Introduction - Urbanism in the Anthropocene

In recent years, discourses and debates over the environment are largely scripted around the notion of the Aanthropocene. Coined by the Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, it conveys the idea that a new geological era has been brought about by the impacts of human activities; humanity is said to have become a geological actor that has moved the Earth System away from the Holocene and into a new state, namely the the notion postulates that since the late 18th century the Holocene has given its place to the anthropocene, a new geologic epoch in which humanity has become the driving geological actorAnthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000; Crutzen, McNeill & Steffen 2007). Arguably, the notion opens up a series of intertwined ecological, technological, political and normative questions. It is no surprise then, that sSince its introduction the concept has generated lively debates across in physical natural and social sciences, alike not least within human geography (for a review of geographical engagements with the notion of the anthropocene , see Castree, 2014a as well as (Johnson et al. 2014)). For sure, the concept has provided a scientific skeleton, vocabulary and imaginary to the hardly disputable notion that the material throughput of human activities has undergone a great acceleration (Steffen et al. 2015) and reached a magnitude and scope able to shape the very future of the Earth system, as the emblematic issue of climate change testifies. TFor some, the anthropocene Anthropocene has constitutes a compelling argument for provided a highlighting the socio-historical roots framing to global of environmental change and a possible ground for , thus providing a fruitful opening for environmental politics (Dalby, 2007, 2013; Steffen et al., 2011). Arguably, one of the reasons behind the success of the concept is that it opens up a series of intertwined ecological, technological, political and normative questions which also attracted a number of critiques. To begin with, the idea that the Anthropocene represents as a geology of mankind (Crutzen 2002) is controversial. Can any discourse on mankind reflect the myriad of different temporal, spatial and social positions that exist within humanity? Indeed, ADDIN EN.CITE Crutzen20021461(Crutzen 2002)1461146117Crutzen, Paul J.Geology of mankindNatureNature23-23415686720020028-0836http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/415023a(Crutzen 2002)the Anthropocene has been criticized for obscuring the driving forces that lead the transition (basically, Western industrialization and capital), as well as the fact that not everybody on the planet has had the same role in the great accelerationOthers, however,are wary ofthe term, arguing that it is insufficiently attentive to thecapitalist and imperialist relations that shape the geo-historical shifts inquestion (see Haraway 2014; Collard et al 2015; Moore, 2013; Malm and Hornborg 2014). From a related angle, the tendency to treat humanity as a whole has been criticized for de-historicizing the epistemological, social and economic regimes from which the Anthropocene (as a condition and as a body of knowledge) has emerged, with the result that it universalizes the white liberal humansubject of the Enlightenment (Caluya 2014: 41). Capitalocene and Oligantropocene - the alternatives polemically proposed by Jason Moore and Erik Swyngedouw condensate well such concerns. and that it universalizes the white liberal humansubject of the Enlightenment (Caluya 2014: 41). This being said, what appears to be clear is that we are in a new political era, in which futurity is conditioned by the consequences of a changing planet (Derickson and Mackinnon, 2015: 304).When trying to make sense of the series of epochal transitions conflated in the term Anthropocene, one cannot stress enough the centrality of Not surprisingly, cities and urbanization are situated at the heart of such debates. Indeed, a series of geographical interventions have highlighted the essential interconnectedness between the Anthropocene and the urban. Ljungkvist et al, for example, have recently talked about the urban anthropocene whileFor instance, according to Erik Swyngedouw, has argued that the anthropocene has arrived () and planetary urbanization is its geographical form (2014: no page). While Ljungkvist et al have recently talked about the urban Anthropocene, Mark Whitehead coined the term Metrocene to describe the new socio-ecological and geological poque, a period defined by the dynamics and demands of urbanization (2014:100). In a similar vein, Seto et al. (Seto, Sanchez-Rodriguez, and Fragkias 2010) created the Greek-inspired neologism Astycene - from the Greek words for city (asty, ) and new (cene, o). For sure, the linkages between the Anthropocene and Cities and rapid urbanization are multiple and deep. To begin with, are doubly inscribed in this process. the social, economic and spatial transformations that have caused the Anthropocene are inextricably linked to the trajectory rapid urbanization that has characterized the last century or so. While the emergence of the Anthropocene is explained, depending intellectual leanings, as a reflection of industrialization, development, globalization, fossil-fuelled capital accumulation (or most often a combination thereof), all of these processes entailed and were conditioned on an irresistible drive towards urbanization. Understanding the trajectory that has led to the Anthropocene thus requires also understanding the history of the transition towards a primarily urban civilization. The symbolic watershed year of 2008, when for the first time more than half of the worlds population was urban, Impacts PoliciesOn the one hand, urban areas and their inhabitants are cast as a key driver of anthropogenic climate change being responsible for up to 75% of global carbon emissions and energy consumption more generally (Hodson and Marvin, 2010) while urbanization processes are also at the core of other socio-ecological transformations such as biodiversity loss, soil erosion, deforestation, pollution, and the ever-expanding commodification of all manner of natures. [vulnerability] At the same time, cities and urban dwellers are also portrayed as the prime victims of occurring, potential or perceived ecological disasters like sea-level rise, flood events, etc. (Atkinson 2008; Hodson and Marvin 2010). On the other hand, however, cities are also at the epicenter of imaginaries and experimentations around more sustainable socio-ecological configurations. The green or sustainable city take a leading role within manifold discourses ranging from proclamations around green capitalism and market environmentalism (see Bailey and Caprotti, 2014) through planning and policy interventions (UN-Habitat, 2006; UNFPA, 2007; UN-Habitat, 2011) to a series of critical and radical perspectives (North, 2010). As Angelo and Wachsmuth observe these two ideas have tripped along hand in hand: if more than half of the world is now urban, hopes for its future must rest on the shoulders of the green, sustainable city (2015: 16).Comment by Giovanni Bettini: Chapter in IPCC report?Comment by Giovanni Bettini: We have three hands here.. shall we talk about a triad thus?Comment by Giovanni Bettini: If anything new has to come, it is urban although not necessarily in the form of contemporary cities Uneven growth and tactical urbanism?This chapter is an exploration of some of the intersections of these two phenomena. Strategically what we are interested in are the political implications of this dynamic of the anthropocene and rapid urbanization. Of course, while urbanization and socio-environmental transformations summarized under the anthropocene notion are unfolding at a planetary scale, neither their causes nor their consequences are equally distributed and experienced (Derickson and Mackinnon, 2015; Swyngedouw, 2014). The same goes for the ability to influence environmental politics and the room to imagine and enact socio-ecological futures. On the one hand, hegemonic responses to climate change including the construction of eco-cities, experimentations in the networking, management and governance of urban infrastructures and the expansion of market environmentalism seem to articulate what Alain Badiou has described as a gigantic operation in the depoliticization of subjects (2008:139). On the other, the blurring of the lines between the natural and the human, the city and the environment calls for imagining and enacting alternative urban socio-ecological configurations and political subjectivities. It is with these two senses of the production of subjectivity that this chapter engages (see also Read, 2003; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). However, our aim is neither to provide a totalizing and bleak image of all-encompassing capitalist urbanization that leaves no alternatives, nor to identify the proper political subject or political imaginary suitable for the anthropocene. Rather our aim is to maintain a productive tension between the two processes and explore some of their co-implications. In order to do so, the chapter draws from Urban Political Ecology (henceforth UPE) to critically discuss some of the urban responses to the anthropocene. Informed by this reading it also poses some questions around localized urban responses in the hope that beginning to explore them might inform an emancipatory socio-ecological politics. The remainder of the chapter is structured in four parts. The first part provides an overview of paradigmatic hegemonic and alternative responses in the challenges posed to urbanism in the anthropocene. The second part offers a brief sketch of how UPE might inform a reading of urban environmental politics in the anthropocene. Informed by the previous sections, the third part asks a series of critical questions about these responses articulated around three broad themes: the politics of scale, the apparent divide between responses in developed and developing countries and issues of power and the political. The concluding part summarizes the argument, reviews its critical implications and identifies further research challenges.Comment by Giovanni Bettini: Edit contents summaryUrbanism in the anthropocene

As we have already described there is now an increasing recognition that the networks, infrastructures and socio-ecological transformations that make possible and sustain the existence of cities and urban inhabitants simultaneously have detrimental ecological effects which in turn are reconfiguring the planetary socio-ecological context, wherein cities are being reproduced (Luke, 2003). It, thus, follows that the question of achieving a more green and sustainable future becomes an urban question. Indeed, over the past years increasing attention is paid to urban environmental problems on the part of policy makers, architects, planners and a variety of non-governmental and citizens organizations as well as urban movements. In this section we provide a brief overview of the major characteristics of recent paradigmatic urban experiments in responding to these problems. In doing so, we first focus on hegemonic responses that are largely scripted along techno-managerial lines of greening capitalism to then look at more politicized struggles and alternatives.

Urban Political EcologyCitites inand /in the Aanthropocene: What is left of the environment? It is interesting to note that the relations between cities and the environment remained largely unaddressed for the best part of the 20th century. On the one hand, despite the omnipresence of what Henri Lefebvre called the urban revolution (2003) the majority of political ecology accounts have failed to acknowledge the role of cities in environmental politics. To be more precise while cities were acknowledged as terrains of struggles for land use and resources they were conceptualized as sites where nature was understood to be already subjugated to societywhere no rehabilitation was possible because there was no environment left to be rehabilitated (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015: 17). Actually, this informed a long standing tradition in social sciences in general that was unwilling to understand cities as natural (Braun, 2005). On the other, [w]hile 19th century urban thought and practice were directly related to ecological and environmental relations, the understanding of the urbanization process as a process of urbanizing nature was largely lost in the 20th century (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2014: 464). It was, thus, only in the mid 1990s that a systematic engagement with the relationship between urbanization and the environment re-emerged as a central concern in urban studies through urban political ecology.UPE is a school of critical urban political-environmental research (Heynen et al., 2006b). UPE draws many of its demeanors from the wider school of political ecology (for reviews, see Castree and Braun, 2001). Inspired by the early work of Piers Blaikie (1985; Blaikie and Bloomfield, 1987), David Harvey (1996) and Neil Smith (1984) amongst others, urban political ecologists have sought to understand the socio-material basis of environmental problems, while attempting to transcend binary perspectives on the nature and society interaction. In his 1996 call for an explicitly urban political ecology Erik Swyngedouw posited the stakes and scope of the endeavor as follows: In the city, society and nature, representation and being are inseparable, integral to each other, infinitely bound-up, yet simultaneously this hybrid socio-natural thing called the city is full of contradictions, tensions and conflicts (...) Only over the past few years, a rapprochement has begun to assert itself between ecological thinking, political-economy, urban studies and critical social and cultural theory. This may provide the ferment from which a new and richer urban ecology or urban political-ecology may germinate. (Swyngedouw, 1996: 6566).In the years that followed Swyngedouws programmatic statement a series of influential and thought-provoking monographs such as Matthew Gandys (2003) Concrete and Clay, Maria Kaikas (2005) City of Flows, Keil and Desfors (2004) Nature and the City: Making Environmental Policy in Toronto and Los Angeles and Alex Loftus (2012) Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology have contributed in crystallizing an explicitly urban political ecology. In the remainder of this section we will outline some of the basic tenets of UPE to highlight the insights it can provide in understanding contemporary socio-ecological relations (see Blaikie, 2008).Comment by Giovanni Bettini: Something form the south?Maybe something from people in Barcelona? On waste in Campania (Napoli, Italy) maybe? Perhaps the central contribution of UPE is that it challenges the artificial ontological divide between nature and society that exists in both mainstream academic and popular understandings of nature/society, emblematically summarized in David Harveys influential contention that there is nothing unnatural about New York City (Harvey, 1996: 186; emphasis in original). For UPE scholars nature and society do not exist independently of each other but are intricately tangled in mutually constituted socio-natural assemblages (Swyngedouw, 1996; 2006). Through this lens cities cease to be viewed as places where nature stops (Hinchcliffe, 1999: 138), shifting the emphasis to the urbanization of nature in the process of making and remaking the cities. The resonances of this understanding with the fundamental rethinking of our ontological categories that the notion of the anthropocene poses are quite evident. For Dipesh Chakrabarty, for example: the anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history (2009: 201). This not only constitutes a conceptualization that might lead to conceptual clarification, it more importantly is a shift of emphasis that might open up new intellectual, political and practical paths. As Castree and Braun argue: Comment by Giovanni Bettini: Contextualize UPE seems to capture shifts in sensibility or sensibility widespread among critical thinkers..The crucial issue therefore, is not that of policing boundaries between nature and culture but rather, of taking responsibility for how our inevitable interventions in nature proceed along what lines, with what consequences and to whose benefit (Castree and Braun, 1998: 34).This blurring of the false dichotomies between nature and cities foregrounds a conceptualization of cities and urbanization as a process of de-territorialization and re-territorialization through metabolic circulatory flows (Swyngedouw, 2006: 106). In this line of analysis, circulation and metabolism constitute theoretical lenses through which to engage with the myriad intertwined ways in which human and non-human, material and discursive processes configure new socio-spatial arrangement and assemble bodies, materials and biophysical elements. Drawing upon the work of Bruno Latour (1993) and Donna Haraway (1991), several UPE scholars have theoretically and empirically investigated urbanization as a process of historic-geographically specific socio-environmental metabolisms that fuse the social with the physical, producing a cyborg city (Swyngedouw, 1996; Gandy, 2005).This emphasis on circulation and metabolism has configured urban infrastructures as a central element in UPE analysis and as an important vehicle through which the urbanization of nature can be analyzed. As Matthew Gandy argues the production of urban nature is inseparable, for example, from the development of urban technological networks which served to bind the modern city into a more integrated spatial form (2006:67). This understanding explains UPEs early emphasis on water and the production of hydroscapes; a theme that continues to be central in UPE (beginning with Swyngedouws work in 1997; see also Bakker 2003; Gandy 2004; Kaika 2005; Loftus 2006). Yet, an increasing number of other vectors have since been mobilized to analyze the uneven processes of the urbanization of nature ranging from food (Heynen, 2006) to insects, pesticides (Biehler, 2009) and SARS Virus (Ali and Keil, 2013) through waterfront transformation (Bunce and Desfor, 2007; Hagerman, 2007). Importantly, such metabolic and circulatory processes are not confined within the limits of the city but are rather linking places, and the humans and non-humans within these places, in uneven and contingent ways (Cook and Swyngedouw, 2012: 1968) with cities and peoples across the globe through socio-technical networks (Graham and Marvin, 2001) and circulatory flows. In parallel, a number of more recent studies have started to unpack the multiple ways and networks through which cities and their dwellers are linked with ecologies elsewhere (op. cit: 1968) through an exploration of the geographies of things like e-waste (Pellow 2007) and redundant ships (Buerk, 2006) from the cities of global North to those in the global South. This understanding of the city as product of a metabolic socio-environmental process that stretches from the immediate environment to the remotest corners of the globe (Heynen et al., 2006: 5) also poses significant challenges to urban responses to the anthropocene that are imagined and practiced as eco-enclaves. This is particularly so in a context wherein contemporary development seem to fulfill Lefebvre prognosis of the complete urbanization of society (2003). We will in return in this question in our discussion of some of the questions that urban localist responses in the anthropocene open up, before discussing these issues, however, it is important to note one further contribution of UPE. Together with providing ontological and theoretical clarity the afore-described blurring of the nature/society dichotomy and the emphasis on metabolic circulation also helped open up new avenues for urban theory and politics. UPE scholars, have time and again highlighted how urban urban environments are drenched in uneven power relations (Heynen, 2014: 600) and explore how metabolic circulatory processes of socio-natures are infused by uneven relations of power. This not only addresses how processes of capital accumulation as well as racial and gender hierarchies are played out and reproduced through the urbanization of nature but also how such processes are contested by diverse (urban) groups. As Nik Heynen puts it UPE has also taken seriously the egalitarian potential that is embedded within a robust conceptualization of urban metabolism (2014: 599). As a result at a time when specters of environmental catastrophes haunted urban imaginaries (Davis, 1999) UPE, under the auspices of the urbanization of nature, provided a language and a perspective through which urban environmental problems could be reframed in radically political ways linking them with wider social, economic and historical contexts. In a nutshell, the most important claim advanced by UPE in this regard is the insistence that in order to address problems like environmental justice, pollution and so on wider changes to the socio-economic and cultural policing of the urban were necessary (see also Angelo and Wachmuth, 2015). In other words, UPE challenges hegemonic understandings that, as Maria Kaika writing on urban planning perspectives, puts it argue that it is the nature of the city and not that of society that need[s] to change (2005: 17).

Add Gandys and Altvaters critique of the homogenizing effects of the anthropocene here???

[what are the approaches in the field? A double movement more of the same and experimentation]As we have already described there is now an increasing recognition that the networks, infrastructures and socio-ecological transformations that make possible and sustain the existence of cities and urban inhabitants simultaneously have detrimental ecological effects which in turn are reconfiguring the planetary socio-ecological context, wherein cities are being reproduced (Luke, 2003). It, thus, follows that the question of achieving a more green and sustainable future becomes an urban question. Indeed, over the past years increasing attention is paid to urban environmental problems on the part of policy makers, architects, planners and a variety of non-governmental and citizens organizations as well as urban movements. In this section we provide a brief overview of the major characteristics of recent paradigmatic urban experiments in responding to these problems. In doing so, we first focus on hegemonic responses that are largely scripted along techno-managerial lines of greening capitalism to then look at more politicized struggles and alternatives.

More of the same: Greening neoliberal urbanization and : In search of the techno-managerial green-fixes

The quest for a solution that would enable the mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change and environmental despoliation through the harmonious interaction between people, the environment and the markets has over the past years become the mantra of urban policy and practice. Commonly articulated around empty signifiers like sustainable cities, (smart) eco-cities, resilient cities, zero-carbon cities and so on a number of responses seek to identify the ways to engineer the delicate balance between humans and the environment increasingly through the design of technological and institutional innovations. While there is considerable variation between the proposed blueprints as well as debate between their pioneers, we can nonetheless, identify some common underlying assumptions (see also Keil, 2007; Swyngedouw, 2009). Comment by Giovanni Bettini: Of course, Im 100% with you on this - Im not sure though that we can use this concept without contextualizing it - First, the hegemonic frame that sutures such experiments is that of market environmentalism or greening capitalism. As Erik Swyngedouw has argued the claim that the current environmental predicament of cities requires serious and urgent action to make sure that they survive is inscribed within the consensus that neoliberal globalized capitalism is the framework wherein such action will take place (2009; 2011). Such perspectives, often sustained by apocalyptic discourses, seek to green capitalist urbanization through the reduction of pollution and the design of new smart eco-technologies that are carbon-neutral and resource-efficient, including socio-technical systems that permit the re-use of what was hitherto considered to be excess or waste. Urban ecological modernization or sustainability based on the mobilization of eco-technical rationality, good governance principles, and the internalization of negative externalities within the market logic, becomes the ideological basis around which such experiments are articulated. Concurrently, a hegemonic consensus has emerged that urban sustainability can be achieved and managed through technological fixes and institutional change, while maintaining economic growth, rather than being viewed as an intensely political issue over possible or desirable future socio-ecological urban trajectories (Swyngedouw, 2009). Despite the varieties of urban sustainabilities, debates are confined to how to reduce carbon emissions, what technologies to use, the mix of organizational fixes, and the urgency of the timing and the implementation (Krueger and Gibbs, 2007).Comment by Giovanni Bettini: often hand in hand with apocalyptic narration of what will come if we do not act now Comment by Giovanni Bettini: what about the generative aspects of techno-managerial green discourses? Of course, Im thinking of resilience here.. which does not allow for the creation of more of the same, but creates (or is part of/symptom of the creation of) quite a few new thingsSecond, as a result of the above consensus constructing the green and sustainable city becomes a hugely profitable market niche which is opening up new avenues for capital accumulation (Castree, 2008; Himley, 2008). Of course, cities as collectively produced socio-ecological assemblages have always been one of the prominent terrains and battlegrounds for what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession (2003). Yet, the current consensual quest for ecological modernization has expanded the frontier of commodification to a vast new area of socionatures. The most telling examples of this investment in green capitalist urbanization are eco-cities (Capproti, 2014). While many of these eco-cities still remain blueprints, several of them are under construction. These include the Masdar City in Abu Dhabi that claims to be the worlds first fully sustainable city (Caprotti and Romanowicz 2013; Cugurullo 2013), the development of eco-island developments in San Francisco Bay (Joss 2011; Joss et al 2011), and the over 100 eco-city projects throughout China (Wu 2012). Articulated around visions of market-based technological fixes to socio-ecological problems such projects stand as paradigmatic sites where new socio-ecological assemblages are imagined and perhaps materialized scripted, however, by the commodity relation and subjected to spiraling rounds of capitalist speculation (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2010).Third, the quest for ecological modernization has also been accompanied by a selective multiplication and pluralization of the actors who are involved in the production of the green city. As Hodson and Marvin observe concerning a series of eco-urbanism projects [a] pattern starts to emerge within which particular coalitions of social interestsconsultancies, architects and engineers sometimes with elements of the green movementare collaborating with particular place-based interests in the development of new infrastructural fixes (2010: 303). This reflects a general trend wherein non-elected officials, experts, and private actors are being incorporated in the governance, delivery and financing of sustainable cities (Swyngedouw, 2009).Fourth, especially during the past few years, an array of urban responses and solutions to environmental problems seem to be articulated around an understanding of cities as experimental sites (Bulkeley 2013; Bulkeley and Castn Broto 2013; Castn Broto and Bulkeley 2013; Evans 2011; Rapoport 2014). Within such perspectives, again paradigmatically encapsulated in eco-cities, but extending to what Hodson and Marvin describe as integrated eco-urbanism, a series of responses which cut across multiple infrastructure networks energy, food, water, waste, etc.and that are rebundled together at particular scales in the design of new buildings, neighbourhoods, towns, blocks and cities (2010: 303). Such experiments seek to achieve resilience and sustainability through a reduction of the dependence of these infrastructures on external resources. In doing so, they rest on an understanding of city as laboratory, as an empty and bounded container wherein architectural, technological and socio-economic reforms are to be trialed (Caprotti, 2014: 1286). Finally, and perhaps more importantly, as a result of the articulation of the above elements the political and social aspects of the city-nature nexus are silenced reducing the urban to a stage for the interplay of technological and governance innovation and green capitalism. On the one hand, questions of socio-ecological justice and equality are largely downplayed and ignored while patterns of unequal access to and control of socio-ecological assemblages along class, gender and ethnic lines are reproduced. On the other, the opportunities for dissensus and real debate about possible and more radical futures are severely curtailed (Swyngedouw, 2009). Yet, the always contingent suturing of political antagonism is challenged by all manner of urban socio-ecological struggles and contestations (Heynen et al., 2007; Loftus, 2012) which re-politicize the urban through a variety of tactics of resistance and rebellion, and imaginings of alternative urban socio-environmental practices. This is what we shall turn to next. [Development the changing world map I cant really imagine how we will return to this after discussing alternatives and scale so perhaps its a good idea to re-write this section to also refer to the global south]Resisting capitalist urbanization, iImagining socio-ecological alternative urban communities?sOver the past 40 years, capitalist urbanization and its socio-ecological repercussions have time and again been fought and challenged by multifaceted urban socio-ecological movements. Originating in the US during the 1970s and 1980s urban environmental justice emerged as both a normative concept and a set of social movements that aimed to unearth and challenge the highly uneven distribution of environmental goods and bads in the city (Walker, 2012). While early environmental justice perspectives predominantly focused on socio-ecological inequalities around race, a number of recent studies and movements extended the scope to other social categories such as gender, class, age, ability, and geographical scale, each reflecting distinct forms of unjust urban socio-ecological configurations (Walker, 2009). During the past years a number of urban environmental justice movements have also unfolded in Europe and across the global south (Schlosberg, 2007; Schroeder et al., 2008; Walker, 2009c) and the rise of transnational EJ movements and networks (Carruthers, 2008; Pellow, 2007). (Climate Justice?) Such movements as well as assorted academic research have managed to bring to the forefront the social dimensions of ecological problems by revealing the intricate mechanisms through which nature, ecological processes and socio-environmental conditions in the city are so highly interwoven in such an extremely unjust manner. This being said, as Agyeman (2005) points out, rather than taking a progressive stance that outlines an alternative socio-ecological imaginary, these movements have overwhelmingly been confined into a defensive stance, demonstrating against existing or proposed injustices, quite often adopting a form of NIMBY (not in my back yard) politics. Comment by Giovanni Bettini: what about environmentalism of the poor and or dear granpa M-A?Comment by Giovanni Bettini: do we really need to make such a strong point on those here whithout the space to defend it?Alongside them, however, there is also a growing number of alternative experiments that seek to re-imagine urban metabolic socio-ecological along more just, ethical and inclusive lines. The Transition Town network and the Lilac co-housing community constitute prime examples of such approaches in the UK. The rapidly growing network of Transition Towns across the UK seeks to localize food and energy supplies in particular in an effort to move towards (urban) local resilience (Bailey et al., 2010; Mason and Whitehead, 2012). The overarching aim of Transition Town network is to foster urban resilience by facilitating community-led responses to peak-oil and climate change (Transition Network, 2012). Concerns around re-localization or eco-localization (North, 2010) are, thus, at the core of transition initiatives on the one hand, pursued through practices of community empowerment and deliberative democracy and on the other articulated around notions of eco-pragmatist traditions that emphasize the power of local communities to provide the skills and resources they need for their survival (Mason and Whitehead, 2012: 496). The Lilac cohousing project based in Bramley, West Leeds provides a smaller-scale example of progressive efforts towards locally reworking socio-ecological relations (Chatterton, 2013). Lilac stands for Low Impact Living Affordable Community and consists of 20 households and a common house. The project founded in 2009 and completed in 2013 is a pioneering affordable, ecological cohousing experiment. Lilac seeks to articulate a grassroots, informal and community-led approach to low-carbon governance through experimenting with low impact and post-carbon living in practice (op. cit). Lilac is one of the many experiments around Low Impact Urban Developments (LID) that seek to internalize infrastructure and resource flows (Pickerill and Maxey, 2009).Comment by Giovanni Bettini: Do we really want to rank TT among the progressive alternatives?There are, at least, two key elements that differentiate the above-described and a series of other progressive eco-localization initiatives from hegemonic techno-managerial eco-urbanism projects. On the one hand, they move away from the hegemonic pursuit for techno-managerial fixes placing further emphasis on social and cultural concerns in finding new solutions and socio-ecological configurations. On the other, being grassroots initiatives that place particular emphasis on community empowerment, deliberative democracy and low cost-living they challenge the neoliberal capitalist logic of accumulation for accumulations shake (see also North, 2010). In doing so, they imagine and enact alternative socio-ecological relations between places and social groups while their networked character allows them to draw links between different places and expand their geographical reach. They can thus be seen as forms of progressive localism than can contribute in the construction of political alternatives (Featherstone et al, 2012). This being said, what such experiments have largely in common with the hegemonic forms of eco-urbanism described above is an understanding of their scale of intervention be that the eco-block, eco-neighborhood or eco-town as self-enclosed. As Hodson and Marvin observe their emphasis on autonomy, the development of local technologies, circular metabolisms and the aspiration for greater self-reliance (2010: 307) is quite similar to hegemonic market and government driven forms of eco-urbanism. This is not to assimilate such progressive initiatives with hegemonic responses, but nonetheless poses a series of questions that if addressed might further inform and equip emancipatory socio-environmental politics.

(Progressive/Radical/Emancipatory) Eco-urbanism and the politics of scale

Crutzen, P. J. 2002. "Geology of Mankind." Nature 415 (6867):23-23.Johnson, E., H. Morehouse, S. Dalby, J. Lehman, S. Nelson, R. Rowan, S. Wakefield, and K. Yusoff. 2014. "After the Anthropocene: Politics and Geographic Inquiry for a New Epoch." Progress in Human Geography 38 (3):439-456.Seto, K. C., R. Sanchez-Rodriguez, and M. Fragkias. 2010. "The New Geography of Contemporary Urbanization and the Environment." Annual Review of Environment and Resources 35:167-194. doi: 10.1146/annurev-environ-100809-125336.Steffen, W., W. Broadgate, L. Deutsch, O. Gaffney, and C. Ludwig. 2015. "The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration." The Anthropocene Review 2 (1):81-98. doi: 10.1177/2053019614564785.

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