ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that various aspects of environmental political theory in the Anthropocene may be deduced by comparison to environmental politics in cities. As they manifest the exercise of human power over nature, cities are the perfect embodiment of niche construction in the Anthropocene. This goes beyond location and extends to land and infrastructure, lending credence to the idea that urbanization is a planetary process. The main analysis scrutinizes three facets of the relationship between cities and the natural environment and indicates their social and political implications for environmental political theory in the Anthropocene: first, cities and nature are physically interrelated; second, cities and nature are socially, economically and politically interdependent; and third, cities and nature are qualitatively and experientially different. As a result of it, it will be argued that politics is either narrowed to implementation of techno-managerial reforms (e.g. sustainable urbanism) or short-circuited in the name of ‘alternative cosmologies’ (the natural city). The former is conservative in its relationship to existing social and political values, the latter utilizes a revolutionary rhetoric though it tries to transcend existing social and political structures. This denotes that neither a universal and depoliticized notion of sustainable urbanism nor a short-circuited vision of a ‘natural city’ is adequate. Instead, the need for the critical civic engagement with existing urban practices and the socio-environmental and political values ascribed to them must be acknowledged.
