ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the participation of women in the restoration process. It introduces feminist analysis and theory to a still-emerging urban political ecology. The chapter aims to expand upon current debates on the political meaning and implications of voluntarism and its widespread growth as an instrument of urban service provision at the turn of the twenty-first century. It also explains Holston's concept of "insurgent citizenship" and social theories of political performance as especially powerful. The chapter focuses on the recent claims of discursive Nature's reemergence and re-signification in urban policy and planning as a means for capital accumulation, ecological gentrification, and/or social regulation. It discusses the various debates over voluntarism's meaning and function, as either an instrument of local empowerment or of state authority. The chapter analyses the voluntary activity in Cobbs Creek Park using the concepts. It concludes the help account for civic environmentalism among Philadelphia's most marginalized constituency.
