Chapter 18 - Doreen Massey’s Urban Political Ecology

Summary

INTRODUCTION

As the consequences of neoliberal capitalism continue to ravage working people, especially women and communities of colour, there is a need for geographers to keep looking for ways to connect emancipatory theories of change with communities engaged in geographically situated forms of radical praxis. We argue it is equally important to understand and confront the politics of nature as directly experienced through uneven impacts related to energy, waste, toxic exposure and other destructive socio-ecological relations. Within urban political ecology today the question of how to connect models of public engagement and radical praxis to the politics of nature remains open. Better developing these bridging logics between theory and practice is an important place to begin. The question then becomes where to find models for robust and comprehensive geographic, political and ecological thinking in the face of continued narrowing across the discipline? Doreen Massey’s contributions are especially important in this context as she exhibited an expansive breadth across her intellectual and political commitments.

In this chapter, we engage some less discussed threads of Massey’s radical, feminist praxis and extend her theorization of the politics of nature at the intersections of physical and human geography. Featherstone and Painter (2013: 12) highlight Massey’s commitment to nature in arguing, “[T]he biophysical world is of great importance to her and, as her writings attest, that importance is simultaneously personal, conceptual and political.” As such, we draw upon Massey’s writings on nature, physical geography, climate change and urban politics to consider their implications for urban political ecology.

We will start the chapter by discussing her first major work, Capital and Land, which we argue anticipates urban political ecology in significant ways. Next, we will work through her evolving thoughts around the politics of nature by staging a conversation between her writings on power-geometries, physics, time-space, and nature more generally. Finally, we will consider her coming together with Stuart Hall and Michael Rustin (and others) to publish the Kilburn Manifesto, which, we argue, offers encouragement to scholars of urban political ecology to extend the reach of their scholarship.