environment

Essays

The Emergence of Ecological Thinking in the City

Charles-François Mathis & translated by Oliver Waine - 27 September 2022
What place does ecological thinking have in the field of urban planning? In describing the use of vegetation in...
Debates

The Slow Violence of Planned Obsolescence

Elise Mason - 20 September 2022
Elise Mason critiques planned obsolescence as a form of slow violence. She argues for an ethic of care, rooted in...
Series

Urban Wastes, Present and Future

Lily Baum Pollans - 29 April 2022
Lily Pollans guest-edits this series for Metropolitics that focuses on the various ways in which waste is part of...
Debates

Aéroports de Paris: A Strategic Lever for the French State?

Nathalie Roseau & translated by Oliver Waine - 26 January 2021
Following growing controversy surrounding the French government’s plans to privatize the Aéroports de Paris (ADP)...
Essays

Sentinel Territories: A New Concept for Looking at Environmental Change

David Blanchon & Frédéric Keck & François-Michel Le Tourneau & Stéphane Tonnelat & Adriana Zuniga-Teran - 8 May 2020
In this essay, the authors develop the concept of “sentinel territories,” or environments where humans can perceive...
Reviews

Aubervilliers: Portrait of a Working-Class Suburb

Anaïs Albert & translated by Oliver Waine - 21 February 2020
The republication of an early-20th‑century realist novel set in the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers brings...
From the Field

A Construction Boom in an Urban Floodplain: Long Island City, Queens, NYC

Christopher Ryan - 11 February 2020
New York City has encouraged development in Long Island City, Queens, even as the neighborhood has not recovered...
From the Field

How Can Talking Save Trees?

Léo Magnin & translated by Oliver Waine - 12 July 2019
In rural France, tree exchange systems seek to avoiding the felling that typically accompanies exchanges of parcels...
Essays

From non-planning to cutting-edge policy: the transformation of waste management in Boston since the 1980s

Lily Baum Pollans - 11 June 2019
Recycling and composting are hot topics. Lily Baum Pollans argues that Boston’s changing approach to waste...
From the Field

How to Defend the Planet in Law

Valérie Cabanes & translated by Oliver Waine - 19 April 2019
In the face of a growing raft of evidence that increasingly points to an imminent global catastrophe—the very...
Interviews

Global Climate Crisis and the City: An Interview with Ashley Dawson

Ashley Dawson & Maura McGee - 3 April 2019
An interview with Ashley Dawson, professor of English at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center,...
From the Field

Bare Mountaintops and Thirsty Cities: On California and its Snowpack

Sayd Randle - 29 January 2019
Figuring how to represent the oncoming effects of climate change is a common challenge faced by whistleblowers and...
From the Field

Killing Them Softly: The Environmental Vulnerability of Black Women in Albany, New York

Tanesha A. Thomas - 23 October 2018
In Albany’s South End, a predominantly low-income African-American neighborhood, tanks storing environmentally...
Essays

Local Leadership and Global Goals: How City Sustainability Networks are Changing Progressive Policymaking

Emma French & Supraja Sudharsan & Jennifer Clark - 18 September 2018
While national governments often struggle to address global climate change, cities are in a better position to...
From the Field

Planning for the Unimaginable: Puerto Rico and Strategies for Climate-Change Adaptation

Cecelia Walsh-Russo - 1 May 2018
The damage from the two hurricanes that struck Puerto Rico was multiplied by US austerity plans that deprived the...
Series

Climate Change and Social Change

Gregory Smithsimon - 3 April 2018
Cities are home to more than half the world’s population and the source of most global CO2 emissions—and yet often...
Reviews

Nature’s Worth: Using Human Markets to Value Ecosystems’ Contributions

Anna Krol & Lisa Jean Moore - 20 February 2018
Mattijs van Maasakkers’ The Creation of Markets for Ecosystem Services in the United States: The Challenge of...
Essays

Institutional Roadblocks to Achieving Environmental Justice Through Public Participation: The Case of CSO Control in US Cities

Rebekah Breitzer - 24 January 2018
Rather than meaningfully involving representatives of environmental-justice communities in decisions about the...
Interviews

“Build a Wall”: The Wrong Solution for Our Coastal Problems. An Interview with Jennifer Mattei

Jennifer H. Mattei & Lisa Jean Moore - 7 February 2017
Metropolitics editorial committee member and sociologist Lisa Jean Moore interviewed biologist Jennifer Mattei, an...
From the Field

Proclaiming “Veggie Pride” in Paris and New York

Elizabeth Cherry - 22 November 2016
How do animal-rights activists promote vegetarianism? Many activists use environmental and health arguments, but...
Debates

Climate Action Plans and the “Climate-Just” City

Cecelia Walsh-Russo - 27 September 2016
In the face of major climatic changes, more and more US cities are developing climate action plans. But while these...
From the Field

Where Did the Bees Go? New York City Beekeeping Amid Ecological Crises

Mary Kosut & Lisa Jean Moore - 5 April 2016
The decline and extinction of bees and other pollinators threatens the global food supply. Residents in cities like...
Essays

After Fukushima: The Silence of Environmental Organizations on Nuclear Catastrophe

Michael Dreiling & Nicholas Lougee & Tomoyasu Nakamura - 22 September 2015
The nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima plants in Japan in 2011 raised global awareness of the massive dangers...
From the Field

Exporting French-style “sustainable cities” to Morocco

Pierre-Arnaud Barthel & translated by Oliver Waine - 1 May 2015
In Morocco, environmental urban projects are the order of the day. For these projects, French expertise is being...
Reviews

Cities transformed by hygienism: 100 years of local innovation

Sabine Barles & translated by Oliver Waine - 27 March 2015
Hygiene is a “battle”, and the “hygienist revolution” of the 19th and early 20th centuries transformed our urban...
Essays

Looking Backward into the Future of New York

Ted Steinberg - 12 January 2015
Can the lesson of Hurricane Sandy dampen the enthusiasm of New York City’s growth machine? Ted Steinberg, author of...
From the Field

The Horseshoe Crab, our Environment and our Health

Lisa Jean Moore - 15 December 2014
Will we erase all animal diversity in the name of modernity, or will we follow the hints given by the study of the...
Reviews

Detroit: Origins of the Urban Crisis Revisited

Andrew Newman - 24 November 2014
The recent reprint of Sugrue’s classic history of Detroit’s urban crisis highlights the roots of the city’s present...
Reviews

Entry into the Anthropocene

André Micoud & translated by Oliver Waine - 20 November 2014
Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, backed up by an impressive amount of data, trace the history of our...
Debates

The Violence of Sustainable Urbanity

Erik Swyngedouw - 10 November 2014
If Nature is an ideological construction that separates us from the environment, the contemporary search for...

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Series

Black Power and Black Self-Determination in a New Time and New Spaces
Urban Wastes, Present and Future
New York Dossier: The Food Industry Faces the Covid‑19 Pandemic
Cities in the Age of Financialization
Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research
New York Tech Dossier: The Dark Side of New York’s Tech Economy
Progressive Mayors and Urban Social Movements
Land Rights in the Urban Global South
Climate Change and Social Change

Featured

From the Field

Covid-19 Transformed New York’s Destination Food Markets

Ivana Mellers - 5 October 2021
Ivana Mellers analyzes how New York’s destination markets—key spaces of economic and social interactions—coped during...
From the Field

Moving Inside City Limits: The Urban Mobility of Undocumented Youth

Stephen P. Ruszczyk - 4 June 2019
The urban context and public transportation shape how undocumented youths move within cities. In a comparison of...
Reviews

Filming Ethnic Diversity in New York

Stéphane Tonnelat & translated by Christina Mitrakos - 21 October 2016
Frederick Wiseman’s fortieth documentary film, In Jackson Heights (2015), returns to an urban theme explored in...
From the Field

Looking Inward, Across the Border

Harel Shapira - 19 April 2016
In the constellation of anti-immigrant politics in the United States, groups like the Minutemen, civilians who...
Essays

The Political Aesthetics of Drag

Shaka McGlotten - 13 October 2015
Drag, or the diverse art form and culture of performance that typically plays with gender and sex, is an integral...
Debates

Disarm the Police

Gregory Smithsimon - 29 September 2015
In the current political debates about discriminatory policing, there has been a lack of serious discussion of...

Other resources online

Cycles of Violence: Analysing Media Discourse in the Newspaper...

Mobile Lives Forum
How are cyclist and pedestrian deaths depicted in newspaper reports, and how do these reports help shape...

Lahti: The First Carbon-Rationing Experiment Applied to Local...

Mobile Lives Forum
The city of Lahti in Finland was the first to experiment with a carbon-trading scheme among its inhabitants to...

Is Rationing Carbon for Travel a Fair, Efficient, and Realistic...

Mobile Lives Forum
In the wake of the pandemic, a carbon tax at Europe’s borders is now on the agenda, but a domestic version for...

Reducing Carbon-Emitting Travel: A Factor of Social Cohesion and...

Mobile Lives Forum
As part of France’s Mission on the Future of the Economic Model of Public Transportation, commissioned by the French...

Strasbourg, An Example of a Cycling City

Mobile Lives Forum
Strasbourg is the leading city for cycling in France and a constant source of inspiration for all French cities...

The Trinity of Walking, Cycling and Public Transportation Must Be...

Mobile Lives Forum
While emissions from the transportation sector remain at a very high level, all hopes are currently pinned on the...
Centre national de recherche scientifique
Journal supported by the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (Institute of Human and Social Sciences) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

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