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Traditional interventions to “bring nature into the city” were often motivated by a concern to create forms of public space which would provide a public good. Despite such well-intentioned motivations, these public forms of urban nature have always been to some extent bounded, serving some in favor of others, authorizing particular uses and forms of behavior as more or less legitimate, and policing the boundaries of who is/not included in such space. In this paper, we argue that new interventions seeking to bring nature-based solutions (NBS) into the city serve to further trouble these boundaries. NBS seek to use nature to address urban sustainability challenges and they navigate and serve to reconfigure what is (and is not) public in the city. We draw on research undertaken in three cities – Newcastle (United Kingdom), Cape Town (South Africa) and Athens (Greece) to explore the ways in which notions of the private and the public are being remade with and through nature, and its implications for how we might understand urban politics. Our conclusions point to the need for governance arrangements that can support the long-term stewardship of nature in the public interest and with due accountability and we suggest three arrangements.

This book uses a unique typology of ten core drivers of injustice to explore and question common assumptions around what urban sustainability means, how it can be implemented, and how it is manifested in or driven by urban interventions that hinge on claims of sustainability.Aligned with critical environmental justice studies, the book highlights the contradictions of urban sustainability in relation to justice. It argues that urban neighbourhoods cannot be greener, more sustainable and liveable unless their communities are strengthened by the protection of the right to housing, public space, infrastructure and healthy amenities. Linked to the individual drivers, ten short empirical case studies from across Europe and North America provide a systematic analysis of research, policy and practice conducted under urban sustainability agendas in cities such as Barcelona, Glasgow, Athens, Boston and Montréal, and show how social and environmental justice is, or is not, being taken into account. By doing so, the book uncovers the risks of continuing urban sustainability agendas while ignoring, and therefore perpetuating, systemic drivers of inequity and injustice operating within and outside of the city.Accessibly written for students in urban studies, critical geography and planning, this is a useful and analytical synthesis of issues relating to urban sustainability, environmental and social justice.

In this chapter, we explore how applying a feminist political ecology (FPE) lens to ageing shows how ageing experiences are relational and dynamic processes of embodying everyday practices and ethics of care. We apply writings on post-capitalist community economies and rupturist gerontology and FPE intersectional thinking and link them to two studies of ageing in Japan and Uruguay. We analyse ageing as part of dynamic socionatural relations and the ethics of care including the agentic roles played by miso, machines, fungus, climate, and politics. Our chapter shows how the role played by socionatural relations in ageing experiences demands more careful attention.

In this chapter, I tell the story of La Mercadita, an imaginary Market located in Mexico City in the year 2050. This fictional story was inspired and informed by the visions of vendors, who created four stories about the future of their marketplaces and their energy systems, during my field research in Mexico City in 2020. It pulls together the wishes, dreams and fears vendors have while talking about the future; some of their concrete ideas that address energy transitions; and the implications these visions may have in their communities and environments. The chapter stories energy imaginaries from a feminist political ecology perspective in order to encourage FPE to explore narrative approaches and to build creatively on communities’ visions of their own futures.

In this chapter, we set out the book’s engagements with feminist political ecology (FPE) theory and practice. We first position the book in relation to FPE discussions underlying how the field is evolving as an open-ended set of discourses responding to the different crises and disruptions caused by the last years of environmental, climate, health, economic and political crises. We then briefly explain how the book was shaped through four years of the relationships and knowledge co-production within the Wellbeing, Ecology, Gender and Community Innovative Training Network (WEGO-ITN), followed by a discussion on the main themes emerging in the book chapters and a finishing with a section indicating where the contributors of the book are heading next. The book is rooted in the networks and journeys between activism, academia and policy arenas reflecting on the many situated conversations and stories within FPE.

In this chapter, we explore the topic of population in the context of the latest work by renowned feminist STS scholar Donna Haraway and her call to ‘make kin not babies’. We reflect on the explosive reactions among feminists to Haraway’s recent work by paying attention to emotions in population debates among feminist thinkers. Using an informal dialogue format, we engage at both a personal and scholarly level to map out the contours of feminist thinking about the fraught topic of population growth and population control.

In this chapter, we dialogically intertwine meanings that flow between the Western and the Andean cultural horizons, in urban environments marked by coloniality. Attentive to different ways of establishing community, we evoke elements from the Andean worldview from a decolonial perspective, at times overlapping with feminist political ecology (FPE). By opening to the Andean way of understanding and feeling the relationship between the social and the natural, we rehearse answers to social and environmental crises.