While the imaginary of modern infrastructure remains prevalent in many places, it is increasingly coming into question, being replaced by other ways of imagining, building and governing infrastructure. In this chapter, we first consider what exactly is ‘modern’ about the ‘modern infrastructure ideal’ and how this relates to ongoing concerns with modernity as an imaginary of the world that is. We then examine two cases of infrastructure that work beyond modernity, teasing out some of the logics that shape how they work. In Kampala, we show how a new sanitation technology handbook works to legitimise onsite sanitation, offering users a decision-tree through which to consider a range of sociotechnical options. While there is homage paid to user heterogeneity, the handbook primarily focuses on the implications of environmental and technological heterogeneity. In South Africa, we consider the opportunities that arise through infrastructural labour that operates beyond modern conditions and the ways in which waste picking enables autonomy and serendipity. Broadly, we suggest the limitations of uniform services in contexts where nature, homes and residents are heterogeneous and the limits of standardised jobs for everyone in contexts where unemployment is high and individual socioeconomic conditions are unpredictable. Our argument here is not to romanticise already existing infrastructure, but instead, to contribute to teasing out an alternative imaginary that might shape ways of thinking beyond modern infrastructure. We call this a ‘modest’ imaginary, and suggest serendipity, autonomy, and heterogeneity play an increasingly important role in infrastructural configurations in an uncertain world.

Our reflection axis is an urban-natural virtuality, seen as a necessary step towards envisioning an urban utopia. For Lefebvre, the urban era succeeds the industrial era. The focus on collective reproduction, as opposed to production and/or accumulation, reunited the formerly opposed urban and natural/environmental perspectives, redefined by planetary threats. At the same time, extended urbanisation keeps on guaranteeing urban-industrial modernisation. Lefebvre’s urban society proposal demands the inclusion of nature and natural space that, although implicit in his proposal, has become crucial confronting current threats and illuminating our very understanding of contemporary everyday life. An extended naturalisation corresponds to an extended urbanisation. Movements towards any possible future envisioning call for both spatial and social justice and a continuing critical theory effort to offer some possible answers. The reunification of the urban and the environment implies the reunification of human and nature. The urban-natural, taken as an idea that reunites contemporary concerns and spatial practices within everyday life, already has countless manifestations in most parts of the world that may metaphorically represent the transformation from the industrial era into the urban era. Among Brazil's traditional peoples, that is a reality; in metropolitan areas, many such cases are found, as are many emerging popular and social economies, most of which are also ecological, pointing to other futures. The dialectical interaction between extended urbanisation and extended naturalisation entails rescuing the urban-natural variety of (and virtual) manifestations. An insufficient but necessary step towards urban utopia.

Urban political ecology has over the past few decades matured into a thriving and sophisticated perspective across a range of academic disciplines, policy networks and activist organisations. In this chapter, I argue that there is nonetheless nothing inherently critical or progressive about the current state of ‘Political Ecology’, urban or otherwise, neither as a practice nor as a theoretical perspective. I shall make a case for the need of a ‘Critique of (Urban) Political Ecology’. It is, I maintain, through a ‘Critique of Political Ecology’ that the intellectual gaze might shift to identifying the mechanisms through which new and progressive political-ecological configurations can be forged. The first part of the chapter focuses on a critique of the political ecology of capitalism as an urban socio-physical process. In the second part, the focus will shift to a critique of the discursive-imaginary configuration of the political ecology of capitalism. The conclusion will concentrate on the central importance of traversing the fantasies upon which both the material and imaginary sustainability of the infernal socio-ecological dynamics of capitalism are predicated and that inform much of contemporary environmental or ecological activism. Shifting the gaze in ways that radically re-imagines our view of the socio-ecological situation we are in, I contend, is vital to configuring a strategy and forms of speaking and acting that are performative with respect to enacting progressive socio-ecological transformations.

A disease outbreak is an emergent product of social and ecological processes. To more fully understand disease outbreaks and their response, we must therefore consider how these dual processes interact in specific locales within the context of an increasingly urbanised world. As such, in this paper we examine the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak and its response in West Africa by adopting the lenses of two approaches that are usually treated separately – namely, urban political ecology (UPE) and urban political pathology (UPP). The UPE approach sheds light on how the material/biophysical basis of the EVD outbreak was influenced by the socio-political-economic and vice versa. The UPP approach gives us insight into how the EVD response was influenced by broader socio-political-economic forces, particularly the historical legacy of colonialism. Through the adoption of this dual lens we are able to gain greater insights and a more comprehensive understanding of the EVD outbreak and response in West Africa.

In situating urban ecologies in the context of extended urbanisation and extreme weather events, this chapter focuses on the disappearance of water bodies in the city of Gurgaon, located in the southern edge of New Delhi. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork and first argues that it is imperative to acknowledge the imbrications of urban and agrarian dynamics in primarily agrarian countries like India and attend to the micropolitics of power that is firmly intertwined with the social and material relations of land, water, class, and caste. Second, the chapter makes a case for paying close ethnographic attention to the processes of social-ecological transformation through which land and water are simultaneously assetised and urbanised, and track how new ecological imaginaries recast the social geography of exclusion and marginalisation in this political-economic moment. The chapter concludes by arguing that it is crucial to rethink the precepts that have historically guided the frameworks of urban planning and eco-restoration, undo the entrenched boundaries that separate ‘nature’ from urban, and highlight how ecology is relationally constituted and constitutive of social-political-material dynamics to address the challenge of climate change meaningfully.

In this chapter, I document how the ‘bad natures’ of Mathare, a poor urban settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, are constructed, as well as their imperial genealogies. Here, bad natures references both the polluted environment as well as the internal landscapes considered immanent to residents of this ‘slum’ and that are said to make them ungovernable, allowing that this space and its subjects represent the city’s biophysical and socio-political profanities. I argue that these bad natures, in both senses, stem from and are reproduced by ongoing colonial metabolic processes that territorialise in the discursive and material practices of Nairobi’s urban spatial management. The imposed coalescence of subjects and their space leads to sinister ecological events that can range from flooding to extrajudicial killings. The call here, thus, is that we view how questions of urban nature are connected to subjectivity, and implicated in a multitude of urban violences, however disparate these may appear.

The reorganisation of the extractive industries into transnational supply chains has signalled the functional integration of hitherto dispersed elements of social production and brought together natural resources and built environments, as well as city and non-city space, in novel and ever more intricate ways. This demands decentring the process of metabolic urbanisation beyond the predominant role that is usually attributed to cities; specifically, it involves grasping the ways in which the dynamics of capital accumulation taking place across planetary hinterlands are also reshaping urban environments in substantial ways. On the basis of Marx’s theorisation of the circulation of capital – laid out in Volume II of Capital – the paper develops the notion of circuits of extraction in order to rethink the extractive industries from the standpoint of three contradictory, crisis-riven, yet interrelated circulatory systems: a productive circuit of extraction; a commodity circuit of extraction; and a money circuit of extraction. With this the chapter contributes to the development of an expanded conception of extractivism that is rooted in the actual dynamics of production and circulation of raw materials, but that can also illustrate the ways in which the extractive industries are remaking urban, financial, and logistical landscapes in their own image.

How do dualist identifications such as peasants vs. urbanites support or impede democratic egalitarian politics? On the one hand, the ´planetary urbanisation´ thesis as unidimensional epistemology risks producing a pernicious universal ideological position which depoliticises the range of diversity and difference external to, and/or within, urbanisation. The rural may not just be the peripheral that feeds the expansion of urbanisation but also the ´outside´ left to be ´conquered´ in the sense of proletarisation or a source of ´resilience´ for these populations. On the other hand, the radicality of the ´peasant way´ such as the global movement Via Campesina, lies not only in the processes in addressing human rights critically but also in moving agrarian politics beyond typical reformist demands in search for structural ´nurturing´ of alternatives to organise planetary food production and consumption. In this paper I engage with these tensions by starting from the premise that in order to allow for ambiguousness to play a role in egalitarian social struggles, we have to allow for political imagination to undo the terms of any consensual politics about dualisms. I am looking at the limits of existing classifications such as ´food sovereignty´ or ´peasant rights´ and illustrating a repetitive tendency to conflate politics with ontology. I propose a zooming-out of this tendency in order to observe that such rhetoric places the peasantry again and again in the same meritocratic logic of policy-police that is to blame for the reproduction of inequalities in the first place. I discuss the limits of the politics of rights as an open question about what Ranciére discussed as the limits of justice as recognition. I am exploring the possibility to reflect on the ´political´ futures as being less about specific subjects with a series of virtues (such as good eco-citizens) and more about events of subjectification, which implies processes of disidentification. Finally, I discuss how such disidentifications may allow re-opening the interpretative practices of new generations.

The circular economy has become an extremely popular paradigm for socio-technical transitions in contemporary policymaking. Governments at all levels are devising policy programs in different policy sectors – from water to energy, waste to logistics – with the objective to increase material productivity and waste recovery. As a strategy of green-growth, these programs are gaining an unquestioned consensus both among multinational corporations active in the market of secondary materials and local enterprises active in the sector of waste reuse and waste reduction. In this chapter, I will argue that circular economy defines an unfolding regime of ecological accumulation in city-regions that thrive out of the valorisation of urban waste. Previously understood as anti-value in modern capitalism, left to the marginal sectors of the economy and the planet, waste is today becoming a driver and not an externality of urban and regional development. Through infrastructural strategies for integrated material flows, I will show how circular economy establishes an approach to economic development that depends on the perpetual production of waste materials. To do so, I will look at current realisations of circular economic policies in the region of Amsterdam. My analysis shows that this development paradigm unfolds through a ‘wicked’ partnership between three distinct sub-markets that simultaneously compete and cooperate with each other. The micro economy of consumers waste reuse, repair and recycling, the corporate sector of multinational recycling companies investing in secondary materials, and the regional economy of biomass and incineration to produce energy for the city region. As the three bandits of Sergio Leone’s classic, I will metaphorically define this vicious triad of sectors seeking for waste valorisation as the good, the bad and the ugly of the circular economy.

Over the past two decades, the debate about the future of the Planet has been challenged by the new climate and environmental crisis. Neoliberal urbanisation has been condemned as responsible for the Planet’s decline. In response, the ‘political in-between’ the urban and the ecological (the link between the urban question and the ecological question) have increasingly dominated political agendas, worldwide, and challenged the theoretical debate. In particular, urban political ecology (UPE) – focused on the ways in which the intertwining of political, economic, spatial, ecological processes transforms the cities – has intercepted this debate challenging itself to go beyond the ‘urbanisation of nature’ thesis still focused on the concept of the socio-environmental continuum that privilege the inside (the centre) as the space that decrees the logic of the outside (the periphery). This contribution, designed as a research project, intends to support the reverse of this logic and the shifting of the geographical focus to overlooked peripheries and hinterlands. They are even suggested as a theoretical domain where to explore new possibilities for encounters between human and more-than-human actors. This is addressed with reference to the theoretical debate that calls into question the centrality of the Earth, of its ability to act autonomously (insurgency), being the subject of a bio-political argument. The background idea is that the terrestrial/earthling is no longer the scenario of human action, but it takes part in it as agent/actor of a new political interplay between geo-sphere, socio-sphere and bio-sphere. Accordingly, the planetary (sub) urban future is tackled with a questioning on ‘who’ owns/governs/acts the Earth in the processes of capital accumulation.

This chapter presents a socio-natural and feminist political ecology approach to adaptation efforts by urban areas. It addresses two questions, how do processes of social inclusion and exclusion reshape urban climate change adaptation; and how are these social inequalities shaped by and also shape the knowledge politics that emerge around adaptation questions? Challenges for urban areas may not map cleanly onto the kinds of responsibilities and actions that cities as municipal units have, making unpacking these politics vital. Examples from Nepal and the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance help illustrate how intersectional social relations and knowledge claims shape adaptation efforts. These politics are not inconvenient side effects, rather they in part constitute the types of knowledges used to assess needs, measures considered, the people who become involved in efforts, and the overall outcomes achieved. By focusing on how material relations are co-emergent with social political dynamics, this framing looks not only at risks from climate change, and also how to create new openings for deliberative politics around adjusting to a changing world.

Systems-based conceptualisations of urban ecology are the dominant perspective within most degree programmes and also in fields of professional practice such as architecture, engineering, and landscape design. In this chapter I explore the tensions between urban political ecology and the recently emerging design emphasis on ecological urbanism that aligns with resilience discourse under the adaptive Anthropocene. I conclude that a recourse to design as the focal point for urban policy making cannot advance beyond various forms of behavioural, organisational, or technological change that effectively obscure the underlying dynamics of environmental degradation.

As climate change threats to urban centres become more alarming, cities are proposing ambitious plans to adapt to climate impacts. These plans are increasingly subsumed within urban development projects, and embedded in global flows of capital and networks of environmental governance and planning. And yet, scholarship on urban adaptation has tended to approach the city as an analytically bounded territory, neglecting interconnections across space and processes of globalisation, urbanisation, and geopolitics. This chapter extends theories of relational geographies to explore how emerging conditions of urban adaptation to climate change and globalised urban development inform and revise our understanding of urban socioecological change. Focusing on the global links of Dutch water expertise, and tracing relationships within and between Rotterdam, New York, and Jakarta, it illustrates the formation of global-urban networks – the multiscalar, multilevel connections through which capital, knowledge, and influence flow. It probes the ways in which these networks emerge to mobilise ideas and influence across geographical scales and political boundaries, driven and defined by interrelated factors including economic relationships, historically defined situational relationships, and interface conditions including narratives of culture and environmental urgency. The findings explain how processes of urban socioecological change are mediated through global-urban formations that are transhistorical and relational; how situated and positional struggles are part of generalised political economic and environmental processes; and how biophysical, ecological limits are invoked and wielded as part of contested urban struggles.

Chapter 2 provides a detailed breakdown of the different components of A Machine To See With, categorising them as design, technology and city actants. The design actants are related to the process of planning, designing and producing the performance. This includes the locative cinema commission for the performance and the detailed production of each design component, including the narrative, the adaptation of the project to the local ‘stage’ (the city of Brighton) and the testing and promotion of the event. The analysis of the technology actants in the performance includes the infrastructure network mediating the event (including two computer servers located in different countries); the programming of the interface; the state machine, a custom piece of software that can be adapted to respond to prompts from users and computational devices. The user’s mobile phone is also discussed as a technology actant and as the point of contact between the main interface and the participant. The analysis of the city actants includes urban furniture and a BMW car that was part of a key exchange in the performance (the partnering up of participants unknown to each other). This chapter ends with a description of how the fictional narrative of the performance was successful in drawing bystanders into the performance. This is illustrated through several accounts provided by participants.

The conclusion addresses the initial proposition of the book: as we walk through the city, we are subject to an embodied experience that is increasingly mediated by machines, and where human and machine hybrids produce new modes of subjectivity. It emphasises the role of performance art to bring us on a reflective journey where artistic narrative is assembled with the urban fabric and digital technologies, generating unexpected and meaningful outcomes while also instigating us to think about the consequences of our digitally mediated lives. It also emphasises the role of performance art towards acknowledging dissensus as a key outcome through the process of translation of the artistic narrative by each individual participant. The importance of assembling efficient and not-so-efficient machines and acknowledging the multiple modes of subjectivity emerging from human and machine hybrids is emphasised as a means of countering dystopian narratives of technology applied to urban living.

Chapter 4 provides a historical account of aesthetic machines, with a focus on performance and the use of technology, from ancient Greek theatre’s use of the device of the deus ex machina to contemporary theatre and its use of digital props. It discusses the critique of inauthenticity in art that makes use of machine-components and the associated argument that machines overshadow the human performer. To counter this, it is argued that we need to acknowledge the artistic relevance of human-machine hybrids to move beyond human-centric and technocentric arguments. The importance of twentieth-century avant-garde art movements as influential references for contemporary digital performance is stated, with references to Futurism and the Agit-Theatre of Attractions. This is followed by a description of cinematic machines, with a particular focus on Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera and its similarities to A Machine To See With. The post-1960s performative turn is described as a key event in performance art through the dissolution of the barrier between stage and audience and through the ability to blur art and life. This is illustrated through some of its key movements, including Neo-Concretism, Situationism, Fluxus and Happening. The assemblage of aesthetic machines and the digital paradigm is illustrated through the Cybernetic Serendipity event, which foregrounded the artistic potential of the computer’s procedural logic as a non-human actant. Finally, the paradigm of the machine as an autonomous artist is discussed through events such as the use of artificial intelligence agents in the generation of art.