ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the strange trajectory of how the relationship between cities and environments has been scripted over the past century. It argues that new metabolized socio-ecological relations that could operate within emerging different political-economic frameworks. The chapter considers the discourses of the more radical voices such as those of the environmental political movements or the various indignados' that over the past few years have been demanding a new constituent democratic process. It explores three perspectives that have galvanized more politicized thinking and practice around the urban environmental question, namely urban sustainability, urban environmental justice, and urban political ecology. Urban Environmental Justice (UEJ) perspectives have been much more sensitive to the inherently conflicting and power-laden processes of urbanizing natures and the creation of unjust urban socio-environmental conditions through elite-based techno-managerial fixes. Urban political ecology (UPE) shifts attention to the socio-ecological inequalities embodied in and shaped by the reproduction of capitalist urbanization itself.
