Published February 22, 2013
by iris_author
Human Habitats and Ideologies of Sustainability
An Urban ASIA lecture on Kathmandu, Nepal
Thursday, 28 February 2013 | Noon to 2pm | 626 York Research Tower
With Anne Rademacher, New York University
When is housing an environmental problem? In this talk, I draw from long-term ethnographic engagement with the biophysical, cultural, and political dynamics of urban river degradation in Nepal’s capital city to describe the ways that conflicting concepts of urban ecology were used to categorize urban space as either “land” or “river.” As a consequence, thousands of informal settlements in the river’s riparian zone were either considered agents of degradation or icons of sustainability. When embedded in Nepal’s revolutionary political context, I further demonstrate the malleability of ecology in urban social life. I then turn briefly to more recent fieldwork among green design practitioners in Mumbai. Here, I consider how an emergent form of urban sustainability expertise, in this case environmental architecture, served as a critical arena within which ecologically appropriate housing was defined. In both cases, the social and political dynamics of sustainability in practice transform scientific concepts of ecosystem ecology into multiple and contested social practices of urban ecology.
This Urban Asia Speaker Series event is organized by the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) and the City Institute at York University. This event is co-sponsored by the South Asian Studies Programme and the Department of Anthropology, York University
ALL ARE WELCOME!
For more information: ycar@yorku.ca | www.yorku.ca/ycar/Events/urban_asia.html
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