Metropolitics

A Crisis of Habitation in LA's Last Remaining Wetland

Deike Peters & Sam Lutzker — 2025-03-18T06:00:00Z

As housing crises become increasingly entangled with environmental crises, the question of just outcomes requires different ways of thinking. In their exploration of the politics of Los Angeles' Ballona Wetlands, Deike Peters and Sam Lutzker suggest the concept of multispecies justice may offer a pathway for negotiating these conflicts.
The Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve lies just south of famous Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Its 600 acres (240 ha) are all that remains of the once mighty

- From the Field / environmental justice, environment, ecology, urban ecology, housing crisis, housing, housing justice, habitat, wetlands, multispecies justice, United States, California, Los Angeles

Working-Class Ecology Versus Olympic Urbanism

Flaminia Paddeu & translated by Oliver Waine — 2024-04-19T05:00:00Z

In Aubervilliers, north of Paris, swathes of a community garden—the Jardins Ouvriers des Vertus—have been destroyed as part of preparations for the Paris 2024 Olympics. Flaminia Paddeu recounts the action taken by some of the Vertus gardeners and defends calls for a “right to land in the city”
Winter 2021 in Aubervilliers, in the northern inner suburbs of Paris. Behind a building site, between gardens and a few old buildings, a group of gardeners and residents with placards chant slogans such

- From the Field / Paris, Olympic Games, mobilization, urban planning, Paris region, Aubervilliers, Seine-Saint-Denis, ecology, community gardens, gardens, Greater Paris, Île-de-France

Writing the Intellectual History of Bioregionalism

Antoine Dubiau & translated by Oliver Waine — 2023-12-22T06:00:00Z

As bioregionalist ideas spread in France, their history remains partly unwritten. This environmental movement, which originated in the United States, is characterized by a diversity of approaches that are perhaps mutually incompatible.
Among the ecological utopias that emerged in the 1970s, bioregionalism long remained exclusively North American. After two decades of widespread international dissemination, the concept is only just beginning to make its mark in France. The promotion of

- Debates / bioregion, Italy, ecology, environment, United States

The Emergence of Ecological Thinking in the City

Charles-François Mathis & translated by Oliver Waine — 2022-09-27T05:00:00Z

What place does ecological thinking have in the field of urban planning? In describing the use of vegetation in cities since the 19th century, Charles-François Mathis examines the historical evolution of planning choices and the foundations of a new “ecological urbanism.”
Wherever I may go today, if the opportunity arises, if I have an hour to spare in an unknown city, a complacent drift takes me along the streets, towards these placid chlorophyllous enclaves encircled nowadays by the

- Essays / landscape, nature, gardens, ecology, parks, urban development, urban planning, environment, history

The Slow Violence of Planned Obsolescence

Elise Mason — 2022-09-20T05:00:00Z

Elise Mason critiques planned obsolescence as a form of slow violence. She argues for an ethic of care, rooted in Black feminist thinking and writing, to transform waste and our relationship to it.
---- Series: Urban Wastes, Present and Future “We are all entangled. And the fact that entanglement is a slow death doesn't make it any better; it in fact makes it more gruesome. And I mourn the parts of you that lost feeling today” (Gumbs 2020, pp. 103–104).
I have spent my adult life amid the

- Debates / waste, waste management, environment, consumerism, consumer goods, planned obsolescence, feminism, Black feminism, care ethics, ecology

How Can Talking Save Trees?

Léo Magnin & translated by Oliver Waine — 2019-07-12T05:00:00Z

In rural France, tree exchange systems seek to avoiding the felling that typically accompanies exchanges of parcels between farmers resulting from land-consolidation procedures. Leo Magnin's analysis of how this system operates reveals a means of managing conflicts between environmental protection on the one hand and individual property rights on the other.
On Tuesday, February 6, 2018, the village of La Siouve1 in the Auvergne region of central France wakes to negative temperatures. It' is 9

- From the Field / land consolidation, hedgerows, trees, conflict, farming, agriculture, landscape, environment, environmental protection, ecology, rural, France

How to Defend the Planet in Law

Valérie Cabanes & translated by Oliver Waine — 2019-04-19T09:26:51Z

In the face of a growing raft of evidence that increasingly points to an imminent global catastrophe—the very self-destruction of humanity, even—one means of taking concrete action, as opposed to fatalism and denial, is to promote new legal frameworks that can structure debate and action on this issue. Valérie Cabanes shows that defining the concept of ecocide is the first key step along this road.
The destruction of the Earth's ecosystem by industrial technologies that show no respect for

- From the Field / international law, environment, global warming, climate change, anthropocène, law, NGOs, ecocide, environmental protection, ecology, nature, mobilization