Siddharth Menon

This course is available on the MSc in City Design and Social Science, MSc in Environmental Policy and Regulation, MSc in Human Geography and Urban Studies (Research), MSc in Regional And Urban Planning Studies and MSc in Urbanisation and Development. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

By 2050, the UN predicts that more than two-thirds of the world's population will live in cities, ninety percent of which will occur in the global South. In response, public and private sector actors have been increasingly constructing new urban infrastructures, like roads, water pipes, sewage and garbage systems, electric lines, and buildings, creating new patterns of uneven urban development and environmental change.

This course will investigate our rapidly transforming urban world with a specific focus on urban infrastructures and their ecologies, i.e. ‘urban natures’. As geographer Neil Smith (2006, xiii-xiv) notes, ‘The production of urban nature is deeply political but it has received far less scrutiny and seems far less visible, precisely because the arrangement of asphalt and concrete, water mains and garbage dumps, cars and subways seems so inimical to our intuitive sense of (external) nature’. We will demystify the role that urban natures play in shaping the social world. How do urban natures exacerbate social inequalities? How do governments use urban natures to extend their power over urban residents? How do the urban poor use urban natures to contest their marginalization? This course will address these questions by using frameworks from urban political ecology, urban environmental justice, and critical infrastructure studies.

The course is divided into two parts: Part I: Foundations and Part II: Urban Natures. In Part I, we will read key articles from the last few decades examining classic debates about urban natures. In Part II, we will turn our attention to new monographs and articles examining more contemporary debates about urban natures.

20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Discussion post.

• Anand, N. (2017). Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Duke University Press.
• Anand, N., Gupta, A., & Appel, H. (2018). The Promise of Infrastructure. Duke University Press.
• Choplin, A. (2023). Concrete City: Material Flows and Urbanization in West Africa. Wiley.
• Degani, M. (2022). The City Electric: Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postsocialist Tanzania. Duke University Press Books.
• Elinoff, E. & Rubaii, K. (Eds). (2025). The Social Properties of Concrete. Punctum Press.
• Fredericks, R. (2018). Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal. Duke University Press.
• Gandy, M. (2014) The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity and the Urban Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Harvey, Penny, & Hannah Knox. (2015). Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Cornell University Press.
• Heynen, N., Kaika, M. & Swyngedouw, E. (Eds). (2006). In the Nature of Cities: Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism. Routledge.
• Jaffe, R. (2016). Concrete Jungles: Urban Pollution and the Politics of Difference in the Caribbean. Oxford University Press.
• Kaika, M., Keil, R., Mandler, T., & Tzaninis, Y. (Eds). (2023). Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency. Manchester University Press.
• Rademacher, A., & Sivaramakrishnan, K. (2017). Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism. Hong Kong University Press.
• Silver, J. (2023). The Infrastructural South: Techno-Environments of the Third Wave of Urbanization. MIT Press.

Exam (70%).

Presentation (30%).

Please note: the in-class presentation will be a group presentation.