Book Review Forum: Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency

Kaika Maria, Keil Roger, Mandler Tait, and Tzaninis Yannis, Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency©. Manchester University Press, 2023: 400 pp.: ISBN: 9781526167996 | £25.00 (paperback).

Introduction

Michele Acuto – University of Bristol, UK

Turning Up the Heat comes at a point where the climate emergency beckons us to experiment with urgency, to tackle head on not only environmental disasters but the unavoidable political conditions that generated them. Enter the field of Urban Political Ecology (UPE). If the acronym suggests echoes of the 1990s in the more seasoned of our Urban Studies readers, it might be worth considering how much of the cast of Turning Up the Heat has been involved in the recent sister journal launch, also by Sage, of Urban Political Ecology. Put simply, UPE is alive and well, thriving and finding new 2020s feet. The book, edited collectively by eight hands, and packing 18 chapters of different urban persuasions, steps in to reconsider how, from its 1990s roots, UPE can be refreshed and revived as a driving perspective on all things urban, political, and environmental. Colleagues from across a number of countries came together for one of the longest forums we have published in recent Urban Studies history—a testament to the comprehensiveness and the interest this volume has generated, and to the moment UPE is having in urban research. Not to distract us from the depth of engagement that ensues in the next few pages, and the prolific series of observations you will find in this Forum, this introduction is uncharacteristically short. It points you in the direction of five rich commentaries, and a frank authors’ response. You will find collegial criticism by a cast of diverse urban scholars, and even more friendly acknowledgment by the group of manuscript editors, as with the matter of whether Turning up the Heat should have more, or less, engagement with extended urbanization. You will find a mix of styles of contextualization as to where Turning up the Heat sits conceptually and directionally, from a close territorialist read to a deeper dive into experimentation and ethics, or indeed verse.

Just like Turning up the Heat, this Review Forum is a rich mix of UPE viewpoints that all share some degree of connection. This is a familiar feeling for the many of us who opened the pages of Turning up the Heat to encounter a prologue, “Losing California” by the late Mike Davis, a friend, critic and point of reference, and found ourselves lost in the wealth of stories that followed this account of the political ecology of the megafires, from India’s urban periphery, West African suburbs, Singapore’s sprawl, and more. In that detailed and situated narration, but also in common points of human (or more-than-human) contact and collegial connectivity, Turning up the Heat is quite the taster for all things contemporary UPE, an invite to dive into the book, as much as to connect with this scholarly community.

Commentary I

Lorenzo De Vidovich – Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan, Italy

The quest for a territorialist ramification of UPE in the contemporary climate-related complexity

In the spring of 2022, I found myself immersed in Natura Urbana by Gandy (2022), a book that deeply resonated with my academic interests. Around the same time, I attended a football match in Trieste with Giovanni Carrosio, a colleague at the University of Trieste. As we waited for the game to begin, our conversation turned to the “urbanization of nature,” the concept of urban metabolism, and the Marxist inflections introduced by Urban Political Ecology (UPE) scholars. Giovanni, a ruralist by training and temperament, always expressed skepticism toward urban-centric narratives, yet conceded that cities necessarily depend on complex metabolic processes to sustain human life, a point that UPE has compellingly theorized over the past three decades. That exchange lingered with me, prompting questions about the extent to which UPE offers new perspectives beyond its foundational critiques. This reflection resurfaced recently as I read the Italian edition of Vaillant’s (2023) Fire Weather, a fascinating account of the 2016 Alberta tar sands fire. The book’s exploration of climate change, disaster governance, and urban sprawl reaffirmed my sense that the core themes of UPE are increasingly resonating beyond academic circles. It was therefore gratifying to see this event referenced in the introduction to this edited volume, which marks an important new milestone in UPE scholarship.

In addressing these issues, the book mobilizes—particularly through the chapters in Parts II and III—key themes that deserve particular attention for advancing and (re)adapting UPE scholarship to better understand the collective emergency posed by climate change. These themes can be centered around two interrelated keywords: “urban adaptation,” which introduced significant complexities, and “territory,” which brings new theoretical implications for UPE. The interconnectedness of these two concepts brings together multiple layers of complexity that are crucial for fully engaging with the theoretical urgency—emphasized by this paper—of expanding and integrating UPE’s scope in the face of extended urbanization under climate change. These themes form the central focus of this review.

The knot of urban adaptation to climate change

Climate change entails social issues of vulnerability, exclusion from adaptation and transition processes, and exposure to climate-related threats (Sovacool, 2021). In this context, centers and peripheries are continually reproduced in climate change adaptation (rather than mitigation) challenges, which unfold across multiple scales, both within and beyond urban boundaries. As the book explicitly aims to draw “an integrated research agenda for a UPE beyond the city, by exploring if—and to what extent—it is also (or even mainly) the ‘margin’, the ‘outside’, and the ‘periphery’ that dictates the logic of the core and the inside” (p. 23), it can be argued that this objective has been fully achieved. By assembling 18 highly heterogeneous chapters in terms of content, objectives, and theoretical perspectives, the volume successfully extends the scope of UPE beyond its traditional focus on urban metabolism and the urbanization of nature. It redirects attention toward peripheral and suburban areas, as well as the dynamics of extended urbanization. These domains are increasingly shaped by overlapping tensions: foremost among them climate change, but also decarbonization efforts, the crisis of social protection systems, growing inequalities within and between urban and suburban areas, and new socio-ecological risks intensified by the climate crisis, such as energy poverty, exposure to hydrogeological hazards, and vulnerability to floods, heatwaves, and other extreme weather events. As a result, emerging social and spatial complexities are entrenched within the “relational geographies” of global and urban climate change, as well as in the responses developed to tackle it, which are produced, contested and outlined in the urban context especially, thanks to socio-technical inputs enacted to define a new urban regime of low-carbon transitions (Bulkeley et al., 2014). As Kian Goh meaningfully suggests in her chapter (“In formation: Urban political ecology for a world of flows”), the relational geographies emerging from climate change—spanning the urban and beyond—invite us to revisit conventional understandings of urban socio-ecological change. These dynamics rely on the formation of networks that bridge multiple geographical scales and institutional levels, and that are theorized through diverse and situated urban socio-natural processes (Lawhon et al., 2014), which UPE continues to critically inform.

Insofar as “the process of reconstructing urban life is the process of reconstruction of the city as a communication system in its multi-dimensional sense” (Castells, 2002: 557), the formation of networks to tackle climate change comes “from the urban” and it well extends beyond the “urban”: in the suburbs, where infrastructural networks transform space and territory to fuel the urban (growth) machine, in the rural, where extraction processes of different forms physically alter contexts and communities, and across the scales. Urban projects focused on climate change adaptation, on the one hand, and the broader political economies and ecologies that shape them, on the other, are deeply entangled in spatial and temporal interconnections that cut across sites and scales (Goh, 2020). The urban is thus reaffirmed as the analytical category through which strategies, plans, and knowledge for climate change adaptation are produced and organized. These urban networks also take shape within the governance of low-carbon transitions. This is evident in some European cities, where new forms of “transition management” have emerged (Nochta and Skelcher, 2020).

However, as Goh argues in her chapter, the formation of global-urban networks transcends bounded, city-centric perspectives in urban climate change research. Instead, it reveals how urban spatial interventions operate within broader political ecologies. UPE and its recent theoretical developments offer valuable contributions to this critique. Yet the socio-spatial implications of the climate emergency, and the emerging political ecologies that seek to address it, extend far beyond the urban. This is precisely why adopting a “territorialist” perspective becomes essential for reconfiguring and advancing UPE in the face of climate change.

The meaning of a territorialist perspective

Although “territory” has been often understood as a “bounded space” under the control of a group or a state and defined by physical extensions associated with specific analytical categories (such as the urban and the rural), its meaning extends well beyond this spatial dimension. Territory also encompasses political and social implications. It is shaped by relationships, organized communities, and political technologies, including techniques for measuring land, controlling terrain, and governing various domains through legal instruments (Brighenti, 2006; Elden, 2010; Raffestin, 2012). This broader understanding aligns with an interpretation of territory as a “subject,” a network of reciprocal relationships that generate the “lifeworlds” of human societies. From this perspective, managing territory requires rethinking the tangible and intangible assets that compose it: cities, coasts, infrastructures, agroforestry landscapes, agricultural and river systems, socio-cultural models, arts, and lifestyles. All of these are the outcomes of long-term co-evolutionary processes between human settlements and the environment (Magnaghi, 2020). Within this framework, as Camilla Perrone discusses in her chapter entitled “Insurgent earth. Territorialist political ecology in/for the new climate regime”, the climate crisis involves political-ecological dynamics that directly affect the habitability of the planet. These dynamics cannot be adequately understood if we treat territories as “bounded spaces,” in the same way cities are often viewed as self-contained entities providing climate change adaptation strategies.

In line with Keil (2020), the focus should move beyond the political ecologies of individual cities to embrace the political ecologies of urbanization, which offer a more effective lens for understanding the socio-spatial transformations driven by the climate emergency. Since territory emerges from a metabolic process that intertwines spatial and physical transformations with social, cultural, and political mediations, resulting in a “situated synthesis of the political and the social” (p. 247), a “territorialist” perspective in political ecology offers an epistemological lens, deeply invigorated by the theoretical debates of UPE, to critically examine the socio-spatial complexities of the climate crisis and their territorial implications. These include: deep decarbonization strategies connected to socio-technical changes in energy production and consumption; the redefinition of welfare and social protection systems in response to emerging socio-ecological risks; the governance of urban regions where cities and suburbs “territorially coexist” in complex interdependencies, often with decision-making power concentrated in the former; and infrastructural transformations in suburbs on a global scale, especially in key sectors such as logistics and mobility.

A Territorialist Political Ecology (TPE) therefore offers a lens for studying the social, spatial, and ecological transformations that define contemporary extended urbanization—in both spatial and epistemological terms—in the era of climate change. This perspective allows us to move beyond the “urban-centric” networks that shape climate change adaptation, while also contributing to the ongoing, dynamic debate on UPE and its evolving trajectories. I am convinced of UPE’s relevance not only as a matter of personal scholarly interest but also because of the strong curiosity and engagement I have observed among students when introducing UPE and the concept of urban metabolism in my courses on the sociology of territory and the energy transition. UPE remains, to me, one of the most meaningful frameworks for critically observing our suburban planet in the 21st century, and Turning up the Heat provided a dense compendium of insights on broader perspectives that—using Perrone’s words—help us to reobserve territory as a “human environment where a new climatic civilization can be tested and the conditions for the habitability of the earth can be reconstructed in a game of situated interdependencies between the parts in a political, ecological, and social context.” (p. 254).

Conclusion

I focused my attention on two chapters that allowed me to highlight two key issues that should be further explored by UPE scholars: the grey areas of urban adaptation to climate change and the importance of adopting a territorialist perspective to study the contemporary political ecologies underpinning extended urbanization. However, many other compelling chapters contribute meaningfully to this discussion: Martín Arboleda’s analysis of the capitalist circuits of extraction, the “situated” political ecologies of the Global South explored in Part II, the critique of “green” glorification in urban policies examined by Hillary Angelo and David Wachsmuth, and Federico Savini’s theorization of a degrowth approach in urban planning.

This richness is undoubtedly one of the volume’s strengths, as it paves the way for an integrated research agenda grounded in UPE. Yet, in my view, the book delivers one particularly strong message: the dynamics of climate change are intrinsically connected to the processes of extended urbanization. Still, further implications of climate change for suburban societies shaped by these urbanization processes need to be more thoroughly investigated, using the epistemological and conceptual tools assembled in this dense volume. This is by no means an easy task, especially when it comes to bridging theory and empirical research. Future engagements in the field I am currently navigating—which focuses on energy poverty and “community energy”—may offer valuable contributions in this regard. For example, studies on energy practices in the face of urban metabolic change (see Kobi, 2023) share a common groundwork with UPE scholarship, and the engagement with territorialist standpoints beyond the urban might set the stage for further empirical explorations regarding how suburban and peripheral spaces actively reshape urban metabolic processes under climate stress.

References

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Commentary II

Greet De Block – University of Antwerp, Belgium

The first thing that captures the reader’s attention in Turning Up the Heat is the cover showing a child’s drawing titled The Fire Land, created by the son of one of the editors. It depicts fires in Australia: chaotic black clouds swirl menacingly in the center, brushing against a blue sky above. On the scorched earth below lie abstract stick figures—or perhaps stick animals; the distinction is blurred—lifeless, ensnared in angry red lines. A few figures stand outside the fire, watching. One tall character, with head in the clouds, is looking down, smiling.

Following this arresting cover image, the volume opens with the essay-prologue “Losing California—The Political Ecology of the Megafires” by the late Mike Davis. In the span of 10 pages, he offers a razor-sharp analysis that traces the social production of nature in intimate relation with bio-physical processes as well as ex/urbanization and uneven distribution of risk, connecting global and local scales, human and non-human actors. While the analysis exudes the academic relevance of Urban Political Ecology, Mike Davis’s unflinching, direct prose radiates political urgency and draws the reader into a shared temporal horizon and affective engagement—pronouns “us,” “we,” “our” span past, present, and future. Two years after the publication of the volume, the fires in Los Angeles stand as a harrowing reminder of the pattern of past invasive grass-fire cycles, a shattering catastrophe for those who currently live in the wildland–urban interface, and an eerie premonition for what is to come. We are losing California.

The intergenerational transmission of concern—between a man leaving our earth and a boy just arriving—resonates through the pages. It grips the reader by the throat, demands our attention. This volume does not only speak to the academic, policy-maker, or activist, but also to the reader as affective subject, disrupting our comfort zone. In the introduction, the editors summarize the aim of the volume: “to showcase urban political ecology as an intervention—in theory, methodology and practice—to the socio-environmental emergencies of the 21st century” (p. 2). The tone is set. We simply cannot be the figure standing outside of the climate emergency, with our head in the clouds, watching. At a moment when the climate crisis demands a radical rethinking of socio-ecological relations, this volume rises to the challenge and underlines the urgency. It challenges the field, and us, to meet the crisis head-on. The heat is, unmistakably, turned up.

One of the book’s most significant contributions is the articulation of the extended urbanization thesis as a research agenda, aiming to both deepen and expand the conceptual and methodological horizons of UPE. While the foundational urbanization of nature thesis of UPE has framed urbanization as a process of uneven socio-ecological transformations (Heynen et al., 2006)—emphasizing dynamics of surplus and extraction, privilege and exclusion, and the relations between core and margin—empirical studies have often remained constrained by methodological cityism. That is, they tend to conceptualize the city and its citizens in geographically and ontologically limited ways, thereby restricting the full realization of UPE’s radical potential. Moving beyond the urban bias, while keeping the urbanization of nature thesis as conceptual cornerstone, extended urbanization reframes socio-spatial development through broader, more entangled, metabolic relations. This extension is reinforced empirically by the book’s engagement with situated approaches, insights from feminist and postcolonial debates, more-than-human ontologies, and relational geography in general—tracing the dynamics of extraction and accumulation, production and destruction across the globe, beyond nested scales, traditional sites, and privileged actors. In so doing, Turning Up the Heat is not just an academic achievement, it is a sharp political critique exposing the myriad forces driving deeply uneven socio-spatial relations and indeed environmental breakdown—ranging from systems of extraction (Arboleda, chapter 4; Connolly and Muzaini, chapter 17) to racialized urbanism (Heynen and Luke, chapter 6; Kimari, chapter 8), infectious diseases (Keil et al., chapter 11), modernist planning and international experts (Gururani, chapter 9; Lawhon et al., chapter 10; chapter 12) and populist rhetoric (Loftus and Gort, chapter 14; Velicu, chapter 16), to name but a few.

Throughout the introduction and subsequent chapters, UPE is approached as a dynamic and essential field of inquiry and action, open to new concepts, methodologies, and even ontologies challenging its dominant trajectories, while bolstering the intellectual legacy of UPE. In this regard, Turning Up the Heat succeeds in positioning UPE as an established academic field—one built on solid foundations yet open to critical dialogue and contestation. The volume thus marks an important moment in the institutionalization of UPE, offering a platform for both continuity and innovation, a trajectory that is further supported and extended by the recent launch of the journal Urban Political Ecology, which formalizes and sustains the field’s growing intellectual infrastructure.

The following section of this commentary aims to contribute to the ongoing development of UPE by engaging critically with the volume’s ambition to deepen and expand the field’s research agenda. In doing so, it proposes three avenues through which UPE might evolve further, both conceptually and methodologically. First, it argues for a more explicit engagement with the extent of extended urbanization, suggesting that alliances with disciplines rooted in quantitative methods—such as ecology, geology, transport geography, and financial geography—could meaningfully complement UPE’s critical, qualitative strengths. Second, it calls for a tighter integration of empirical research and theoretical reflection, in order to consolidate UPE’s academic robustness and coherence. Finally, the third avenue revisits UPE’s ideological foundations by reasserting its political agenda. These directions are not exhaustive but are offered as short provocations to stimulate further reflection and collective exploration within and outside the field.

While UPE has long embraced interdisciplinary approaches, there is still significant potential for methodological experimentation in research on extended urbanization. In addition to Gandy’s advocacy for greater engagement with more qualitative modes of research, like archival work and ethnography (Gandy, 2022), this commentary argues that a more explicit engagement with the extent of extended urbanization—understood in a literal and empirical sense—could enhance both the analytical depth and political traction of UPE. Specifically, this entails a strategic broadening of UPE’s methodological repertoire through closer collaborations with disciplines grounded in quantitative approaches, such as biology and ecology, chemistry and toxicology, Earth sciences and geology, and economics and financial geography. These disciplines offer methodological tools and empirical datasets capable of capturing the magnitude, speed, intensity, and spatial distribution of socio-ecological flows and transformations. Metrics such as the number of affected populations, hectares of land lost to fire and flooding, geospatial patterns and levels of accumulated toxicity, financial flows underpinning ecological degradation, and volumes and trajectories of waste production and disposal, can usefully complement UPE’s established critical and qualitative strengths. Moreover, sustained inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations that combine quantitative and qualitative methods could offer novel insights into the correlations between environmental risks, decline and social inequalities. For instance, spatial analysis revealing the co-location of flood-prone areas, toxic waste sites, and socio-economically vulnerable populations may uncover patterns of environmental injustice that would otherwise remain obscured. Integrating such data could add biophysical and material dimensions to UPE’s current socio-political focus, and doing so could not only advance the field’s analytical capacities, but also enhance its strategic capacity to intervene in the technocratic discourses and metric-driven logics that govern environmental policy and regulation. In this way, UPE may be better positioned to “ride the wave” of the techno-managerial frameworks that dominate contemporary governance regimes. That is not to suggest that UPE should obediently inscribe itself in these frameworks. Rather, the proposition is that it could be seen as one of the strategies through which UPE can assert its political relevance—combining quantitative empirical engagement with sharp political critique and radical imagination, reminiscent of 19th century socio-ecological analysis and praxis (see also De Block, 2015; Swyngedouw and Kaika, 2014).

A second concern pertains to the relationship between theory and empirical research, which at present can be somewhat disjointed. While theoretical contributions often remain abstract and broadly conceptual, empirical investigations tend to be increasingly situated and place-specific. This divergence risks, on the one hand, the development of theoretical frameworks that are too general to meaningfully inform empirical inquiry, and on the other, the production of case-specific empirical insights that resist broader synthesis or comparative analysis. Strengthening the feedback loop between theory and empirics could foster a more systematic and cumulative mode of knowledge production. Such integration would render both theoretical and empirical work more transferable, invite critical dialogue and constructive review, and thereby enhance the robustness of the field’s claims. The volume already offers several promising proposals in this direction—for instance, Erik Swyngedouw’s call for the development of flow-based methodologies (chapter 1), or Neil Brenner and Nikos Katsikis’s proposition of a hinterlands framework apt to connect specific forms of city and non-city spaces and processes (chapter 5). Yet, there remains scope for further reflection on—and experimentation with—potential intermediaries that can structure, connect, and advance UPE’s evolving knowledge production.

A final remark takes the form of a plea: A call not to lose sight of the enduring relevance of human agency, political power, and class dynamics in efforts to broaden UPE’s conceptual terrain—particularly through engagements with post-human ontologies. While such ontological expansions have opened important analytical horizons, they should not come at the expense of, or even eclipse, political structures and power asymmetries that drive socio-ecological transformation (see also Swyngedouw and Ernstson, 2018). Crucially, this includes an interrogation of the class dynamics that underlie and exacerbate such inequalities. Attending to these forces aligns closely with the foundational commitments of UPE, underscoring the necessity of identifying the actors and institutions through which power and capital is seized, circulated, concentrated, and shielded from accountability. By elucidating the technonatural configurations through which injustices are produced, reproduced, and normalized, UPE is well positioned to assert political responsibility amid an escalating socio-ecological crisis. “Turning Up the Heat” is not simply a metaphor, it is an ethical imperative. As the editors remind us in the afterword: “we are held to act” (p. 354, after Brand and Wissen, 2021).

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Commentary III

Chiara Camponeschi – York University, Canada

Finding possibility in the midst of crisis

In the fall of 2024, visitors to Paris’ renowned Center Pompidou embarked on a different kind of journey when they stepped on the museum’s iconic escalators. No longer simply moving from floor to floor, they found themselves transported to a world where past, present, and future converged to make an urgent statement about our (increasingly normalized) state of emergency. Guided by the unmistakable voice of Björk, the famous Icelandic singer, they entered a soundscape where the calls of extinct and endangered species merged with a spoken word poem, Nature Manifesto, that asked them to reject the “pessimistic vision of a post-apocalyptic future” and embrace “an era of ‘post-optimism’” instead.

Produced in conjunction with the museum’s forum on biodiversity—the fascinatingly titled Which Culture for which Future?—Björk’s immersive sound installation was at once an opportunity to unsettle the passive acceptance of our ecosystems’ ongoing collapse and an invitation to reflect on the choices available to us as a society on the threshold of more ecological tipping points.

Starting from the premise that “it is an emergency/the apocalypse has already happened,” Nature Manifesto draws on language that is delightfully UPE-like in its orientation to evoke “an emergence of assemblages,” “rhizomatic entanglements,” and “ecological connective tissues” through which “the web of life will unfold into a world of new solutions.” In a voice simultaneously vulnerable yet open-hearted, attuned to loss yet resolute in its insistence on hope, Björk’s sensory journey describes a resilient future where, yes, “our old comfort is gone” and, yes, “life wins with or without us,” but where crisis does not have to spell the end of possibility—it may actually be compost for fertile new beginnings. Consider these lines from the manifesto:

After plagues and pandemics

there will be new modes of existence

of weaving our bodies into relations with our surroundings

of decomposing our old ways of life

and escape the feedback loop

with metabolic ingenuity

Almost as if in direct conversation with the themes of this immersive installation, Turning Up the Heat offers precisely the kind of guidance we need to disrupt “the feedback loop” of emergency and (perma)crisis with courage and “metabolic ingenuity.”

As is typical of the trailblazing nature of their work, Turning Up the Heat’s editors are clear that if urban political ecology as a field “wants to remain relevant to the politics of a heating planet” (p. 24), then “staying with urbanization as a matter of concern does not have to mean succumbing to reformist, technocratic, and mechanical suggestions for ‘cities to save the world’” [Wachsmuth and Angelo, chapter 15] (p. 24). Rather, their edited volume puts forward the timely call to “move UPE beyond the (inevitable) apocalyptic scenarios of extended urbanization and climate change” and toward “emerging grassroots practices and imaginaries for alternative socio-environmental arrangements” (p. 22).

Much like the title of the biodiversity forum from which Björk’s manifesto emerged, inherent in this call is the recognition that the culture we validate and privilege is the one that directly shapes the future we end up with. And, much like Björk herself, Turning Up the Heat’s contributors are not interested in dwelling in despair and dystopia. They prefer to engage in a reflexive interrogation of which “epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies within UPE’s pathways might be best suited to deal with the integrated, compound, and systemic disaster we call climate change” (p. 5). In this volume, they do so across four pivotal domains: extended urbanization; situated urban political ecologies; more-than-human urban political ecologies and relational geographies; and addressing disjunctions between policy, politics, and academic debate.

Echoing Paul Robbins, who suggests that we can remain open to the “terrible realities” of injustice and oppression while continuing to move toward transformative change through “good forms of hope and despair” (p. 23), their essays do not shy away from feeling the discomfort and pain that characterize these highly turbulent times. They do, however, trouble entrenched narratives of doom and the problematic outcomes of technocratic imaginaries by embracing a lively epistemic plurality that speaks to the “unity within UPE’s diverse debates” (p. 5).

At a time when UPE as a field continues to hybridize and evolve, this unity is perhaps best exemplified by the shared vision of a relational and liberatory approach to research and practice, one that pays attention “to the embodied metabolism, social reproduction, intersectionality and articulation, emotion and affect, and political subjectivity” (p. 12) at the heart of lived experience, all the while centering “Indigenous political ecologies, theories and practices of decolonization, as well as abolitionist political ecologies” (p. 13) to resist and reorient the very hegemonic practices that dominate today’s emergency management and climate response protocols.

While it is true that “the world is in a state of continuing cascading crises that are universal and truly planetary” (p. 23), and that this is “the first time in history that global events like climate change and the pandemic presented themselves in a world of extended forms and processes of urbanization” (p. 23), this volume hints at an important fact: crisis itself is not a foregone conclusion. Collectively, the essays featured in this collection remind us that UPE has an important role to play in exposing and reworking what Heynen and Luke describe as “the ways nature and the city congeal through power and oppression” (p. 130). In their essay, “The Case for Reparations, Urban Political Ecology and the Black Right to Urban Life”, they remind us that:

A critical and reflexive practice of UPE can contribute to transformative change in investigating the intersections of colonial, racialised, and gendered power relations that shape urban space and interrogating the ideologies, plans, and theories through which we know and account for cities in an effort to disrupt these hegemonic practices. (p. 131)

Their words are echoed by Nightingale who, in dissecting the politics of climate adaptation, points out that “efforts to guide change can never be politically neutral” (p. 144). This is why we must always remain vigilant and savvy about what Kimari calls an “ecology of exclusion” that validates and reinforces “interconnected ecological, political, economic, and social processes sanctioned by the state, and that have imperial origins” (p. 161).

Disrupting the hold that crisis has on our culture today is inevitably a matter of forging new imaginaries to inform reparative and regenerative action. In Part II of this book, Lawhon et al. urge us to move past the “modern ideal” of efficiency and (purported) neutrality typical of top-down infrastructures in favor of “care, autonomy, serendipity, and non-work identities” as the new blueprints for liberation (p. 192). Wachsmuth and Angelo, in turn, unpack the nuanced ways in which the “illusion of transparency” (p. 289) at the heart of neoliberal technocratic thought leads to problematic instances of greenwashing and greywashing that flatten the complexity of sustainability into “a thing lurking beneath the surface of the city, to be uncovered through science, technology, and expertise” (p. 292).

Equally notable is the book’s engagement with the ways in which public opinion and lived experience can be weaponized to heighten polarization and dissent in times of high volatility. Loftus and Gort, for example, shine a light on the rise of populist political ecologies by insisting that we “recognize the connections between—and the legacies of—neoliberal practices and authoritarian social imaginaries to build alternative futures” (p. 277). They remind us that:

Rather than romanticizing the voice of an imagined people—in opposition to that of imagined environmental technocrats—political ecology is well-positioned to tease out the relationships between knowledge claims around the environment, how these are woven through and out of different contexts, and how they come to be politicized. (p. 267)

There is no doubt that the questions that have animated UPE scholarship for the last 30 years have left their mark inside and outside of academia—in large part thanks to the work of this volume’s own editors and contributors. Today, we find evidence of UPE’s language and impact not only in policy and grassroots settings but in popular culture and creative practice as well. Works of art like Björk’s only confirm UPE’s ability to transcend boundaries, its unique power to stimulate new imaginaries while challenging rigid dichotomies about nature and society. Take the artist statement at the heart of Nature Manifesto, for example. It, too, engages with the nature–society divide so foundational to UPE’s origins:

the modern concept of nature itself is problematic […] because it’s a concept born in the Romantic period and, with the rise of the industrial era, became an antithesis to human civilization and everything urban. Nature came to define what was outside, the savage Other … But nature is everything that we’re part of. (Waite, 2024)

However we may understand socio-nature relationships today, as the editors of Turning Up the Heat write, “Climate change has forced a wider recognition of the argument at the heart of UPE: that nature and society do not occupy ontologically separate domains” (p. 345). So now the question becomes: “If it is no longer (as) necessary to theorize and demonstrate the inseparability of society and nature, where does this take UPE?” (p. 348).

Turning Up the Heat is an invaluable first step in uncovering answers to this very question. In the future, more questions will reveal themselves to us, questions that, with luck, we will be reading about in follow-up editions of Turning Up the Heat. For now, we could start by considering the following ones: What can UPE as a hybrid and ever-evolving field teach us about the work of safeguarding solidarity and cultivating hope in the face of moving (technocratic) targets for climate adaptation and crisis response? How can UPE be mobilized to disrupt urgency culture and question the very nature (and seeming inevitability) of emergency/crisis itself? In cultivating reinvigorated imaginaries for transformation and repair, what is it exactly that UPE wants? In affirmative terms, what world does it seek to create and how will we know we are getting there? What can we learn from more-than-human urban political ecologies and relational geographies about de-escalating the polarization, isolation, and instrumentalization of alternative visions of the future so prevalent today?

In explaining their choice for the book’s title, the editors tell us that Turning Up the Heat is just as much a metaphor about an increasingly apathetic world as it is a call to action. They make no mystery of the fact that “a heating planet is an emerging reality to which scholars must respond” (p. 348). Yet they are just as clear in warning us that academic debate alone will not be enough to get us to where we need to go. The work of staying present to the pain of loss while striving for a new way of life must be accompanied by a commitment to courageous bridge-building, situated activism and meaningful inclusiveness.

Perhaps, moving forward, UPE scholars and activists will expand on the lessons presented in Turning Up the Heat and, guided by the tenets of feminist care ethics, speculative futures, and healing justice (to name but a few), will continue to point to promising pathways for responding to emergency while simultaneously getting us out of the feedback loop of (perma)crisis. Or maybe, to put it in Björk’s words:

the memory of our genes

will form a call to action

mold a new Paris climate accord

this time reachable

reach

let’s reach it

References

Waite T (2024) Björk: The apocalypse has already happened … but we have to go forward. Dazed. Available at: https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/65618/1/bjork-apocalypse-has-already-happened-nature-manifesto-pompidou-aleph-molinari (accessed 28 July 2025). Google Scholar

Commentary IV

Stijn Oosterlynck – University of Antwerp, Belgium

This edited volume arrives at a pivotal moment for the field of Urban Political Ecology (UPE)—illustrated, for instance, by the recent launch of the Urban Political Ecology journal by Sage. Curated by scholars at various stages of their academic careers, the book offers a timely and thoughtful intervention, helping to steer this prolific and maturing field in new and promising directions. Throughout a wide range of contributions from many different parts of the world, the volume clearly and confidently sets the agenda for the future of urban political ecology. In this contribution, I focus on two of the four proposed pathways within contemporary UPE agendas, namely the pathway on “extended urbanization” (part 1) and the pathway on the “disjunction between politics, policy, and academic debate” (part 4).

Extended urbanization

At the end of the volume, the editors write: “As the urbanized planet heats, its challenges will need to be met at the scale of its extended urban political ecologies” (p. 355). Urban Political Ecology has a strong commitment to blurring the conventional categories used to study cities and processes of urbanization. This is clear from its early agenda to study the urbanization of nature rather than examining cities and nature as distinct ontological entities (Heynen et al., 2006). This edited volume aims to continue along this path of challenging received categories of urban analysis by pushing it beyond the core city or centralized urbanization into the vast and varied areas that are in the process of being transformed through extended urbanization. Extended urbanization not only has the potential to bring as yet dimly researched “notions, actors, and spaces” (p. 10) into the analytical view of political ecology. The editors also present extended urbanization as the privileged terrain for scholarly analysis of the politics of urban–nature relations as it is “the chief artefact of the Anthropocene and terrain of new political performativities” (p. 24).

While the introduction of the volume warns of the danger of overstretching the concept of extended urbanization, the contributions in the first section of the volume do not always succeed in mobilizing its full analytical strength. In Swyngedouw’s otherwise very insightful chapter in which he calls for a critique of urban political ecology to give UPE renewed political edge, capitalism is discussed as an urbanizing process with no further references to the differentiated nature of capitalist urbanization. (This chapter would have fit better in the fourth part on policy and politics, see further). Gandy in his chapter contrasts ecological urbanism and urban political ecology and rightfully criticizes the use of ecology as a cultural resource to “naturalize” the urban in ecological urbanism, but makes only few references to the differentiation of processes of urbanization.

Monté-Mor and Limonad, who were amongst the first scholars to talk about extended urbanization when claiming that the Amazon is urban, propose the notion of “extended naturalization.” Usefully drawing on the Latin-American “buen vivir” paradigm, they see the “urban–natural” as the social appropriation of nature in an everyday life and urbanized context. They claim it harbors the potential for “concrete” utopias that point beyond modernity and coloniality. Unfortunately, the utopias only really become concrete and positioned vis-à-vis processes of extended urbanization in a number of long footnotes at the end of the chapter.

It is only in the last two chapters of this section that extended urbanization really takes center stage. Arboleda distinguishes three circuits of extraction (product, commodity, and money). This allows him to study the differentiated nature and planetary scope of the territories of the “commodity supercycle” that supports the recent rise of the East-Asian economies. Especially Brenner and Katsikis’ chapter on the “Hinterlands of the Capitalocene” does crucial conceptual work to sharpen the analytical value of the concept of extended urbanization for UPE. They claim that urban ecological studies, including UPE, have been central in foregrounding how city-building is largely dependent on metabolic inputs produced in non-city areas zones and in pushing urban studies beyond a city-centric approach. They then identify four recent mutations of city–hinterland relations, all of them related to primary commodity production. By concretely naming and analyzing four contemporary trajectories of city–hinterland relations (infrastructuralisation, hinterlands of hinterlands, real subsumption, and metabolic rifts), this contribution effectively maps the terrain of a distinctive research agenda on UPE and extended urbanization.

Politics and policies

The second pathway that I would like to discuss in this review is concerned with the “disjunction between politics, policy and academic debate” (fourth part of the volume). In keeping with their commitment to move beyond the core city, the editors critique the tendency to treat cities as the primary sites for governance experimentation and call for greater attention to the politics and policies unfolding outside urban cores.

Loftus and Gort warn against fetishizing the urban–rural distinction and for identifying authoritarian populism with urban peripheries. They advise us to analyze how specific peripheries are produced to better understand how they came to support authoritarian populism. Velicu equally criticizes the dualism between the urban and the rural as depoliticizing, but she takes an entirely different entry-point. She critically assesses the strategic essentialism of the “peasant way” by food sovereignty movements like Via Campesina. However, the argument does not make very clear what “disidentification” (in the Rancièrian sense of the term) of the “peasant way” may concretely entail for this movement.

There is a strong focus on disruptive politics in this section and elsewhere in the book and a strong criticism of techno-managerial approaches to socio-environmental problems and scientists’ implication in developing and promoting these approaches (see also Swyngedouw’s contribution discussed earlier). This focus definitely has its merits, but it may also get trapped in unhelpful binaries between “politics” and “policies.” In this regard, it remains important to engage in critical but constructive analysis of policies, governance and all other means through which the socio-ecological metabolism of capitalist urbanization is regulated and governed, however incomplete. As Rancière notes, “politics” is rather rare (Rancière, 1995), while policies and governance are—empirically speaking—abundant.

Moreover, as Brenner notes: “the operational landscapes of planetary urbanization are hardly a stable foundation for territorial development, social reproduction, or political-ecological security” (p. 122). Shifting our analytical focus to the socio-natural relations and dynamics of extended urbanization also compels us to ask: what forms of governance and regulatory strategies are in place—or emerging—to manage and stabilize these processes, however geographically uneven, institutionally fragmented, socially exclusive, or temporary they may be? And how are these arrangements spatially articulated?

Wachsmuth and Angelo’s great analysis of green and grey sustainabilities shows how this works in the more established governance arrangements in cities. Connolly and Muzaini sharply analyze how Singapore, as a city-state without hinterland, urbanized and spatially transformed a range of islands at its coast at the cost of completely marginalizing their histories, ecologies and populations. It is interesting to pose the question here which political actors operate in and through processes of extended urbanization. Following Connolly and Muzaini’s analysis, one may wonder whether it is not just central state institutions that jump in (or create) the regulatory holes of extended urbanization.

Finally, Savini’s analysis of the emergence and consolidation of the circular economy in Amsterdam and its suburban hinterland perhaps best captures the complex spatial articulations of today’s unstable regulatory regimes. This regime ties together the urban economy of waste recovery, the increasingly globalized waste processing industry and the suburbanized incineration industry. Although this integrates urban circular economic activities in a green growth strategy, by making it dependent on the continuous production of waste (and hence infinite consumption), Savini suggests that the emerging urban economies do have some potential in socializing waste and framing waste production in alternative ways.

What the chapters in the fourth part of the volume collectively show is the importance of examining politics and policies as they unfold in the non-city zones shaped through extended urbanization. Whether these dynamics represent novel developments or more familiar top-down capitalist state politics is a question that is perhaps best explored through empirical research rather than assumed on theoretical grounds. Despite some open questions, the editors and contributors have assembled a rich and thought-provoking collection that offers valuable insight into the directions UPE scholars are aiming to take in this field.

References

Heynen N, Kaika M, Swyngedouw E (2006) In the Nature of Cities. Routledge. Crossref Google Scholar

Rancière J (1995) On the Shores of Politics. Verso. Google Scholar

Commentary V

Manolis Pratsinakis – Department of Geography, Harokopio University, Greece

Urban political ecology in motion: Locating migration in the circuits of extended urbanization

In a time marked by planetary heating, both literally and metaphorically, Turning Up the Heat reinvigorates Urban Political Ecology (UPE) as a mode of both critical diagnosis and situated political engagement. As far as the former is concerned, the volume engages with emergencies grounded in acute, systemic crises, while also exposing others as discursively constructed to justify technocratic or securitized responses, responses that deflect attention from structural injustices and ultimately entrench the very conditions that actually produce the current socio-ecological crises. At the same time, the book amplifies UPE’s commitment to the analysis of “the political,” not merely as an interpretive lens but as an urgently interventionist praxis amid ecological breakdown, climate apartheid, escalating social precarity, and social disposability. As Swyngedouw argues in his contribution, “it is already too late”: the apocalyptic condition is not pending but unevenly lived, under accelerating metabolic nature–urban flows that transform the planet in ways that insulate privilege for some at the cost of many.

In this context, the volume rejects both nostalgic appeals to a pristine ecological past and redemptive narratives of a unified “humanity,” the kind that obscure deep inequalities in the making and experience of ecological crisis, steering clear of both dystopian fatalism and techno-optimism. Instead, it sets the stage for a UPE that is politically committed and theoretically capacious in grappling with the systemic and interconnected challenges posed by climate crisis and extended urbanization. It unfolds across four thematic pathways. First, foundational ideas such as the urbanization of nature thesis are revisited through contributions calling for a more pluriversal, open, and relational approach to socio-ecological theory, decentering the city as the core of analysis and, as such, extending the field into hinterlands (and the hinterlands of hinterlands), circuits of extraction, and urban utopias. Second, the volume works to deprovincialize UPE by centering historically grounded perspectives from the Global South, placing ecological crisis in direct relation to enduring structures of coloniality, racial capitalism, and dispossession. Third, several chapters address the disjuncture between critical scholarship and policy-making, asking what kinds of political alignments and institutional entanglements UPE can, and should, pursue in the context of cascading emergencies. Finally, the volume embraces a more-than-human urban political ecology, reconceptualizing both “urban” and “nature” as co-constituted and contested terrains of metabolic struggle within the capitalocene, offering a generative broadening of UPE’s epistemological horizons.

Human mobility as metabolic process

It is precisely here, in this expansion of the socio-ecological subject, that I wish to contribute a reflection from my own disciplinary standpoint. As a social geographer working on migration, I am struck by how human movement, despite being a key driver and consequence of extended urbanization, remains analytically peripheral in UPE scholarship, including in this volume. UPE’s central analytical premise, that urban spaces are products of socio-natural metabolisms, is built on the recognition that extended urbanization is a relational, material process depending on constant flows: of water, energy, matter, food, capital, and, crucially, people. Yet, while this process has been richly theorized in terms of resource flows and infrastructural systems, the movement of people, as laborers, displaced subjects, caretakers, commuters, consumers, tourists etc., has not received equivalent attention.

In the context of the climate crisis that underpins this volume, the most immediate way of introducing a critical perspective on migration and mobility into UPE would be through the lens of environmental migration. Indeed, in 2020 alone, climate-related hazards triggered over 30 million new internal displacements across 149 countries, more than three times those caused by conflict and violence (IDMC, 2021: 12). These are among the most visible victims of capitalism’s heating of the planet. Yet to meaningfully embed mobility within UPE, we must go further: not only recognizing displacement as a consequence of ecological crisis, but also understanding mobility as constitutive of the socio-natural relations that produce and sustain extended urbanization.

Given the volume’s call to broaden UPE’s theoretical capacity and empirical span, I take this as an opportunity to bring human mobility into the conceptual metabolism of UPE as a way to deepen our understanding of labor, differentiation, and the unequal consumption of urbanized nature. For reasons of economy of space, I will limit myself here to migration, as one subtype of human mobility, aiming, through an evidently sketchy presentation, to suggest that the integration of migration into UPE is a theoretical and empirical imperative. Simultaneously, the field of migration studies stands to benefit greatly from such engagement: shedding its economistic and state-centric frames and avoiding the trap of methodological nationalism.

Historical genealogies of migration and the urbanization of nature

Urbanization has never been a self-contained demographic or spatial process, but a violent socio-ecological transformation predicated on the displacement of populations and the large-scale mobilization of labor. In Europe, enclosure movements dismantled communal land systems, laying the groundwork for capitalist agriculture while displacing rural populations into emerging industrial towns. At the same time, enclosure-like processes imposed through colonial rule across the Global South unleashed a planetary wave of displacement and dispossession, linking urbanization, infrastructure development, resource extraction, and agricultural reform with the exploitation of coerced and devalued human labor.

In parallel, settler colonial migrations did not simply populate new lands but displaced, eliminated, and ultimately replaced indigenous communities, dismantling indigenous socio-ecologies and transforming them into production zones and extractive frontiers. The transatlantic slave trade, arguably the most extreme and long-distance system of forced human displacement in history, cynically converted human life into circulable capital for plantation economies, through a system that institutionalized slavery along racial lines and at an unprecedented scale. Far from historical aberration, this system was instrumental in establishing the circuits of accumulation that underpinned early industrialization and urban expansion in Europe and North America, cementing racialized hierarchies and entrenching extractive labor regimes at the foundation of the capitalist socio-ecological order.

Following the abolition of slavery, systems of indentured labor were instituted, particularly drawing from South and Southeast Asia, to maintain the plantation economy established under colonial rule and preserve extractive circuits. New racialized regimes of coercive labor ensured a steady supply of disposable workers, securing capital accumulation through intensive land production systems. These mobilities were not incidental but structurally embedded in the metabolic logics of urbanization, serving to connect plantations, port cities, and industrial centers across continents.

By the early 19th century, tens of millions of Europeans, mostly peasants, migrated to urban centers, especially in North America. In contrast to earlier forms of coerced migration that had sustained plantation economies and extractive infrastructures in colonial peripheries, these waves of European voluntary migrations were entangled with the rapid urban-industrial intensification of capitalism’s core. Over time, racialized minorities also began to enter the expanding urban formations through very different trajectories. In the United States, the Great Migration saw millions of African Americans move from the rural South to urban centers in the North and Midwest, driven by the dual pressures of racial terror and the promise of industrial employment. These movements helped shape new urban racial geographies while highlighting human mobility not as a byproduct of urbanization but as its structural precondition.

World War I and the Great Depression significantly disrupted the dynamics of extended urbanization and the global population flows that had long sustained it. During the interwar period and the immediate aftermath of World War II, (forced) population movements were reoriented toward consolidating national identities, enforcing ethnic homogenization, and pursuing “racial purification,” through state-led population exchanges, large-scale displacements, and racially selective immigration policies.

By the postwar period, when capitalist economies once again required substantial supplies of labor to drive urban-industrial growth—particularly in Western Europe and North America—migration no longer followed the pathways of unregulated free mobility, with the partial exception of movements from former colonies, which were soon also curtailed. Instead, states increasingly managed migration through strict bilateral labor agreements that formalized the recruitment of workers from specific countries. Labor was framed as temporary and expendable, while migrants themselves were increasingly cast as threats to the cultural homogeneity and social cohesion of receiving societies, rather than recognized as future citizens. This shift would reshape the entanglements between human mobility and extended urbanization in the decades to come.

Migration under late capitalism: From labor supply to disposable life

In the wake of the oil crisis of the 1970s, labor recruitment programs in Europe and North America were suspended. Yet migration did not stop. Migrants continued to arrive to serve the needs of deregulated urban economies, albeit in increasingly precarious and criminalized ways, recast as “illegal” subjects. Whether by design or effect, the illegalization of migrants transformed them into hyper-exploitable and socially disposable labor, kept in check by the looming threat of deportation. This period marked a profound shift. As capitalist states struggled to balance the labor market’s economic imperative for open borders with political pressures to prioritize citizen entitlements, a deepening tension emerged. Markets demanded mobile labor; nationalist imaginaries demanded closed borders. In this contradiction, the figure of the “illegal migrant” became a convenient scapegoat, vilified by governments in the Global North eager to deflect attention from structural inequalities and economic discontent.

The consequences have been devastating. Vulnerable mobile populations, including refugees, are forced to endure border regimes that criminalize their movement, confine them to detention centers, or push them to perish in deserts and seas. Borders have become necropolitical zones where, in Anzaldúa’s (1987: 2–3) words, “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” These borderlands lay bare the uneven geographies of life and death that underpin planetary urbanization. At the same time, the role of illegalized migrants within global urban economies remains structurally indispensable. Their function as a reserve labor army has not disappeared but has been recalibrated and silenced. Migrant labor remains vital to critical yet undervalued sectors, from agriculture and construction to care work, where hyper-precarity is not an unintended consequence but a systemic and functional component of the socio-ecological metabolism that sustains contemporary capitalism.

Mobility as spatial claim-making: Privilege, precarity, and the unequal consumption of urban space

Here, it is important to stress however, that migration is not only about vulnerable populations. While so far I chose to foreground the violence, coercion, and disposability that characterize many migratory trajectories under capitalism, it is crucial to recognize that human mobility is profoundly stratified. A core characteristic of the age of migration is that while some bodies are immobilized, detained, or turned into “bare life,” others traverse borders with ease. Cities and regions now compete to attract the highly skilled and the ultra-wealthy, through tailored visa schemes, investment opportunities, and carefully curated “urban environments.” From digital nomads and tech entrepreneurs to millionaire migrants, a privileged class of mobile subjects is actively courted by states and municipalities alike.

This bifurcation of mobility is central to the processes of extended urbanization. On one hand, labor migration continues to underpin infrastructural development, logistics, construction, and care—sectors vital to the metabolic flows that sustain urban expansion. On the other hand, selective migration regimes, urban branding strategies and urban projects serve to enhance the city’s appeal to mobile global elites, investors, and highly skilled workers. Mobility, thus, is not merely a response to urbanization; it is instrumental in both its production and its consumption. It reshapes who gets to access, inhabit, and benefit from extended urbanization, and under what conditions. At a smaller geographical scale, gentrification can be seen as a localized expression of the same socio-ecological sorting mechanism that also operates across national borders.

Urban Political Ecology, as a field, is particularly well-suited to grappling with these dynamics. Its core insight, that cities are socio-natural assemblages, produced through unequal power relations and metabolic transformations, offers a powerful lens through which to understand the politics of mobility at different geographical scales. The differentiated channels through which people move, settle in and get displaced directly shape the socio-ecological fabric of urban life. Migration, in this light, is not external to urbanization but constitutive of it.

Crucially, this relational approach to mobility allows us to look beyond depictions of migrants as passive victims, something I recognize I may have partially reinforced earlier in my longue durée presentation of migration through a similarly depersonalized lens. Without negating the violence and precarity many face, it is vital to also attend to migrants’ aspirations, strategies, and political agency. Migration itself can be understood as a spatial claim-making practice: a way of gaining access to the material and symbolic products of extended urbanization—the infrastructures, resources, and possibilities it generates. In this sense, migration is also an act of spatial oikeiosis, a practice of expanding one’s social space, making a home transnationally by asserting presence and laying claims in an unevenly urbanizing world. Understanding migration through this lens invites a rethinking of agency and spatial justice. It shifts the focus from the migrant as “bare life” to the migrant as political actor, engaging with and contesting the entrenched mechanisms of spatial segregation and exclusion that characterize the Capitalocene. Such an approach resonates with UPE’s interest in situated struggles and grounded knowledges, highlighting how mobile subjects navigate, and lay claim to unequal urban socio-ecological terrains.

This brings me to the conclusion of Turning Up the Heat, which poses the question of whether UPE should pursue an integrated research and policy agenda. Yet perhaps its strength lies precisely in the absence of such restrictive integration, instead remaining a critical, pluralistic lens that enables us to interpret and intervene in broader socio-natural processes beyond the city proper, a way of seeing the world through its material flows, socio-ecological entanglements, and spatial injustices.

It is from this vantage point that reading and reviewing the book has been a deeply inspiring endeavor for me, inviting me to see migration as a constitutive dynamic that has always animated UPE’s object: the urbanization of nature. This is a perspective that shifted how I understand human mobility. I am certain that others, possibly particularly those working in fields not traditionally seen as part of UPE’s core agenda, will find similar inspiration in this book.

References

Anzaldúa G (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera. Aunt Lute. Google Scholar

Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) (2021) Internal Displacement in a Changing Climate. Norwegian Refugee Council. Google Scholar

Authors’ Response

Yannis Tzaninis, Roger Keil, Tait Mandler, and Maria Kaika

Working on Turning up the Heat felt both like creating an overwhelming project and like engaging with grounded ideas; perhaps much like working on Urban Political Ecology (UPE) can feel. The complexities of the procedures (submissions, reviews, indexing etc.) of getting this book off the ground notwithstanding, collaborating with our colleagues and our community has been inspiring and rewarding. That is to say that although challenging, being part of the UPE community has always energized us and continues to do so, especially considering that community’s diverse motivations, as aligned with ours, to not just explain the world but change it. Without digging too deep and returning too far into the past, it needs to be remembered that, in addition to it standing on the shoulders of the founding generation of UPE, this book had its first origins in a wide ranging and long-term process of thinking through the tremendous changes in this (sub)urban century (Keil and Wu, 2022). We will return to this shortly.

More immediately, this book took its strength from the collective discussions at a spring 2019 workshop in Amsterdam (when the pandemic was yet beyond the horizon), and a hurried and self-consciously precious meeting of the editors in Maria’s and Erik’s house at the end of February 2020, just days before the WHO declared the new coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. We knew that there was change in the air (and Roger kept talking about his experience, just weeks earlier, at the end of 2019, when he drove through bush fire-ravaged landscapes in Australia). The project of Turning up the Heat was inevitably collective and self-conscious, historically rooted and current, never a quiet endeavor put together on late nights inside an ivory tower. It was an intervention and a statement and we are honored to read in the preceding reviews that the nature of this project was not lost on the readers. It heartens us that the book seems to be understood by those who turn its pages. As Manolis Pratsinakis perceptively observes in his review: “the volume rejects both nostalgic appeals to a pristine ecological past and redemptive narratives of a unified “humanity”, the kind that obscure deep inequalities in the making and experience of ecological crisis, steering clear of both dystopian fatalism and techno-optimism.” Turning Up the Heat is an ambitious (and rather long) book. Its story is complex, heterogeneous and urgent. And while it perhaps is not fully coherent at times—after all it is an edited volume—our reviewers remarkably (and a bit flatteringly) tend to treat it as a somewhat unified project. It is a story of people, cities, nature and politics, and can oftentimes fuel anxiety, sadness and anger, at least for some of us. But we have always tried to rise to the challenge presented by troubled times with this academic undertaking. And that is how we feel gratitude to have members of our broader academic community discuss this book with such passion and in solidary spirit.

It is still definitely quite the challenge to review an edited book. We are indeed humbled by our five colleagues who read Turning Up the Heat and crafted such insightful and diverse texts. The assembled team of reviewers comprises representatives of several disciplines, among them history, sociology, anthropology and geography. We can only do our best to respond to their elaborate and incredibly insightful commentaries on this special book review forum of Urban Studies. Similarly to the five reviewers, we, the editors, are also a diverse team of scholars, let alone all the contributors of Turning up the Heat, who come from a huge array of scholarly and linguistic traditions, local contexts, and academic interests. So, again, we recognize the challenging task of reviewing such a book and we hope in this response to do justice to both the diversity of the book contributors themselves as well as the reviewers.

We cannot agree more with Greet De Block’s comment that the book results in an “ethical imperative” calling for action. It is perhaps not only a book, but the long introduction to a manifesto of sorts (see Tzaninis et al., 2025), and also a symbol of creative energies geared toward change and action. We dearly appreciate De Block’s recognition of our work as intergenerational and interdisciplinary and of its effect on the reader as an affective subject. We are further humbled to see Chiara Camponeschi’s references to Björk and art as an important aspect of affective expression for the book. In De Block’s and Camponeschi’s comments, we feel that the UPE that is presented in Turning Up the Heat obtains life beyond the page: it is a project that meanders out into the world of activism, action, politics and policy—and we hear Stijn Oosterlynck’s admonition, not to treat the latter as binary. Meanwhile we agree that UPE needs more engagement with natural sciences. In fact, this is an approach more UPE scholars seem to aspire to as the ecology part of UPE has long been the traditional realm of the natural sciences. While Gandy has recently demanded that UPE needs more and better relationships with natural sciences (Gandy, 2022) and we see such work now coming out (Aguiar et al., 2024; Lorimer et al., 2025), we wholeheartedly agree with De Block that the natural sciences need more UPE. That is, in order to replace the dominating techno-managerial approaches with new political imaginaries for the climate emergency, UPE needs to intervene into these “natural-technical” realms and propose its own imaginations built on solidarity and prefigurative thinking (Boudreau, 2024; Swyngedouw, 2025). Meanwhile, as Camponeschi eloquently writes, we (or UPE in other words) are compelled to find ways “out of the feedback loop of (perma)crisis.” And as she hints, perhaps books like Turning Up the Heat or fields like UPE have an obligation to be activist, to be political, not just for the intellectual’s sake but for exactly this burning world’s sake. Notably, while there is agreement on the urgency of the issues that climate change brings to the urban world, Camponeschi advises us editors “to disrupt urgency culture.” In other words, there is still time to strategize, and not to come to foregone conclusions about the end of the world and wallow in the climate emergency’s apparent foreclosures. Not to “dwell in despair,” then, may in fact push us in the direction that Pohl and Swyngedouw (2023: 8) have provocatively advised us to move towards when they argue that “we have to consider a way to collectively enjoy climate change without further destroying the planet or sacrificing in the name of Nature.”

Most reviewers in this forum agree that, if anything, Turning Up the Heat lacks some more engagement with the “extended” aspect of extended urbanization. As a matter of fact, we believed the call for a conceptual move from the center to the periphery might be more dissensual than it turned out to be. What we thought of as a controversial and contentious idea proved to land favorably with these particular readers—and they demand more! Stijn Oosterlynck focuses especially on this lack of concrete mobilization of extended urbanization’s “full analytical strength.” It is perhaps UPE’s conceptual strength to provide for radical scholarship that always looms as its potential weakness to have this persistent rift between its debates and the developments in urban policy/politics (as we have been consciously trying to address since our 2020 Progress in Human Geography paper (Tzaninis et al., 2020) and of course in the book itself in part IV “Addressing disjunctions between policy, politics, and academic debate”). We are still definitely confident that UPE is well-suited and perhaps destined to contribute to these matters, but in any case we agree with Oosterlynck that more empirical engagement needs to be par for the course with UPE. We might also stretch this engagement to more fruitful theoretical and conceptual debate, especially outside the French–English–German dominated world of post-Lefebvrian studies on the subject. Clearly, Monte-Mór and Limonad already push into this direction in their chapter in Turning Up the Heat. Yet more may be necessary here, for example the ample and far reaching debates in Portuguese, Italian, Finnish and elsewhere we can find common ground and interests (e.g., Ilmonen, 2024; Napoletano et al., 2020, 2022; Tonucci, 2024). Expanding this debate may also have parallel resonance for the debate on territory and territorialization which will clearly benefit from, for example, debates in Spanish and Italian scholarly and activist domains (see Perrone’s chapter in the book and De Vidovich’s review in this forum; also e.g., Schwarz and Streule, 2016).

While Oosterlynck, De Block, and Camponeschi propose how to expand and enrich the sphere of UPE itself, Lorenzo de Vidovich and Manolis Pratsinakis attempt a somewhat different approach in their reviews of our book. The former proposes “territorialism” as an epistemology for UPE that allows the incorporation of especially suburbs and peripheries into a UPE analysis. As two of us editors have engaged with suburbs in various ways, we align with De Vidovich’s take on a way to enrich UPE perspectives. The ongoing work on pandemic urban ecologies in global landscapes of extended urbanization is also testament to this (Aguiar et al., 2024; Ali et al., 2025; Brenner and Ghosh, 2022). We also, again, agree that UPE should persist in engaging with the “extended” part of urbanization and, as De Block notes (provocatively for sure) “with the extent of extended urbanization.” In sum, De Vidovich suggests further empirical engagement of UPE with territorialist standpoints beyond the urban, and we certainly see the potential there. As a scholar of migration, Pratsinakis has a provocative proposal for dealing with extended urbanization and generally new UPE avenues: human mobility. Although much of UPE work delves into people’s mobility one way or another, it is true that humans as such are not at the center of attention (although, again, a focus in analyzing the proliferation of the virus in peripheralized populations could be counted as such an attempt; Ali et al., 2025). Not to say that there is anything anti/mis-anthropic or dehumanizing in UPE conceptualizations; on the contrary UPE is fueled by the radical and revolutionary ideas that push for a better social system for humanity at large. But indeed, UPE seems to always find itself in this balancing act between (human) collectives and the human individual as agent. Ultimately, we do agree with Pratsinakis’ implication that UPE can gain from an engagement with human mobility as such. Moreover, Pratsinakis’ comments do, indeed, represent something that UPE has, again, as both a strength and weakness: its comprehensiveness and pluralism. And these elements can be a struggle when it comes to “UPE thinking,” at least for some of us, but can also be exactly what Pratsinakis points out, to inspire those outside the typical UPE boundaries to see UPE’s possibilities to enrich other fields, apart from those fields enriching UPE.

The moment is fitting and urgent. We recently released a special issue in our newly launched UPE journal, titled “Imagining with UPE for a Burning World”, exactly focusing on opening new avenues and continuing to figure out how we can take UPE even further forward. Our work since our first article together in 2020 has indeed remained laser-focused on moving UPE forward, being radical and constructive. We continue to be fortunate to work with incredible colleagues, be it the authors of Turning up the Heat, the editorial board of the new UPE journal, the Urban Studies editors or these reviewers here.

The question that ultimately lingers is Camponeschi’s provocative “what does UPE want”? Of course, UPE is not a living subject with a will and a desire. So ultimately, it is up to all of us to make UPE into something that we want. We will not always agree. But we have firm ground to stand on when it comes to further developing urban political strategies—“what we want”—in the face of the climate emergency.

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