options are challenged‟.  Hillier calls for „relational ontologies of social and 

environmental justice which turn from traditional ontologies of individual, bounded subjects … 

to recognize that residents and birds alike are enmeshed in far broader space-time relations ‟.  

Such insights offer food for thought for mainstream EJ work concerned with the risks and 



 10 

rights of individual subjects, suggesting that as we recognise the hybridity of socio-ecological 

processes, there is a need to embrace more relational ways of thinking about justice.  

 

The spatial politics of urban environmental justice: 

 

Our final theme places the political at the centre of contemporary debates on justice, 

nature and the city.  Political ecologists have been successful in linking politics and 

economics to the production of environmental degradation, poverty, marginality and 

vulnerability in the city (Robbins et al., 2001; Swyngedouw et al., 2002; Wolch, 2007; Gibbs, 

2002) – drawing out the power relations (whether material or discursive, economic, political, 

or cultural) through which particular socio-ecological conditions are produced and maintained.  

In Heat Wave, for instance, Eric Klinenberg (2002) takes us inside the anatomy of the 

Chicago metropolis to conduct what he calls a "social autopsy" of the 1995 heat wave linked 

to a staggering 739 deaths, particularly among the poor, elderly and reclusive.  He examines 

the social, political, and institutional organs of the city that made this urban disaster worse 

than it ought to have been – and meant that some neighbourhoods experienced greater 

mortality than others.  Critically, redundant but fragmented city support services catered to the 

most vocal, proactive, consumers - thereby ensuring neglect of the generally reticent elderly 

and infirm who led insular lives in a "culture of fear".  Social injustices were in this way 

structurally built into the fabric of the city. 

It follows from such work that we cannot neatly define a city or urban place as un/just 

per se.  Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 hit Southern states in the US, and specifically the 

city of New Orleans, speaks to the social power relations underpinning such urban ecological 

disasters and how they are collectively understood – with the social segregation of the city 

centre, the suburbs and surrounding towns particularly significant in shaping the differential 

impact of the hurricane on rich and poor (Rydin, 2006: 4; Bakker, 2005).  The crisis also 

raised distinctly political questions about how authorities permitted development in vulnerable 

locations – and about the trade-offs between the ecological and economic benefits of wetland 

environments.  Whilst Hurricane Katrina, and the political response, prompted intense debate 

around a host of local planning and governance questions, it also touched on decision 



 11 

making, and the inadequacies of leadership at much higher political levels.  The ensuing 

`blame game', centring on individual incompetence, arguably distracted debate from more 

fundamental questions about the role of the state, and of markets, in producing `natural' 

disasters that are fundamentally inequitable in their socio-ecological impacts (Bakker, 2005: 

798; Braun and McCarthy, 2005).  In a similar vein, for Peck (2006: 693), the dominant 

political narrative that located blame for the disaster in federal bureaucracy and the long term 

consequences of urban welfarism (reflected in a discourse of personal responsibility and 

culpability, displacing an earlier emphasis on victimisation) legitimated a renewal programme 

for New Orleans embodying a new urban agenda of enlarging the role for private enterprise, 

selective institutional roll-backs focused on the social state, redoubled crime control and an 

interventionist program of “moral reconstruction” aimed at those stranded in the storm‟s wake.  

Katrina is thus a case which speaks very directly to what we might term an ethical imperative 

of rights and responsibility: that is, how parties in political and civic life construct their social 

and ecological obligations in relation to the pursuit of the just city (Peck, 2006; Rydin, 2006; 

Agyeman et al., 2003) and what it actually means (and who is able) to be an urban ecological 

citizen (Wolch, 2007).  It is a set of ethical issues that a number of authors in this collection 

address.  Whitehead, for instance, considers how notions of environmental neglect challenge 

ideal-type ethical discourses of social responsibility – that is, how the issue of neglect frames 

a sense of obligation not just in terms of visible harm but also in terms of the consequences of 

inaction or lack of care that impinge on the everyday.  Hiller considers how responsibilities for 

distant strangers – in the shape of the ship-breakers of South Asia – became entangled with 

socio-ecological in/justice in Hartlepool as the conflict over the Ghost Ships was enacted.  

There are, then, no neat boundaries around what constitutes „urban‟ in/justice, and, indeed, 

the spatial politics through which such conflicts are framed can have profound consequences 

for how they are contested and resolved. 

The authors also consider different forms of (post) political response to urban natures 

and claims of environmental injustice.  Swyngedouw presents a radical re-interpretation of 

urban environmental politics and considers the consequences of a post-political condition for 

discussions of environmental justice, equality and democracy.  He is particularly critical of a 

neo-liberal vision of environmental governance, a reliance on expert knowledge and 



 12 

administration and what he terms populist environmentalism (in particular through forms of 

participatory deliberative practice), which he sees as supporting the established social order 

and restricting scope for debate, disagreement and dissensus - in short, politics proper.  

Hillier speaks to these same issues and processes in her analysis of the „consensual‟ policy-

making surrounding the Hartlepool ghost ships.  This is a challenging insight for scholars of 

EJ for it requires a move beyond seeking to open up the channels of decision-making to „just‟ 

processes of involvement, and rather a recognition of the need to work against and outside 

current modes of environmental governance in order to properly confront the distinctly political 

causes of in/justice.  Other authors in this collection follow this line of thinking to some degree 

by challenging the dominant framing of environmental injustice in terms of extreme 

exploitation of urban nature(s) and urging instead a stronger theoretical and political 

engagement with the (more) ordinary or banal meanings and spaces of urban in/justice – “that 

expand and insinuate themselves largely below the radar” (Robbins and Sharp, 2006: 111, 

also Whitehead, this issue).  Such a strategy entails engagement with alternative political 

spaces where in/justice is contested and configured.  Dooling argues that homelessness is a 

deeply political problem tied closely to the exercise of sovereign power (delivered through 

policymakers, providers and law enforcement). She offers an account of the ways in which 

multiple strategies of being-at-home, practised by homeless individuals in the urban green 

spaces of Seattle, challenged the dominant political construction of ecological justice or 

gentrification - one which sustained the displacement and exclusion of homeless individuals 

from urban natures and indeed from policymaking.  Tying in with Swyngedouw‟s analysis of 

depoliticised environments that fail to seriously tackle questions of urban environmental 

justice, it is in precisely these spaces of urban nature that our authors argue for, and begin to 

sketch out, an alternative environmental politics that is built upon a political “space of 

contestation for those who have no name or no place” (Swyngedouw, this issue).  

 

 

 

 

 



 13 

 

 

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