







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 1 (2): 19–30, July 2018 

 
THEMATIC ESSAY  
 

Reading History and Power in Urban Landscapes: 
The Lens of Urban Political Ecology 
 

Karen Coelho   
 
1. INTRODUCTION 

Urban nature is not given but produced. Whether in avenue trees or city 
parks, canals or drains or even in marshlands, lakes, and rivers, the natural is 
inextricably enmeshed with the social production of urban landscapes. 
There is clearly nothing primordial or pristine in these forms of urban 
nature. Conversely, to put it in Heynen’s provocative words, ‘there is truly 
nothing unnatural about urban ecosystems …’ (2014, 600).1 Even oceans, 
so wild and seemingly autonomous, have been shifted and shaped at their 
interface with land by processes of urbanization. Chennai has, over the 
course of its formation, reshaped its coastline, unintentionally building for 
itself the generous expanse of sand that is today the Marina Beach. Until the 
late 19th century, the city’s coastline comprised a series of dunes and ridges 
edged by a narrow strip of mud that teemed with mudskippers and was 
regularly inundated. The construction of the harbour in the northern part of 
the city in 1881 began a process of sand accretion to its south that, over 
time, pushed the ocean outward by up to 2.5 km, creating a wide sandy 
beach in the central section of the city, even as it ate away stretches of 
coastal land in the north. 

Urban ecology, then, is not only an account of the interface between the 
city and its natures; it is about the co-production of urban nature and 
society or, in Swyngedouw’s (1996) formulation, the production of 

 
 Madras Institute of Development Studies, 79, Second Main Road, Gandhinagar, Adyar, 

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India 600 020; karen.coelho@gmail.com 

Copyright © Coelho 2018. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 
4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i2.33  

1 Here he draws on David Harvey’s assertion that ‘there is nothing unnatural about New 
York City’ (Harvey 1996, 186; emphasis in original) 

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i2.33


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [20] 

‘socionatures’, a process that implicates history, technology, and power. 
While this process is at work in almost all ecological systems known to 
humans, as the field of political ecology has been pointing out since the 
1980s (Blaikie and Brookefield 1987), there are some distinctive features of 
urban ecologies that demand new or different analytic categories, lenses, 
and methods. This essay sketches some of these features and their 
implications, employing five intersecting rubrics—hybrids, boundaries, 
histories, values, and peripheries. Together, these frames build an account 
of how the urban engine (or metabolism, in the language of urban political 
ecology), with its distinctive pace and drivers, assembles dynamic entities 
that defy easy categorization and carry powerful political stakes. The essay 
draws on a selection of empirical work across Indian cities (including my 
own writings on Chennai) and on the theoretical contributions of urban 
political ecology, to argue for a more complex understanding of urban 
nature as constituted through historical projects of urbanization, and of 
environmental sustainability as inseparable from questions of social justice. 

 

2. HYBRIDS 

Urban spaces and systems are deeply hybrid productions. They are 
assembled by, on the one hand, projects of socio-spatial engineering, capital 
accumulation, and advanced consumption, and on the other hand by 
nature, working in at least two separate registers, first as a relatively 
autonomous empirical force, and second as a complex of socially 
constructed values: resource, factor of production, or object of 
consumption. The new entities thus assembled challenge established 
boundaries and categories. At the cremation site of Nigambodh Ghat on 
the Yamuna River in Delhi, writes Baviskar (2014), urban pollution had 
sullied the holy river so thoroughly that water from the River Ganga was 
piped into the site by the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the late 
1990s. Was the sacred river here then Jamna Ji or Ganga Ma? Plans to bring 
the Ganga to flow in/for the Yamuna are near finalization in other urban 
centres like Agra and Varanasi as well (VT Staff 2018). 

Baviskar (2018) also describes two urban forests in/near Delhi that 
represent two distinctive socionatural hybrids. First, the sacred grove of 
Mangarbani on the edge of the city—a stretch of dense, apparently 
undisturbed forest—emerges in legal terms as a collection of private plots 
poised to be sold to developers. Its past, as village commons parcelled out 
to landowners to prevent its use by landless dalit households, spells its 
imminent future of Gurgaon-style real estate urbanism, unless elite 
environmentalists from Gurgaon and Delhi can prevail. The threatened 
unmaking of this forest contrasts sharply with the official making of the 



[21] Karen Coelho 

urban forest on the Delhi Ridge, where plantations of the imported thorn 
tree Prosopis juliflora, a legacy of colonial engineered greenery, alternate with 
manicured parks where urban walkers, joggers, and lovers can engage in 
leisure, exercise, or clandestine romance. 

Chennai’s famed Pallikaranai Marsh is another urban hybrid. Once a vast 
and wild expanse of freshwater swamp on the southern edges of Chennai, it 
is today a thoroughly socialized element of the city’s urban landscape, 
intertwined with the information technology corridor, slum resettlement 
colonies, and other projects of the city’s southward expansion. Over the 
course of 30 years it has been transformed from a dynamic 14,000-acre 
complex of water sinks and drainages—lakes, swamps, inlet and outflow 
channels—to a scattered patchwork of marshy plots spread over 1,500 
acres where birds still roost, trapped between luxury residential and 
commercial complexes, golf courses, garbage dumps, railway stations, and 
road corridors. 

Like other cities, Chennai has periodically made and unmade water in the 
landscape. The city’s celebrated Buckingham Canal, for instance, is an 
engineered waterway that was cut through tracts of coastal land in the 19th 
century for navigation purposes. In the 1960s, after navigation on the canal 
had decisively failed, city managers proposed closing it and reclaiming its 
land for roads (see Krishnamurthy 1964). And in the 1980s an elevated 
urban railway was built into and along its course, turning half its width into 
land in its central city segments. Somehow still surviving, the canal is today 
hailed as an important ‘natural’ drainage channel for the city (Sridhar 2015). 

Acknowledging the socionatural hybridity of urban forms implies 
recognizing the agency of the natural, technological, and, in the language of 
urban political ecology, ‘more-than-human’ dimensions of urban ecologies. 
Drawing from Latour’s actor network theory, urban political ecology draws 
attention to the actions of non-human actants—from dogs and drains to 
effluents and embankments—in the assemblages that fuel urban 
metabolism and produce effects of power in the landscape. 

 

3. BOUNDARIES 

A second important facet of urban ecology is an ongoing drawing and 
redrawing of boundaries and categories of its component entities. The 
casting of specific geographies, demographies, or economies as urban often 
involves defining or dissolving boundaries based on norms, criteria, and 
cut-offs that differ across contexts. (For a discussion of different metrics 
that are or can be employed to define urban centres in India, and the 
dramatically different profiles of urbanization that they yield, see Jana 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [22] 

(2016)). But the process of urbanization also entails socionatural 
transformations that remake categories of land and water in line with 
shifting rationalities and drivers. 

In Chennai, numerous centuries-old engineered tanks and lakes known as 
eri—seasonal water bodies that, along with their interconnecting channels, 
created and established an irrigation-cum- drainage system for the region—
were eliminated from the 1960s on by processes of urban expansion 
through in-filling. Significant actors here were state agencies like the Madras 
Metropolitan Development Authority and Tamil Nadu Housing Board, 
which drew up formal schemes to enhance the supply of land for housing, 
infrastructure, and institutions through filling vast expanses of these 
waterbodies, often at considerable cost. When one such scheme was 
challenged in court in 1993 by an environmental non-governmental 
organization, the government’s defence was to claim that the lakes in 
question were defunct, ‘abandoned and useless for groundwater recharge’ 
(TNHB 1993). 

Such re-inscriptions of water as land, or the denial of water, have led to the 
destruction or disappearance of water bodies across urban centres in India. 
The urban eye on nature, sharply interested and interventionist, sees like the 
state, in categorical metrics (Scott 1998). Waterlines are notoriously smudgy, 
with the demarcation of water from land on shorelines, lake edges, 
riverbanks, or floodplains being more a shifting seasonal zone than a line 
(D’Souza 2006). But urbanization processes have classically proceeded 
through authoritatively asserting the categories of land and water on these 
reluctant interfaces, and reinforcing the boundaries with signboards, 
concrete, projects, and finance. Baviskar (2011) and Follman (2016) 
document how large tracts of the River Yamuna’s floodplains in New Delhi 
were handed over against the protests of environmental groups for 
construction of the Commonwealth Games Village by a Supreme Court 
judgement that simply declared that ‘the site in question is neither a 
“floodplain” nor a “riverbed”’ (Supreme Court of India 2005, cited in 
Follman 2016). These erasures are also sometimes signalled preemptively. 
Jayaraman (2016) writes of a signboard standing up in the middle of a 
marshland, proclaiming ‘this land is the property of Kamarajar Port’—
indicating the intent to reinvent the tract of water as land. Urban political 
ecology, then, trains attention on the construction of ecological entities 
through acts of boundary assertion and recategorization. 

 

 

 



[23] Karen Coelho 

4. HISTORIES 

The urban ecological lens also reveals historically shifting frameworks 
through which urban nature is conceived and valorized. From the late 
1990s, as discourses of environmental governance and ecological 
management became part of world-class projects in Indian cities, the era of 
turning water into land in Chennai was succeeded by one of restoring and 
reclaiming water under ‘eco-restoration’ schemes. Lakes, rivers, and tanks 
became transformed in the eyes of urban society from nuisances to assets 
(Coelho and Raman 2013). As urban river waters remained intractably 
diminished in flow or inseparable from sewage or effluent, it was the 
‘waterfront’—the land, rather than the water—that came into focus. In this 
era, then, eco-restoration projects were framed around goals of 
beautification, greening, and real estate enhancement (Baviskar 2011; 
Mathur 2012; Coelho and Raman 2013). 

Many histories, some long and many short, are implicated in the production 
of urban socionatures. The everyday urban eye is innocent of history; it 
takes the landscape at face value. However, the distinctive temporalities of 
the urban—and its accelerated pace of change or transformation—
produces a rapid overwriting of spaces and histories where older land uses, 
settlements, and spaces are demolished, built over, and sooner or later 
forgotten as the new forms acquire a life of their own. The negotiations and 
struggles that were part of this appropriation are smoothed over by the 
everyday working of the new form. Histories of the urban are thus as much 
about violent erasures and forgetting as about creation and transformation. 
The green park rolling pleasantly alongside the river conceals a recent past 
as a dense hub of auto repair and body workshops where hundreds of 
urban workers made their livelihoods. The massive CitiCenter Mall standing 
entrenched on the banks of the Buckingham Canal in Chennai carries no 
hints of the violent demolitions that cleared the land for its construction. 
The crowds of young customers and moviegoers streaming in and out of it 
are serenely unaware that only slightly over two decades ago, hundreds of 
families watched bulldozers reduce to rubble homes that embodied decades 
of slow investments in taming the wilderness of the canal banks and making 
it habitable. Although the past protrudes through the concrete in the form 
of an old shrine or an aquatic shrub missed by the bulldozer, it takes less 
than a generation to wipe these pasts out of memory. Traces of erased 
waterbodies sometimes live on in the urban landscape, if only in the form 
of street names like ‘Lakeview’ or ‘Lock Street’ found in the midst of arid 
concrete jungles. 

 

 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [24] 

5. VALUE 

The machine of urban metabolism generates value and produces waste. In 
the process, it not only engages and transforms land, water, and human and 
non-human entities, it also dialectically shifts the categories and meanings 
of value and waste. Values of urban forms and spaces are not only 
differentially distributed across territories but remain unstable over time. 

As seen above, shifting values of urban nature disrupt or dismantle certain 
histories and legacies of urbanization. As the concept of ‘ecological value’ 
has taken on a specific meaning in contemporary Indian urbanism, 
associated with projects of beautification and the manufacture of ‘usable 
nature’ for recreation and aesthetics (Baviskar 2011, 2018; Coelho and 
Raman 2013), neglected backyards along rivers, creeks and canals—long 
invisible to capital and sidelined by the state—are propelled into 
prominence as frontage or high value real estate (Baviskar 2011, 2018; 
Coelho and Raman 2013). 

Some hybrid socionatural infrastructure like urban canals, bridges, or 
drains—designed and built at specific historical junctures for specific 
purposes—may survive awkwardly in the shifting course of urban history 
long after their original values—techno-functional, ecological, aesthetic, or 
social—have declined. Chennai’s Buckingham Canal is one such complex. 
As its navigation function declined through the early 1900s to the mid-
1900s and it slowly degenerated into a dysfunctional urban drain, its banks 
became a hinterland in the city’s landscape. Concomitantly, they also 
became the site of stealthy urbanization by subaltern groups in the shadow 
of the formal city, over time producing some of the most fecund hubs of 
small-scale industrial and commercial livelihoods and affordable housing in 
the city (Coelho 2017). Yet, since the 2000s, as the canal has been inserted 
into new imaginaries of elevated roadways, walking and cycling paths, and 
waterfront parks, along with a growing discourse about its drainage 
functions, many of these spaces have been, or are under imminent threat of 
being, demolished. 

The contemporary revalorization of urban waterways has everywhere 
dislodged or destroyed ecologies of livelihoods and subaltern settlement. A 
distinguishing feature of the current era of eco-restoration projects in 
Indian cities, whether in Delhi, Ahmedabad, or Chennai, is that they are 
increasingly motivated by and overtly designed around the eviction of urban 
poor settlements from the banks, selectively targeting them as encroachers 
and polluters (Mathur 2012; Baviskar 2011; Coelho et al. 2010, 2013). Eco-
restoration projects thus emerge today as sites of enormous human tragedy, 
among the most exclusionary interventions in contemporary urban 
transformation. 



[25] Karen Coelho 

The term ‘encroachment’ is a keyword of the contemporary moment, 
indexing a selective stigmatization of property-less subaltern settlers on the 
edges of urban water bodies while implicitly sanctioning more egregious 
appropriations of these spaces by elites who have obtained illegal title 
documents through means at their disposal. This framing is endorsed by 
sections of the urban middle classes who have become increasingly hostile 
toward the presence of ‘slums’ in the city, seeing them as aesthetic 
disturbances or eyesores (Baviskar 2004; Coelho and Raman 2010). 
Economic and ecological visions of development converge in world-class 
cities where both clean rivers and slum-free cities are ushered in through 
the single solution of removing slum dwellers en masse to ghettos outside 
the city. 

The framework of urban ecology thus illuminates the production of 
hierarchy and discrimination in urban landscapes. The contributions of 
urban political ecology have been particularly important in demonstrating 
how flows and circulations of capital, nature, discourses, and social 
processes systematically work to differentially value places and people. 
Urban metabolic processes and their hybrid productions create an uneven 
geography of value, designating certain people and places as ‘waste’ 
(Gidwani and Maringanti 2016), which in turn allows for particular types of 
violence—neglect, discrimination, or appropriation—to be perpetrated on 
them. The marking of people and places as waste, they argue, is and has 
always been crucial for the expansion of capital, both justifying and 
enabling its appropriation of spaces and its abjection of peoples. They show 
how the waste-recycling hub of Bholakpur in Hyderabad—framed in public 
discourse as contaminated, squalid, and marginal—is nevertheless critical to 
the reproduction of the urban economy. Bholakpur and places like it are 
‘toxic sinks, where the waste generated as part and parcel of a capitalist 
space economy is interred by stigmatized bodies who frequently hail from 
historically vulnerable groups’ (2016, 114). But again, ‘wasting’ and valuing 
proceed in dialectic fashion: ‘Capitalist economies produce places like 
Bholakpur as receptacles of waste, only to cannibalize them at a later 
moment when land values rise, shifting the imperative to inter waste to 
other locations’ (114). 

 

6. PERIPHERIES 

These dialectics of devalorization and revalorization underpin, and are also 
unleashed by, urban expansion to newer territories. Urban peripheries have 
received considerable attention in recent scholarship as complex, dynamic 
spaces where the distinctive forms and features of southern urbanisms are 
unfolding. On metropolitan edges, undeveloped tracts with low market 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [26] 

value, typically in ecologically fragile or hazardous locations like wetlands or 
floodplains, become attractive to capital at some point in its search for new 
frontiers of accumulation. Here, then, capital, land, water, and state policy 
are engaged to create a zone of speculative expansion. To put it in the 
words of Ranganathan (2015), ‘Wetlands are a form of land with high 
consequences for capital’s becoming/being.’ Peripheries are thus spaces of 
radical diversity, where zones of relegation—dumping grounds for all kinds 
of waste and devalued bodies, human and non-human—are closely 
juxtaposed with zones of promise where capital prowls for speculative 
profits in deregulated and flexibly governed territories. Urban peripheries 
have been characterized as a seam connecting “natural” and built space, the 
authorized and unauthorized city, the accomplished city and the city-yet-to-
come. These frontiers are where the workings of urban ecologies are most 
evident, where circulations of capital, state action, and social meanings 
shape the boundaries between land and water, the values of built space and 
social categories—all these creating assemblages of vulnerability to various 
socionatural risks, including water stress and flooding, air pollution, and 
traffic accidents. Ranganathan (2015), for example, maps the uneven 
production of flood risk in Bangalore’s peripheries by analysing storm 
drains as socionatural assemblages, historically produced through 
interlocked human and non-human action, including state engineering 
projects, flows, and fixities of real estate capital, and informal developments 
in wetlands. Ranganathan (2015, 1305) argues that ‘The intensifying 
relationship between capital and storm drains in the new millennium has 
enabled a new and dangerous agency to storm flows’. 

Meanwhile, the mushrooming of large slum resettlement ghettos on the 
peripheries of most metropolitan cities of India is giving rise to a new urban 
social geography, a spatial apartheid which renders the urban working 
classes fringe inhabitants of urban centres that they helped to build and 
continue to service. This is also a geography of caste, as these peripheral 
settlements are found to have large concentrations of Scheduled Caste (SC) 
families. These resettlement sites display an exceptional vulnerability to 
floods through a combination of factors acting in concert, including state 
action and inaction, infrastructures built and not built, projects of large 
capital, permissions that violate plans, and outright illegalities (Coelho et al. 
2013). All these cohere around a politics of value which configures certain 
lands, ecologies, and people as of lower worth than others. 

But peripheries are not found only outside the city. Caldeira’s analytic 
framework of ‘peripheral urbanization’ (2016) refers not only to spatial 
location, and not necessarily or mainly to marginality—it refers to a mode 
of production of space distinguished by ‘auto-construction’ (where spaces 
are built from the ground up by their occupants as opposed to being 



[27] Karen Coelho 

consumed as ready-made commodities); a transversal rather than direct 
engagement with official logics of capital, property, and law (as they are 
typically excluded from formal circuits); and the generation of new kinds of 
politics and citizenship claims. Peripheral urbanization, as Caldeira shows, 
produces highly heterogeneous spaces marked by inequality and precarity. 
These spaces are subject to constant, if sometimes slow-paced, change, 
both in the form of incremental improvements and enhancement of the 
quality of built space and, consequent to this, an almost inevitable 
displacement, as the improved spaces are taken over by external actors—
state or market—followed by a reproduction of the peripheral urbanization 
process elsewhere. 

Finally, taking the periphery as key to understanding how urban ecologies 
are formed brings us to reconsidering our definitions of the urban itself. 
Recent scholarship (e.g. Brenner and Schmid 2015) challenges us to drop 
the spatially bounded city as an object of analysis in favour of the urban as 
an ongoing and ever-widening process of transformation of nature, 
economies, and social relations through the workings of capital. Angelo and 
Wachsmudt (2012) argue that a ‘methodological cityism’ which privileges 
the city as the site of urbanization obscures much of what is distinctive 
about the contemporary urban world. Arguments that posit a spillover or 
generalization of urbanization processes beyond cities (as in ‘planetary 
urbanization’ or ‘urban age’ theses) appear to be borne out in the current 
Indian context. Factories, power plants, refineries, and even ports move out 
of cities, transforming the pace and thickening the flows of capital and 
communications across non-contiguous spaces and, sometimes, creating 
counter-flows of labour from urban to rural areas (Chandrashekar 2011; 
Coelho and Vijayabaskar 2014). New elite residential or educational 
enclaves spring up in rural areas, bringing urban consumption cultures with 
them. Corridors between cities see a rise in land prices and a spread of 
urban forms along their length. The framework of urban ecology 
encompasses these diverse axes of circulation and transformation, best 
captured in the term ‘urban metabolism’, even in spaces that are not the 
city. 

 

7. CONCLUSIONS 

Why urban political ecology? What do we gain from this framework? What 
implications does it carry for urban practice, politics, or governance? 
Discourses of green, eco-smart, sustainable cities have been smoothly 
incorporated into global circulations of capitalist urbanization as manifested 
in multilaterally funded multimillion-dollar projects such as the Ganga 
Action Plan and various river restoration projects across Indian cities. Yet 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [28] 

these projects continue to fail, both on social and environmental fronts, 
leaving us on one hand with recidivist dirty rivers and on the other with 
low-income urban communities denied decent drainage even as they suffer 
the most severe effects of river pollution. Environmental and social values 
are pitted against each other rather, rendering just and inclusive eco-
restoration an impossibility. 

Urban political ecology can intervene in this context to demonstrate the 
inseparability of nature, history, and politics in processes of urbanization. 
Adopting the lens of urban political ecology should lead us to question 
purist claims that privilege ‘natural’ entities in urban landscapes as a priori or 
given, while simultaneously urging us to recognize how nature and non-
human actors inevitably shape the outcomes of human interventions. 
Recognizing the limits of state policy and social engineering, and the 
relatively autonomous agency of natural and non-human actors, may be a 
first step in building humility and reducing hubris in the march of 
urbanization. 

In practical terms, an urban political ecology approach would dictate that 
any ecological intervention in the urban context, whether restoring a lake or 
a river, building a home, factory, bridge or drainage system, by state 
agencies, firms, non-profits or local residents, requires a rigorous analysis of 
the range and complexity of socio-natural relations embedded in the 
landscape, and the potential discriminatory effects and differential values 
that the intervention would produce. 

And finally, by highlighting histories of urban production, urban political 
ecology can not only help to assert non-property claims on urban space in 
terms that still carry some legitimacy (such as customary or grandfathered 
rights), but can also draw attention to the value of the investments and 
stocks built up over time in these incremental productions. Urban political 
ecology can educate the urban eye. 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 

I thank Nityanand Jayaraman and Pradeep Kuttuva who read and commented on 

drafts of this article. 

 

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