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ogy as an object of study (e.g., Mayer, 1996; 2000) and indirectly, as urban political
ecology makes its mark on the new urban environmental scholarship. Political
ecology's traditional strengths lie in detailed studies of how local actors manage
environmental resources within particular social, economic and political conditions,
in traditionally agrarian societies in peripheral regions of the world economy. Politi-
cal ecologists explore the impacts of state practices, social norms, and economic
and political marginalisation on land degradation. Although the human health
consequences of environmental degradation have been noted, they have not been
of central concern in traditional political ecology.
More recently, geographers (McCarthy, 2002; Robbins, 2002) have called for
using the conceptual and methodological repertoire of political ecology to explicate
'First World' environmental problems. Converging with this agenda has been the
development of an increasingly robust framework for thinking through the political
ecologies of cities, where marginalisation of vulnerable groups, power wielded by
local and state institutions, and environmental management fraught with corporate
and state agendas are as relevant as they are in peripheral regions of the world
system, but in different ways.
Braun (2005) traces a history of intermittent, yet intellectually powerful, atten-
tion to ecological processes in urban scholarship. Such work has been limited by a
conceptual separation of the urban from the rural landscape that is deeply engrained
in Western culture (Gottlieb, 1993). Consequently, urban scholarship has had more
to say about the effects of urbanisation on human health than on the ecological
processes, which sustain cities.
Recent work in urban political ecology, however, directly challenges the concep-
tual separation of city and country that has informed so much geography's urban
and EJ scholarship. Much of this work owes a debt to William Cronon's magnifi cent
environmental history of Chicago,
Nature's Metropolis
. That book, and others to
follow, by Davis (1999), Wilson (1992), Ross (1994) and Gandy (2002), explicates
in insightful detail Raymond Williams' (1973) argument that city and country are
inextricable parts of larger economic and ecological systems. In this view, properties
of an 'urban environment' cannot be fully understood at the scale of the city alone;
rather, environmental conditions in the city (including those which impinge on
human health) must be viewed ecologically in relation to their consequences for and
dependence upon processes operating at lower (e.g., the body) and higher (e.g., the
bioregion or globe) scales of analysis. As Haughton and McGranahan (2006, p. 3)
note:
The very notion of urban ecology has become multi-scalar, extending from individual
urban systems to systems of cities and towns, and from ecosystems within urban settle-
ments to urban settlements as ecosystems, to the ways in which cities and towns shape
ecosystems beyond as well as within urban boundaries.
The multi-scalar dimension of urban ecology takes on particular salience in relation
to the goal of sustainability, which is an indicator of environmental health, as well
as a keystone to population health. As Haughton (1999) argues, a city (or any other
discrete areal unit) cannot be an island of sustainability; it must relate and contribute
to the sustainability of larger, more extended and quite distant ecosystems as well.
Blurring the multi-scalar boundaries between city and country opens for analysis
a vast and complex ecological web with the potential for both good and ill human
and environmental health. Braun (2005) notes the analytical focus within urban
