In the last few weeks, we have discussed spatial justice and political geographies of the far right in the first two events of the lecture series „Spatial and environmental justice“. The Institute for European Urban Studies would now like to invite you to the next event, in which Professor Maria Kaika, a founding figure of Urban Political Ecology, will speak about the basic ideas of this approach and its application to highly topical issues.

Third lecture

20 May (digital)
Turning up the heat – urban political ecology for a climate emergency

Maria Kaika
professor in Urban, Regional and Environmental Planning
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences
University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)

In this talk Maria Kaika argues that Urban Political Ecology’s (UPE) ontologies, epistemologies, and methods are not simply an academic exercise; they are scientific developments that make academic research more relevant to the politics of climate change. Urban political ecology unsettles ‘traditional’ understandings of ‘cities’ as ontological entities separate from ‘nature’, and develops methods to examine how urbanization is inseparably and metabolically interlinked with flows of capital, labour, and resources, and with the metabolism of the entire biophysical world. In the talk, The speaker proposes four ways forward, to replace the currently dominant catastrophism over climate, with new forms of prefigurative politics and socio-political action for ‘impossible’ solutions.

Access link

For digital participation, please dial in via BigBlueButton.

URL: meeting.uni-weimar.de/b/kat-ek9-0up-qom

Access code: 635539

Information on further events:
www.uni-weimar.de/ifeu/justice

Facilitator: Hendrik Sander (IfEU)
Email: hendrik.sander[at]uni-weimar.de