Urban political ecology: politicizing the production of urban natures

Abstract

In the summer of 1998, the Southeast Asian financial bubble imploded. Global capital moved spasmodically from place to place, leaving cities like Jakarta with a social and physical wasteland where dozens of unfinished skyscrapers were dotted over the landscape while thousands of unemployed children, women, and men were roaming the streets in search of survival. In the meantime, El Niño’s global dynamic was wrecking havoc in the region with its climatic disturbances. Puddles of stagnant water in the defunct concrete buildings that had once promised continuing capital accumulation for Indonesia became great ecological niches for a rapid explosion of mosquitoes. Malaria and Dengue Fever suddenly joined unemployment and social and political mayhem in shaping Jakarta’s cityscape. Global capital fused with global climate, with local power struggles, and with socio-ecological conditions to re-shape Jakarta’s urban socio-ecological conditions in profound, radical, and deeply troubling ways.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 202 citations exist upstream.