ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to map different understandings of the "urban" in Urban Political Ecology (UPE) and to render the more explicit while pushing the field for greater conceptual clarity. It discusses the question of how the different strands of UPE understand the "urban": the traditional Marxist UPE as metabolic process shaped by power and the more recent post colonial perspectives as pluralized socio-natures that act as arenas for the everyday political. The chapter explains the political ecology across the urban/rural divide that could engage more systematically in the question of where the urban is located, as well as which processes of production of socio-nature are specific to the urban. Urban Political Ecology emerged as a more or less coherent research field in the late 1990sto examine the production of urban nature. UPE uses the concept of metabolism to firmly integrate non-human agency with human agency in the analysis of urban processes.
