The Political Ecology of Everyday Life under Settler Colonialism II – Reporting from Palestine

By Melissa García Lamarca Picking up from the first post by several ENTITLE fellows on our experiences in Palestine at the International Conference of Critical Geography, this post focuses on dispossession, appropriation and the erasure of (certain) histories in the city of Jaffa. Traveling from Ramallah to Jaffa: a lesson on dispossession through cement As …

Dimensions of Political Ecology 2016

by Patrick Bigger* The Kentucky-based conference has grown into one of the largest gatherings of political ecologists in the world—registration for the upcoming sixth edition will open in September. The University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group (UK-PEWG) recently began circulating a call-for-papers for the 6th annual Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE): Conference on Nature/Society …

Alimentando otros modelos: cultivar entre las ruinas de la crisis

by José Luis Fernández Casadevante, Kois* Según Naciones Unidas los huertos comunitarios son una buena práctica de sostenibilidad urbana. El auge de la agricultura en nuestras ciudades es un símbolo del cambio de ciclo económico, la efervescencia social y las iniciativas de autoorganización ciudadana. En nuestro libro "Raíces en el asfalto" reivindicamos la huertopía (hortus+topos), un …

Empty living: inhabiting the residues of Spain’s urbanisation tsunami

by Melissa Garcia Lamarca The bust of Spain’s real estate boom has left 3.4 million empty housing units across the country. By 'inhabiting' empty or unfinished housing units, Agustín Ortiz Herrera's Empty Living project underlines the contradictions and consequences of the housing boom and the frustrations generated by its failure. Over seven years ago, Spain’s …

Lessons from the Collectivisation of Aigües de Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939)

After almost eight decades the story of the collectivisation of Aigües de Barcelona during the time of the Spanish Civil War emerges as highly insightful given today's context of European crisis and the parallel worldwide trend towards re-municipalisation of water management. * The changes that Barcelona’s Avinguda Diagonal underwent since it was renamed and lost …

Barcelona, the dead city

  Underneath the attractive brand of Barcelona we find corruption, racism and impunity, from the police to the legal and administrative system. In the documentary Ciutat Morta we discover how undesirable citizens are expendable within an urban-touristic model that cannot be disturbed. The documentary Ciutat Morta (Dead City in English) released in 2013 is now …

Emotions in struggle: reflections on militant/activist research processes

by Melissa Garcia Lamarca I can’t sleep at night, in fact I’m taking sleeping pills regularly, but my dreams are filled with children grasping on to me for help. The other day one of my comrades (compañeros) sent a foreign television crew to our squatted building for an interview, which was not supposed to last …

Diarrhoea and sanitation: let’s get over “panacea” approaches to disease

by Panagiota Kotsila About a year ago, journalist Rose George gave a TED-talk about sanitation and diarrhoea in which she invited people to “talk crap, seriously” and got almost 1.5 million views. Today, after four years of researching this topic, I realize we need to question George’s speech. It is indeed a frustrating reality that …

Landscape politics of ‘swiftlet farming’ in George Town, Malaysia

by Creighton Conolly --- This post originally appeared on Season 3 of the LSE Cities Blog 'Urban Vignettes' on October 27th, 2014. --- Since September last year I have been conducting fieldwork for my doctoral research on urban birds' nest harvesting (or ‘swiftlet farming’) in Malaysian cities – a fiercely debated topic in the country …

Connecting past and present socio-ecological struggles: The “Barceloneta Cooperative Memory Project”

by Irmak Ertör, Melissa Garcia Lamarca and Santiago Gorostiza Barceloneta is one of the most charismatic neighbourhoods in the city of Barcelona. It has a powerful history of cooperatives run autonomously by their workers and inhabitants. The history of the neighbourhood—its name meaning 'little Barcelona'—dates back to the 18th century. It was previously inhabited by …