The New Urban Region: Race, Socioecology, Climate Justice

Keywords: urban region, urban watershed, racial justice, climate change, urban ecology, grassroots movements, infrastructure, development
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 33

Abstract

The problems of climate change and the interconnected nature of the urban ecological-infrastructural watershed raise critical questions about race, space, and socioecologies. In and around cities, disparate urban environmental outcomes have long been tied to systemic racism (Pulido 2000; Holifield 2001). Recently, efforts to “green” or protect once neglected urban sites can often displace poor communities of color pushed to vulnerable sites by prior waves of racist and exclusionary urban development (Gould and Lewis 2017; Anguelovski et al. 2019). The most promising approaches to resisting both the impacts of climate change and unjust actions in response are those that are politically organized from the viewpoint of systemically marginalized groups (Routledge et al. 2018; Agyeman et al. 2016), crucial when making claims of justice against structural oppression. But such community-based organizing is more often in opposition to large-scale urban environmental initiatives, including climate actions, precisely because of the histories of systemically racist and unjust development. Such conflicted claims on space are fights for recognition of communities across multiple sites and temporalities (Goh 2019, 2020a, b). This paper traces a theoretical pathway from urban ecological concepts of the region (MacKaye 1940) through Woods’ (1998) historically and racial power-constructed region and Gandy’s (2002) urbanized-natural watershed, and extends it through to emerging discourses of abolitionist climate justice (Ranganathan and Bratman 2019). It takes seriously biophysical, material conditions of the watershed as well as historically-specific, temporal, racialized spatial injustices to propose a conceptual framework for a racially just and climate just urban region.