ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a pedagogy of urban ecosystems responsive to crises of climate change, species extinction, and racialized global inequality through the lens of Henri Lefebvre’s idea of “the right to the city” and the Marxist concept of metabolic rift. Using Kim Stanley Robinson’s fictional account of New York City in 2140 as a literary frame, the chapter defines the pedagogical challenges of fostering critical literacy, a capacity to critique the system that conditions us, and recognition of the centrality of class division and struggle in shaping human destiny. It then discusses the contingencies of sustainable development under capitalism and suggests key concepts for educators to use in teaching urban sustainability in classrooms and communities that can unveil the essential relations of production that now pose an existential threat to humanity yet also can give rise to the collective struggle that can potentially avert catastrophe and reset the course of history: the Great Acceleration of global warming in the mid-20th century, the metabolic rift between humanity and nature that begins to occur in the 19th century and intensified rapidly since the World War II era, and the manifesto of the right to the city.
