ABSTRACT
Within the contemporary context of environmental crises and rapid urbanisation in South Asia and elsewhere, this chapter reviews the emergence and development of approaches such as urban environmental history (UEH) and urban political ecology (UPE) in South Asia, and shows the significance of integrating these perspectives to convey larger and deeper narratives of urban environmental governance. The chapter demonstrates the usefulness of combining archival research with political ethnography to advance nuanced investigations on South Asian urban infrastructural and environmental governance. It argues that integrated perspectives can reveal the roles of religion, caste, class, ethnicity, as well as the choreographies of power and embodiments, in managing and governing urban ecologies of diverse and plural urban landscapes in South Asia. Finally, the framework of historical urban political ecology (HUPE), a cross between UEH and UPE, is presented, making a case for its potential to blur North-South binaries and to contribute to more comprehensive, temporally dynamic, and politicised understandings of global urban environmental governance that are sensitive to local specificities and complexities.
