About the Symposium

This symposium brings together leading researchers to explore the complex and dynamic interrelationships between urban environments and nature. As cities worldwide face unprecedented challenges from climate change, rapid urbanisation and social inequality, understanding how nature is conceived, governed and experienced in urban contexts has never been more crucial. 

This event foregrounds perspectives from the Global South, challenging dominant Western narratives and showcasing innovative approaches to urban nature. Through dialogue between diverse disciplinary perspectives and geographic contexts, we aim to develop more inclusive, equitable and sustainable frameworks for understanding urban socio-ecological change.

Schedule April 15 Roundtable Symposium

Location: 13.19 Arts Tower, University of Sheffield

12:30 - 13:25: Networking Lunch

Connect with fellow participants over lunch.

13:30 - 14:25: Opening Dialogue (Q&A session following)

A conversation between:

- Efadul Huq (Smith College)

- Ishita Chatterjee (O. P. Jindal Global University)

- Omar Pérez Figueroa (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

14:30 - 15:35: Panel 1: Institutional Dimensions of Urban Nature

Chaired by Shizhi Zhang (University of Sheffield) 

15:40 - 16:45: Panel 2: Everyday Dimensions of Urban Nature

Chaired by Adriana Laura Massidda (University of Sheffield)

16:45 - 17:00: Concluding remarks

Livestream link: https://meet.google.com/ytz-wikh-byc
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Panel 1: Institutional Dimensions of Urban Nature

This panel explores how institutional frameworks, governance structures, and planning approaches shape urban nature across different contexts. Importantly, "institutional" isn't only about top-down approaches but also encompasses community-driven initiatives and grassroots frameworks that create alternative pathways for engaging with urban nature.

Cynthia Wamukota (University of Oxford)

Western perspectives on urban nature-based solutions are shaped by formal governance structures. Conversely, urban systems in Africa are often fragmented, with community-driven initiatives emerging as viable solutions. By leveraging social capital and indigenous knowledge, programs like South Africa's VPUU revitalise neglected spaces, while Nigeria's Makoko Floating School addresses climate challenges through informal innovation. Nairobi's Kibera vertical farms promote food security and urban greening. Such initiatives challenge dominant narratives, encouraging the reevaluation of "nature-based" concepts in Global South cities. Foregrounding the experiences and leadership of African urban residents allows for envisioning alternative socio-ecological frameworks rooted in justice, equity, and local capacity.

Dayu Sari (University of Edinburgh)

Urbanisation drives widespread landscape transformation, particularly in the rapidly expanding urban and peri-urban areas in Global South countries. Loss of blue and green infrastructure (BGI) is an inevitable consequence of intensifying land use change, contributing to environmental degradation and diminishing cultural ecosystem services (CES) that contribute to human well-being (experiences, identities, and capabilities). Through a case study of Jakarta, the largest urban agglomeration in Southeast Asia, this research aims to explore the planning and management of BGI to enhance CES delivery. Drawing from landscape ecology perspectives, it integrates spatial analysis and participatory mapping to assess BGI and its cultural benefits, informing context-driven planning that prioritises human-nature interaction.

Pedro Andrés Muñoz Santibáñez (University of Sheffield)

This research examines Santiago de Chile's urban-nature relationship across history and how it is perceived by stakeholders. Through a literature review, five key periods of urban planning reveal cyclical attempts at ecological integration, contrasting with stakeholder perceptions. The colonial era (XVI-XVIII) and dictatorship (70s-80s) periods were marked by disconnection, with little interest in developing green infrastructure. In contrast, the Republic modernisation (mid 19th) and the social and political revolution (1960) show significant efforts to reconnect the city with nature. However, since the return of the democracy (90s-present), despite reintroducing a nature-friendly approach post-dictatorship, remain constrained by entrenched biases and inconsistent implementation, with stakeholders holding a negative view of historical urban planning.

Shirish Joshi (De Montfort University)

Through research conducted in 22/23 as part of an architectural design studio supported by Council of Architecture India's Urban Studio Research Project, we bring two cases of local and small-scale food production of Mumbai Metropolitan Region, as evidence of how communities retain or evolve their fundamental relationship with nature by continuing to produce food while the forces of urbanization engulf, subsume and in many cases obliterate these practices. These cases highlight their seminal connection with nature, and their increasingly fragile ability to grow food with nature. Food, we believe is central to the question of urban nature.

Emilia Arpini (University of Glasgow)

Across Latin America, various actors are engaging in participatory initiatives that defend and create green urban public spaces against forms of environmental extractivism, privatisation and community dispossession. My research focuses on Argentinian cities as focal points of this phenomenon. I show how workers in the popular economy sector, who have been excluded from the formal labour market, are finding new ways to make a living by creating cooperative agroecological workplaces on previously abandoned public lands, with the dual aim of fostering social inclusion and promoting environmental regeneration. My presentation is based on qualitative research conducted for my PhD thesis.

Panel 2: Everyday Dimensions of Urban Nature

This panel explores how urban nature is experienced, negotiated and transformed through everyday practices and interactions.

Bruna Montuori / Dasha Moschonas (University College London)

This contribution draws from Listen, Learn, and Leap, a collaborative project on equitable nature-based solutions in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. We focus on initiatives mapped across informal settlements in both cities and how their emergence is shaped by the ecologies and politics of the watershed. These initiatives, soon to feature in a co-developed NbS online map, carry stories of exclusion, resilience and care, shaped by and shaping urban nature. Rather than positioning nature as a solution, we centre it as a narrator—one that speaks through flood lines and community action, exposing tensions between technocratic adaptation and lived ecologies.

Monica Martin Grau (University of Sheffield)

This paper explores daily acts of 'infrastructural tinkering'. The concept builds on phenomenological literature of repair and maintenance, as well as the ordinary life of infrastructures for the study of unaccomplished socio-material aspirations. The analysis of barriers and enablers for getting water in Nairobi (Kenya) unveils 6 patterns through which research participants put together their limited emotional, social and material resources to reinstall the normality of their world, constituting practice-based boundaries for the changes they pursue. The reading of these patterns through incremental lenses expands traditional Urban Political Ecology (UPE) debates on the production of socionatures for advancing contemporary climate transition debates.

Manas Murthy (University of Huddersfield)

Following up on my doctoral research on the upwardly mobile middle class and their elite securitized enclaves in Delhi, India, this research adopts a posthumanist approach to study class dynamics through the relationships between stray dogs, pet dogs, and humans (owners, dogwalkers, municipal officials). Driven by 'bourgeois environmentalism' (Baviskar, 2020) and most recently the adoption of the Animal Birth Control Rules (2023), there has been a spotlight on the sterilisation and immunisation of stray dogs (not to mention other simian populations). Evocative of the emotion that the famous "Sada Kutta Kutta, Tuhada Kutta Tommy" [Our dog is just a dog, but your dog is privileged enough to have the name Tommy] meme, this research reconceives the socio-enviro-political ecology that is produced.

Mateus Lira (University of Sheffield)

My PhD research explores the interplay of relocation and occupation in environmentally fragile areas in the peripheries of Sao Paulo, Brazil. I will present an analysis of empirical material on how residents in self-built neighbourhoods contest technocratic resettlement interventions, combining Urban Political Ecology and Latin American theories on Territory. I pay particular attention to 'terrain' as the political materiality of territory. I show how local residents shape new epistemologies on urban nature while transforming terrain with their own hands. In doing so, they politicise possibilities of settlement through material and discursive re-makings of dry/wet, safe/dangerous, green/grey.

Bhawani Buswala (University of Oxford)

My research conceptualizes urban nature by examining the socio-ecological dimensions of squatter settlements in Indian cities. I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi to show how neighbourhood-level waste picking and plastic recycling livelihood help us document the urban dynamics of caste, climate, and the state in South Asia. My project shows how the top-down climate actions brought through plastic bans in the city increase livelihood insecurities. It highlights how planned mitigation action comes into tension with the adaptation intentions of the state, nesting additional risks for the urban poor. Nature thus becomes a socio-economically differentiated reality.

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There is a follow-up webinar on the same topic on 23rd April, 12 to 2 pm (BST). Links to be shared closer to the date.