Urban Ecologies

City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture

Christopher Schliephake

The term “urban ecology” has become a buzzword in various disciplines, including the social and natural sciences as well as urban planning and architecture. The environmental humanities have been slow to adapt to current theoretical debates, often excluding human-built environments from their respective frameworks. This book closes this gap both in theory and in practice, bringing together “urban ecology” with ecocritical and cultural ecological approaches by conceptualizing the city as an integral part of the environment and as a space in which ecological problems manifest concretely. Arguing that culture has to be seen as an active component and integral factor within urban ecologies, it makes use of a metaphorical use of the term, perceiving cities as spatial phenomena that do not only have manifold and complex material interrelations with their respective (natural) environments, but that are intrinsically connected to the ideas, imaginations, and interpretations that make up the cultural symbolic and discursive side of our urban lives and that are stored and constantly renegotiated in their cultural and artistic representations. The city is, within this framework, both seen as an ecosystemically organized space as well as a cultural artifact. Thus, the urban ecology outlined in this study takes its main impetus from an analysis of examples taken from contemporary culture that deal with urban life and the complex interrelations between urban communities and their (natural and built) environments.

Lexington Books

Pages: 268 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-0-7391-9575-8 • Hardback • December 2014 • $133.00 • (£102.00)

978-0-7391-9577-2 • Paperback • March 2017 • $59.99 • (£46.00)

978-0-7391-9576-5 • eBook • December 2014 • $57.00 • (£44.00)

Series: Ecocritical Theory and Practice

Subjects: Nature / Ecology, Social Science / Sociology / Urban

Urban Ecologies

City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

The term “urban ecology” has become a buzzword in various disciplines, including the social and natural sciences as well as urban planning and architecture. The environmental humanities have been slow to adapt to current theoretical debates, often excluding human-built environments from their respective frameworks. This book closes this gap both in theory and in practice, bringing together “urban ecology” with ecocritical and cultural ecological approaches by conceptualizing the city as an integral part of the environment and as a space in which ecological problems manifest concretely. Arguing that culture has to be seen as an active component and integral factor within urban ecologies, it makes use of a metaphorical use of the term, perceiving cities as spatial phenomena that do not only have manifold and complex material interrelations with their respective (natural) environments, but that are intrinsically connected to the ideas, imaginations, and interpretations that make up the cultural symbolic and discursive side of our urban lives and that are stored and constantly renegotiated in their cultural and artistic representations. The city is, within this framework, both seen as an ecosystemically organized space as well as a cultural artifact. Thus, the urban ecology outlined in this study takes its main impetus from an analysis of examples taken from contemporary culture that deal with urban life and the complex interrelations between urban communities and their (natural and built) environments.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 268 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-0-7391-9575-8 • Hardback • December 2014 • $133.00 • (£102.00)

978-0-7391-9577-2 • Paperback • March 2017 • $59.99 • (£46.00)

978-0-7391-9576-5 • eBook • December 2014 • $57.00 • (£44.00)

Series: Ecocritical Theory and Practice

Subjects: Nature / Ecology, Social Science / Sociology / Urban

Author

Christopher Schliephake is teaching assistant in the History Department at the University of Augsburg.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Introduction: A Cultural Urban Ecology
Chapter 1: “(Eco-)Cosmopolitanism”: The Local, the Global and the Ecology of World Cities
Chapter 2: “Force of Nature”: The Ecology of the Inner-City Drug Culture in The Wire
Chapter 3: “The City that Care Forgot”: The Complex Ecology of (Post-)Katrina New Orleans
Chapter 4: The More-than-Human City: Material Agents, Cyborgs, and the Invasion of Alien Species
Epilogue
Bibliography
About the Author

Reviews

Christopher Schliephake's excellent book urban Ecologies: City Space, Mateial Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Cutture stands as a compelling example of the value of the environmental humanities beyond the bounds of the humanities as such. Specifically, this carefully researched, thought-provoking study demonstrates the potential importance of ecocriticism for the fields of urban ecology, urban policy and planning, landscape architecture, and more.
— Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism

Schliephake’s Urban Ecologiesproposes thereby an inspiring and new field of ‘urban material ecocriticism’ based on the interdisciplinary merging of urban studies and ecocriticism. . . .This is a book with relevance for anyone interested in cities, the environment, the environmental humanities, and/or ecocriticism, but also for agents both human and non-human alike.
— Anglia: Journal of English Philology