In recent decades, the field of urban studies has neglected the question of the hinterland: the city's complex, changing relations to the diverse noncity landscapes that support urban life. Neil Brenner and Nikos Katsikis argue that this ‘hinterland question’ remains essential, but must also be radically reimagined under contemporary conditions.

Many scholars working within urban political ecology have yet to substantively reckon with the ways racial capitalism has formed and continues to shape urban environments. At the same time, the emancipatory possibilities of reparational politics are only beginning to be incorporated into discussions of the future city. Given emergent opportunities for reparations to reframe fundamental questions about urban nature, we mobilise insights from the Black Radical Tradition to consider how reparations can be mobilised to mitigate the uneven effects of climate change in Atlanta and New Orleans, two of the U.S. South’s most historically significant cities. We discuss how an abolitionist framing of Atlanta’s land bank opens up new questions about property-based reparative politics, climate change, and ongoing struggles for self-determination. We relate this case to the emancipatory potential of energy reparations as connected to decarbonisation of the electrical grid in New Orleans where the introduction of solar energy responds to climate change and could combat petro-racial capitalism. These contemporary policy initiatives force us to grapple with the obscene power inherent to white supremist urbanism as well as how colourblind urban theory misses opportunities to produce more just cities. Making the case for reparations and urban political ecology we ask how land and energy policy is being mobilised to reinvest in the Black right to urban life.

In this chapter we consider the ways in which urban political ecology might develop a critical perspective on the emergence of right wing and authoritarian populisms. The situated, process-oriented approach developed within UPE fits well with recent efforts to relationally interpret a range of authoritarian populist political projects. Where recent literatures are trying to make sense of the relationship between environmental governance and authoritarian forms of rule, there is a risk, nevertheless, that authoritarian populism comes to be viewed as a uniquely rural phenomenon. Instead, we argue that critical scholarship must challenge the metropolitan-core fetishism so often employed by populists, and thereby situate socio-environmental processes more effectively within the spatial forms they give rise to. An urban political ecology approach, understood as a philosophy of praxis attendant to lived processes emerging around distinct socio-ecologies, can become a tool to challenge current populist projects. In such ways, UPE might provide not only better understandings of the current political conjuncture but also point to areas in which a genuinely popular political ecology, one struggling for social and ecological justice, might be developed.

This concluding chapter summarises the main debates in the book and discusses them in the context of emerging new publications in the field of UPE. It ends with a speculation on the question of whether an integrated UPE research and policy agenda is possible?

This introduction frames the book in a debate on urban political ecology (UPE). UPE focuses on unsettling traditional understandings of ‘cities’ as ontological entities separate from ‘nature’ and on how the production of settlements is metabolically linked with flows of capital and more-than-human ecological processes. The contribution of this paper is to recalibrate UPE to new urban forms and processes of extended urbanisation. This exploration goes against the reduction of what goes on outside of cities to processes that emanate unidirectionally from cities. Acknowledging UPE’s rich intellectual history and aiming to enrich rather than split the field, this paper identifies emerging discourses that go beyond UPE’s original formulation. The chapter introduces the individual chapters of the book in this context.

While Singapore is often considered an island city in the singular sense, the nation-state actually consists of 63 islands, with Singapore being by far the largest. Other than Pulau Ubin and Serangoon (Coney) Island, most of the islands lie off of Singapore’s southern coast. This includes Singapore’s Southern Islands group, comprising of eight islands off the Southern Coast of Singapore and the Western Islands group, consisting of seven islands off the Southwestern coast, which are grouped together for planning purposes by the nation’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). While most of these islands traditionally had thriving communities of orang asli (indigenous) communities, all have since been displaced over time dating back to the 1970s as the islands were developed to service Singapore’s needs. Some of the islands have also undergone considerable transformation (through reclamation) to better serve their new purposes. After Singapore was kicked out of the new Malaysian nation-state in 1965, it became a city-state without a periphery to service the core. While this was later addressed through the development of regional growth triangles in the 1990s, an earlier strategy was the repurposing of Singapore’s offshore islands to serve particular functions from landfilling (Pulau Semakau) to oil refinery (Pulau Brani), shipping (Keppel Island) and leisure/tourism (Pulau Ubin, Serangoon Island, Sentosa). This chapter will provide a brief history of these islands, drawing on specific examples which serve to illustrate how Singapore’s offshore islands have been developed over time to service Singapore’s economy, handle its wastes, and provide ‘rural’ leisure spaces for its residents to escape the dense urban fabric. It also notes how the functions of some of these islands have changed over time, in response to changing needs of the urban core. In doing so, the chapter contributes to the volume’s objective of examining how spaces on the urban periphery are deeply bound up with processes of urbanisation, given their important role in processes of urban metabolism.

In the past two decades, urban sustainability has become a new policy common sense. This article argues that contemporary urban sustainability thought and practice is co-constituted by two distinct representational forms, which we call green urban nature and grey urban nature. Green urban nature is the return of nature to the city in its most verdant form, signified by street trees, urban gardens, and the greening of postindustrial landscapes. Gray urban nature is the concept of social, technological, urban space as already inherently sustainable, signified by dense urban cores, high-speed public transit, and energy-efficient buildings. We develop Lefebvre's ideas of the realistic and transparent illusions as the constitutive ideologies of the social production of space to offer a framework for interpreting contemporary urban sustainability thinking in these terms and concretise this argument through case studies of postindustrial greening in the Ruhr Valley, Germany; municipal sustainability planning in Vancouver, Canada; and the Masdar smart city project in Abu Dhabi. We conclude by examining the implications of green and grey urban natures for the politics of urban sustainability.