CUE213 | Urbanisation and Environment in the Age of Climate Change

Urbanization is widely perceived to be a fundamental driver of planetary scale processes of environmental degradation and socio-ecological change. Climate scientists and environmental scholars draw a direct connection between global urbanization and anthropogenic climate change. The 1992 Rio Summit, for instance, highlighted the potentially serious environmental, health, and social implications of continuing urbanization. How is the multifaceted relationship between environment and urbanization conceptualized in social sciences and

humanities? How are notions of ‘environment’ and ‘urban’ conceived, mobilised, and put to action in contestations over urban resources, and possibilities of collective action and citizenship claims? What are some of the alternative imaginaries and conceptions of the relationship between environment and urbanization that allow us to rethink the urban as not only a cause but also potentially a cure for anthropogenic climate change? This course approaches these questions through a synoptic overview of concepts and ideas that undergird prevalent understandings of nature-urbanism relation. At the same time, it engages with specific and situated ideas and practices that shape urban ecologies and their attendant socio-economic forms in contemporary India.

Divided into three modules, this course draws from a variety of disciplinary traditions especially urban and environmental geography, political ecology, science and technology studies, anthropology, environmental history, and environmental law and policy. The first module titled ‘urbanization of nature’ focuses on multiplicity of ways in which the co-constitutive relationship between the environment and the urban is conceptualized and produced in the wake of capitalist modernity and colonialism. The second module titled ‘elements of urban ecology’ focuses on three key elements of our collective urban life- land, water, waste, and air- to explore how urban environmental problems are framed, articulated, and debated in scholarly and public debates, particularly in the context of India. The third module titled ‘environmental justice and urban commons’ engages with imaginaries and practices of urban belonging,