Imagining a new—human and nonhuman—grammar of urban life.
In this book, the animal becomes an entry point to try and kind of write about the urban without resorting to mutual suspects.
Sandra Jasper:One way to develop this work is to look more closely at how nature changes, and cities are a great place to look at that.
Narrator:The book Lively Cities Reconfiguring Urban Ecology departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities, drawing attention to a suite of beings, human and nonhuman, that make up the material politics of city making. From a cox in Delhi to parakeet colonies in London, this book examines the rhythms, paths, and agency of nonhumans across the city and in the process reconceptualizes several key themes in urban thought, including infrastructure and design, and ultimately proposes a new grammar of urban life. Here, author Man Barua, University lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge, is in conversation with Sandra Jasper, a geographer and urbanist who is assistant professor of geography and gender at Humboldt University of Berlin.
Sandra Jasper:Dear Mann, hello. It's lovely to talk to you today about, your new book that has just come out, Lively Cities Reconfiguring Urban Ecology. And your book is really about challenging how we think about cities taking animals and other non human beings seriously in co producing the urban. And what we want to do today in this podcast is discuss Marlon's book and also some wider questions that come out of the book and other kinds of work around urban natures about how we might rethink the urban through other species and human nonhuman relations. So we think about animals and cities, but always of course in relation to and with people, in a meshwork, as you call it, of relations that also involves materials, build structures, infrastructures, wires, and cables that we can see so beautifully on the cover of your book, bird feeders and many other things.
Sandra Jasper:Really, it's about collective city making by broadening who's counted as part of the collective. So it's really about opening up the collective that co produces urban space. And you said that the aim of the book is to contribute to urban scholarship, maybe rather than fields like animal studies or urban ecology more narrowly defined. It is to intervene in what you understand as the urban in a major key so that the animal protagonists in your book are really vectors into wider urban issues. And so maybe we want to start off with that question.
Sandra Jasper:You can tell us a little bit more about that, about the wider urban issues that you engage with in your book and the questions about the urban that, for example, cattle or macaques or parakeets help unravel. How did you go about doing this in your work?
Maan Barua:Well, thank you so much, Sandra. And it's, really a great pleasure to be in conversation with you, given your amazing work on on urban nature in Berlin and elsewhere. But let me kind of go back to the question that you posed. You know, what is this book intervening in and what is it trying to do? And it's it's this figure of of of the major, what I call major in the text that I think the book is trying to, you know, rub up against.
Maan Barua:By the major I mean the urban as is written with a particular human constant at the center of it right? So but going back to what you're asking about this question of the major and you know why bring the non human into the urban but yet not claim this is a book on animal studies or solely a book on animal studies, I think really gets to the heart of the matter. Because if we think of urbanicity, it is a collective endeavor. And, you know, as I see it flagged up and as I discussed in the book, it's about life in a meshwork, which is about the relations between people, animals, plants, things, materials, you know, forces, but also immaterial or kind of spectral entities as well, which the book is sort of populated by. So the endeavor here, I think, for me was to really try and grasp urbanicity as this broader transversal sort of condition.
Maan Barua:I refer to the major because I think a lot of urban theory is woefully inadequate when it comes to dealing with these things. Now in your work, it certainly isn't. These things come right to the foreground. But there is a tendency in much urban scholarship to be focused on particular kinds of concepts, to be focused on particular vantage points, but also I think more importantly the ethnography itself is quite limited. So in this book, so when you say the animal is a vector for me, the animal becomes an entry point to try and kind of write about the urban without resorting to the usual suspects.
Maan Barua:And the reason why I say this is not solely a book in animal studies is because I don't want it to be, you know, in a silo. I think where a lot of animal studies is going is the animal itself becomes a dead end. But in this endeavor, the animal actually opens up a whole other urban world or urban world that's reverberates within what we call the city or what we call the urban understood in the major key. And I think the endeavor therefore is to try and bend the urban canon is to say, ah, okay, this is how urban city has been sort of specified and, you know, these are the central texts, these are central ideas. But looking at nonhuman life or other than human life, you start seeing a whole range of other stories or other beings that participate in the material politics of city making.
Maan Barua:And therefore, I think this is what the book is really trying to do and therefore I kind of try to pitch my tent within the canon of urban studies. And the second question I think about you know cattle macaques or parakeets and what do they unravel. I think each of them gives you a different picture of the city. So when you're looking at cattle, it's a story of the urban pastoral that's continuously reemerges in spite of sort of intense capitalist urbanization. With macaques, you see a whole other story of infrastructure, the genesis of urban form, the electric wires, and so on and so forth.
Maan Barua:And with barricades, and in London, you know, the barricade becomes a kind of uncanny interlocutor for thinking about the rootedness of nature and whether London's natures are post colonial because barricades were birds that were brought from India and parts of Africa, by the pet trade. And then they went feral. They escaped captivity and went feral. And you start kind of trying to think about nature through a very unlikely, figure, which is I use the word unlikely because it's not typical urban nature as you would think of it. So that's how I think I came, to these ideas.
Maan Barua:It also speaks quite a bit to your work, Sandra, on on thinking about, you know, abandonment, thinking about the acoustic ecologies of cities, your work on urban plants. But one question that I would kind of want to pose a few here is that you think we are kind of moving away from this thesis, the old thesis of the urbanization of nature which is very central to the endeavor of urban political ecology to a new recognition of urban natures. And would you be able to kind of pass this distinction?
Sandra Jasper:Yes. Thank you for that question. And I think, while your work totally speaks to that question, so I'm going to wrap it into my answer. But also the work of other scholars, for example, Matthew Gandy, who has been key in making that point or argument that there has been little engagement in urban scholarships with what we might term the biophysical sciences or those fields that actually study different forms of nature, animals, etcetera, more deeply. And I think the criticism around the work that studies how nature is produced under capitalist urbanization, and that is really important work for sure.
Sandra Jasper:But the critique is that it has a somewhat flat or static conception of nature. One way to develop this work is to look more closely at how nature changes and cities are a great place to look at that. How animals adapt, how they even genetically change, for example, how they change through our interventions in their life worlds. And you have these beautiful stories about the macaques who raised their hand, and the work of ethologists in your book as well. So I think that is something that your work really speaks to that the very important work on, the capitalist production of urban nature needs to be extended to look more closely at different kinds of nature, different species, different animals, because as you show beautifully with the cattle, macaques, parakeets, and all the other protagonists, each of them are enrolled in very different relations that are different also in terms of the effects of capitalism might have on them.
Sandra Jasper:Cattells tell a very different stories than pirate kits, for example. I think this is one point. Another point I think is that people do care for nature and people enter relationships with nature. And these relationships are not always easily just framed through a capitalist lens. And these relationships of care, of effect, positive and negative in a way go beyond kind of simplistic critiques of romantic ideas of taking pleasure in nature, I think as well.
Sandra Jasper:And you show that beautifully in your book, the relationship between people and macaques and both, both are marginalized and, and have these very particular relations. And I think other fields are interesting to bring in here. I think urban history, for example, has contributed a lot and has a long term engagement with looking at animals in cities. So that kind of work could also be brought in a little bit more through scholars like Sonja Dumpelmann or Dorte Prance. And then there are important questions around the ethical and political relations, around co inhabiting cities and the treatment of other than humans and humans.
Sandra Jasper:And you, as I said before, show in the book how people and certain animals live on the margins together. So are there bonds that are created? Are there alliances that could be created and dependencies that exist? And so maybe some interesting work, that goes beyond the urbanization of nature work is also work that looks at questions around the rights of nature, current debates, for example, around legal personhood, of rivers, for example, that could be brought into urban theory, I think, in interesting ways. And people you work with, for example, Tom Frey, also make interesting interventions in the field, both of urban theory and urban ecology in studying an individual fox.
Sandra Jasper:I think that's quite radical. Moving away from population based studies, moving away from the idea that all individuals are the same. All urban foxes are the are the same. They are not. So there's a shift now, I think, where geographers, urban scholars engage with these questions around urban nature in new and interesting ways.
Sandra Jasper:And I think another contribution, maybe moving on. I don't know if you want to respond, but I'm I'm just putting another question into the room to keep kind of a dialogue. But another question might be, how to look beyond the study of a particular place. And I think what you do in your work, especially in chapters around commensality is to connect two different cities, Delhi and London in the book, and bring out both historical and contemporary interconnections. There's a shift in perspective here.
Sandra Jasper:You say you shift the analytical gaze by starting from Delhi to look at London, which is kind of turning things upside down in the context of maybe post colonial theory, post colonial thinking. And you also make an important contribution to comparative urbanism. So there's a lot of debate in urban theory about how to compare, how to compare in the perfect way, how not to compare. And I think, taking these, different animals as a starting point makes these connections between places in a beautiful way and they're empirically grounded these comparisons. And maybe you can tell us a little bit about some of those connections.
Maan Barua:Well, thanks. Maybe I should just go back to the comment you made earlier about history, which I think is is really vital in any endeavor of comparison. And you're thinking of, you know, your work on non human agency in this and, you know, the debates around new materialism that we need to historicize agency. And I think that really is very vital when we are looking across cities because different cities, Delhi and London have certain shared histories, but also divergences. And I think the crux for me is, you know, in the endeavor of comparison is to say, well, cities diverge.
Maan Barua:And it's not that Delhi is at the bottom of an inclined plane aspiring to be London. You know, you do have these discourses within the city of striving to be a world class city and so on and so forth. But on the other hand, that, you know, urban form takes on its own singularity that it goes along particular trajectories because of a specific historical precedent to it. So I think this question of history becomes really important when we look at comparison. So for instance, why is it that in London you have the metropolitan dairies being removed in the nineteenth century, whereas in Delhi, the same thing is initiated by the colonial government.
Maan Barua:But what you see is that the dairies persist in this sort of macro political or what I call a molecular kind of economic form. So I think definitely the question of history. But the second thing with this comparison was one thing that struck me when I was doing field work in Delhi was the prevalence of commensality. You know, these practices of feeding animals, harnessing divine energies because you feed macaques, you get a diffuse merit from God and so on and so forth. And then you start seeing all these economies around these practices.
Maan Barua:So for me commensality became quite a central analytic in the two Delhi chapters of macaques. And when I was doing field work in London I started noticing people feeding birds all over the place. But for me, it was not starting with, ah, okay. People here feed pigeons and barricades and so on and so forth. It was actually my fieldwork in Delhi that made me sensitive to these relations.
Maan Barua:And then it opens up a whole other gamut of trajectories that things take, right from the design of bird feeders to the bird feed industry being like a 25,000,000, industry. All of this now going up with the lockdown, more and more people feeding birds, but also the historicity to it in London. It starts in the late nineteenth century, it's largely a working class pursuit, bird feeders are then commercially kind of advertised to the elites and you know how this sort of by the early twentieth century bird feeding becomes said to be I think in Punch, you know Britain's national pastime, something like that. So you know I think it was the analytic intel and I know there's quite a few people who are working on this now in The UK, there's Gary Marvin and his colleagues who've got this wonderful project on bird feeding. But for me really was to think of it from Delhi and in a way I think it's about reversing the gaze that you know you don't start with concepts that you generate in for lack of a better word the West and, you know, take them to look at phenomena in India.
Maan Barua:But for me, it was really like, ah, commensality is something that allows me to see the city in a particular way. And what if I take this concept and start looking at London? And I think my conclusion is that from that endeavor is that, you know, you see that natures in London are post colonial. You know, they're not urban nature without without that history. You have to write that colonial history into understanding urban natures.
Maan Barua:And I think this is coming up in a lot of people's work, including your own thinking in Berlin. But I think there are two other aspects to comparison that I'd like to briefly talk about. One is in this endeavor of how do we compare, what do we compare, I I think the key aspect is to see whether a community attests or rejects the analytical filter you want to impose. So for me, commensality worked, but not quite because, you know, when you take the figure of the parakeet, it is also about hostility, who is not welcome to the, you know, to the bird feeder. So the whole question of xenophobia and so on.
Maan Barua:So I talk more about virality rather than the question of being commensal. So I think the question of, community attesting to a filter, and that community has to be broad. It can't just be your interlocutors or humans or people, but also the others and human beings that you're looking at. If they refuse to be filtered by an analytic, I think that analytic does not work. And my final point on comparison, I think it's also interesting to think of comparisons within cities.
Maan Barua:So when you're starting to look at cattle versus macaques, you see very, very different things. So it's not, you know, it's the intercity comparison that people like Colin McFarlane have talked about, I think, is interesting. And the final point is also that we should think of these relations or these histories and their singularity, right, that it is not, ah, this is all common everywhere, but it's actually these divergences, these differences that make a comparative sort of reading of a banister degenerative. But, you know, to push this argument further, there are some sort of resonances with the way you think of deal with pastoral because it it's quite prominent in the book, in my book, on on Delhi and how the pastoral form is reinvented in spite of these sort of grand claims for planetary urbanization that actually non capitalist relations remain imminent to the urban form in in a city like Delhi. So what would you think of an idea like that?
Maan Barua:Would it work in a place like Berlin or, you know, how does it operate?
Sandra Jasper:Well, that's an interesting question. I've used, the urban pastoral in relation to an abandoned airfield, in Berlin that's now being inhabited by skylarks. And I've used this word, the acoustic pastoral, because the sound of the skylark is traditionally associated with rural landscapes and has played an important cultural role historically as well. And also in this airfield, we have sheep grazing and these kind of formerly agricultural practices that are being reinvented in the context of conservation. So I've used the pastoral in this context.
Sandra Jasper:And the critique of the pastoral in a kind of Northern European urban context is always that it's kind of romanticizing this kind of romanticized aesthetics of former working class relations. But I think there's more to it, in the context of Berlin. And I think there's more to it, in comparison to other spaces that have been theorized extensively, like the New York High Line, for example, where you have this new romanticist aesthetic. But in Berlin, I think you can see emerging discussions about the relationship between the urban and the rural and the need to think through this relationship more thoroughly and to bring in this relationship between the rural and the urban also back into urban scholarship. Because what we see is that the conservation practices that are happening in the urban context are much more elaborate now than in a rural context.
Sandra Jasper:That we see a lot of social and ecological problems, of agricultural intensification in areas like Brandenburg surrounding Berlin. And that's a lot of effort in conservation and also urban discourses around conservation is going into theorizing Berlin or cities more generally. So I think the pastoral might raise some questions here. I think it has a different meaning, and I'm curious to hear how you conceptualize it in the context of Delhi, but I think it it plays an important role. And what's more widely in the context of what we might frame green urbanism or climate adaptive urbanism, there are controversial projects happening in Berlin or around Berlin in Brandenburg, actually, like the Tesla Gigafactory in Brandenburg that is causing huge ecological disasters, water scarcity, etcetera.
Sandra Jasper:But when this area was ecologically evaluated before the factory was built, it was framed as having no ecological value. So the question is, how are processes of degradation historically overlapping and reinforcing more of exploitation, degradation, etcetera. And how can we bring in spaces that are not that far from the urban center even, the peri urban or the rural back into urban theory, and make it more relational in that sense. That's a contribution that this concept might potentially bring. But let me let me ask you, what's your perspective on the urban pastoral is, in lively cities.
Maan Barua:I invoke the pastoral in two senses. So one is kind of working with scholars of South Asia who argue that the urban in South Asia is an agrarian question. But secondly, that kind of invocation of the pastoral is is also a critique of the thesis of planetary urbanization, that urbanization takes on particular forms, it takes on a capitalist form increasing with velocity and so on and so forth. And I think in Delhi what you see is yes the enclosure of grazing grounds, erstwhile pastoral spaces now being built up, earlier villagers who would herd cows and so on and so forth now having to kind of survive in the interstices of the urban. But at the same time the rise of cattle grazing in you know in streets amidst ephemeral garbage dumps and so on so forth you see a new kind of pasture, a toxic one, albeit, but a new kind of pasture that's beginning to emerge in, in the city.
Maan Barua:And I think that allows us to really think, well, is it capitalist urbanization, you know driving everything down and out and with the richnesses of one kind of urban form or do we actually see these things which are very almost fractal they kind of reinvent the city in these you know in these minor kind of ways. That was my vocation of the pastoral that, you know, these pastures get reinvented. I think it's it's also interesting in in terms of your work and and the and the first question that you posed that we have to stop imagining that these things are just epiphenomena where whether they are the urban acoustic pastoral in Berlin or Delhi with just 12,000 cattle on the streets. These are not epiphenomena which should be sort of in the margins of urban theory. They are central to the way we should understand or think about urbanization.
Maan Barua:And this is this was my invocation of the minor key that it you have to stay within the language, the major language, and develop a patois to develop another kind of tone, another way of speaking. I think the project that's where the project really becomes interesting.
Sandra Jasper:Yeah. I think I mean, one key contribution your book makes to me and your research and perspective and more generally in all of your work is that you don't shy away from speaking to the scientists, the natural scientists. And I think it's it's not surprising to talk to experts on animal behavior as key informants for us if we study animals in cities. It's rather surprising that this is not being done much more. And while one question could be, why do you think this is not happening more?
Sandra Jasper:Is there this kind of skepticism in urban theory about natural sciences or the problematics that scientific perspectives might bring along, which they also do? Or are there other reasons? Yeah. In a way, scholarship and theory is interdisciplinary per se. Many people say that, but it's a selection of disciplines.
Sandra Jasper:It's disciplines like engineering, planning, architecture, sociology, geography, you know, but it's maybe less ethology, maybe less, ecology and other fields, maybe less other kinds of biology that might help us understand what's happening in cities. Yeah. One question is, why do you think there's so little engagement? It's it's a stupid question posing this to you because you're engaging in this, but maybe you have a clue because I'm wondering. And also, maybe more interestingly, a question to you.
Sandra Jasper:How has this interdisciplinary collaboration with ethologists in Delhi shaped and changed your approach to studying the urban? What kind of conversations have you had? What were the most important hurdles or the most productive moments?
Maan Barua:That's a great question. And just to add to, you know, what you're saying about what collaborations we have or we don't, it's almost ironic, isn't it, that so much of sort of animal geography and animal studies have focused on animals, but rarely will they talk to ethologists. Vinciane Despreys is is a remarkable exception and she does that really beautifully. But by and large, and this has been my sort of frustration with a lot of animal geographies and animal studies is that they will not or very rarely have they said ah let's get a bunch of ethologists here and trash out what they think an animal is. I think the difficulties here are twofold, one as you kind of rightly mentioned is the skepticism in some ways of engaging with the sciences.
Maan Barua:But the second is also on their part, you know the science wars didn't help us and they often see social scientists with, you know, view social scientists with suspicion or they think, ah, they're going to tell us everything we do is constructed. So, you know, what's the point in engaging? But I've had I've been deeply enriched by my friend and collaborator Anindya Sinha, who's, by Far India's leading ethologist who studied bonnet macaques in South India for over over twenty five years and has done remarkable work on animal ethology. And my conversations with him and he's you know he's a close collaborator on you know all the urban work that we've been doing. His conversations that I've had with him have been kind of deeply enriching but and we've written about this together that you know it's a conversation between geography and ethology and what does it mean.
Maan Barua:And we say that a conversation is a very difficult endeavor because sometimes you're talking to one another, which is great. At other at other points, you're talking past one another. And at other points, you might even be at loggerheads. And I think working with Anindya or Rana as we fondly call him, we've had very tense moments in in our discussions, but we've always let epistemologies not come into the way of our friendship. And I think it's that conversation across epistemology that's really been very generative.
Maan Barua:And what I've learned, I mean, I've I've probably learned way more from him than he has from me. But one thing is actually rigor. There's a certain rigor, and I don't mean rigor in the sort of masculinist or scientific kind of sense. It's about rigor the rigor of observation that he brings in. So when you make any claims about animal lives or none other than human lives it is backed up by meticulous observation and Ranao Arindya is the most astute observer of animal movement and behavior that I've seen.
Maan Barua:He's amazing, he just sees a flick of a paw of a macaque which I wouldn't have noticed. He said, ah didn't you see the mother slap the infant? I said no I didn't see anything. He said, ah. Ah.
Maan Barua:So I think it's it is that, but it's also the generosity. I think, you know, working with and across fields for it to be genuinely interdisciplinary requires generosity on on both parts. And I think that itself is is a difficult endeavor. And for me, it's been conversations over a long, long time that's really enriched this work. And I think it's really vital if we as geographers as well engage with with this sociology because I mean, he food to one, the geographer said, well, the part of the education of a geographer must include the science of animal observation and animal behavior.
Maan Barua:But also I think the influence of non representational theory, for instance, in geography and this sort of Deleuze inflection. I mean Deleuze in in the book on Spinoza says that ethology is is the study of affect. Right? So can you think of ethology in in a minor key, ethology, which is not reduced to genes and the behavior of express expressions based on genes, but to the study of affect. And that's been one really productive conversation I've had with Anindya Sinha because he says, well, for him, affect was an interesting concept.
Maan Barua:He said, ah, with affect, you can actually bypass all these claims we need to do make about what the macaque is doing when you look at it through the lens of cognition. And it says affect actually allows you to then think about these relations in much more generative ways. And to cut a long story short, there there's a part in the book where I talk about this idea of niche construction through affect. The idea that do the affective relations that parakeets spark, do they actually enable them to construct niches within the urban environment? And now niche construction is a very evolutionary scientific idea, but we are exploring the possibility to say, ah, could this be another driver of evolution?
Maan Barua:And I think that then the conversation goes back. I think here social science concepts can be quite generative for ethology to think about evolution and, the rise of behavior in new ways. So this is an idea we're exploring, and I've kind of laid out some of the themes in the book.
Sandra Jasper:Yeah. One question I sometimes have is, like, working first on on urban botany, and then later now I'm, I'm working with bio acousticians who record animal sounds and they're coming out of animal, behavior science or ethology as well in Germany. And one connection I always feel that helps is that we are all working in the field or in the urban and not in a lab or not just by modeling or making kind of more abstract models around urban space. So that for me has been a kind of connector because also biocosticians or botanists, they think about urban politics as well, obviously, because of the field sites and the observations they make while they're working in, in cities. And, and I was wondering if, if that could be something that you encountered as well as a kind of connection that makes this work, this biological work that is field based so important because some of these disciplines are also moving away from that kind of work.
Maan Barua:Absolutely. I think the field element is is vital. And therefore, I've been working with Anindya Sinha to, you know, develop methods that are the interface between ethology and ethnography. And his interests are also saying, well, can you look at, you know, animal behavior in an ethnographic mode? I think that's where a lot of interesting conversations and future work will go because it allows us to go back to the urban, to go back to the city and say, ah, what is city making?
Maan Barua:But here we're just expanding this a bit more. You thought for instance, I mean, if you think about these sort of ideas about collaborations, if you think about a new urban theory, which has to do with cutting across, you know, disciplinary silos, you've thought, for instance, extensively about design in your work, and you've also kind of written about the possibilities for, you know, radically democratic spatial design. How do you think or where do you see sort of design practices moving after there being the sort of recognition of urban nature? And just to add to that, you know, what about a field like planning, a field that has done so much, but which is sort of hopelessly in need of invigoration? You know, where would you see this discipline?
Sandra Jasper:Yeah. I think maybe it's easier for me to answer to the urban design because I'm working now in a project together with urban designers who are really picking up a lot of this work around other than human presences in cities and questions around cohabitation, also in the field of architecture. And there was a very nice exhibition about one or two years ago called cohabitation by German architectural journal called Arch Plus, really scoping the history of urban ecology and the interconnections between architecture and ecology. And there are really interesting moments in that history from the 1920s to the 1970s and eighties. And I think now maybe is again a crucial moment where designers think about urban natures in different ways.
Sandra Jasper:And, yeah, I see some interesting practices. There are also minor practices, I would say, that are the most interesting. For example, practices that are sort of on the brink between conservation and design. There are interesting architects looking at how to accommodate birds and bats in the context of urban regeneration, especially urban regeneration in the context of energy efficiency and climate adaptation. Because what we see in Berlin, for example, is that a lot of facades, old facades from, tenement buildings that are crumbling and have all these nice crooks and gaps, where species can nest and live and interact with people.
Sandra Jasper:They are disappearing because facades are being insulated, making and making, buildings more energy efficient. So this is some some ways, designers are thinking about how to integrate, species that are being lost or in danger of being lost or their their spaces being lost, especially those, for example, birds that always come back to the same place, how to deal with that. And I think that that's quite interesting practice, but it's faced it's on the margins. It's faced obviously with a lot of projects that do not really care. And some of the legal structures as well that we have cannot answer to this.
Sandra Jasper:We have these kind of constant illegal battles between nature conservation and urban development and, schemes around what we call compensation. I mean, you notice compensation landscapes, compensation spaces where nature's being again, part of a metric, calculating the the damage that's being done and then trying to compensate elsewhere. But I think, yeah, these minor practices are are quite interesting, and I think, one point I would want to make, learning from the history of Berlin is that urban ecology was intrinsic within the degrees of landscape designers. So landscape designers in the seventies and eighties, getting their degrees had to go through modules where they learned how to identify plants, what the ecological dynamics of cities are. And I think this is really key knowledge that needs to be brought back into the education of designers, maybe even planners and architects as well.
Sandra Jasper:I have another question for you, maybe moving away from the practice to the text or to the language. Because I think in your work, language is really key. You talk about the urban grammars, a metaphor that speaks to that already. And I'm curious about how you deal with language and metaphors in your work, that refer to the relations of animals and place, often transferring those relations to people as well that are problematic or that we as kind of social scientists see as problematic. And maybe certain strands of natural sciences do not see it that way.
Sandra Jasper:In your chapter, the micro politics of virality, for example, you take up this deeply ingrained biotic nativism people express in London in relation to parakeets? And also what you term the effective micropolitics of race that come through when you talk to them? How do we deal with such urban grammars that are also coming from fields like invasion biology? Do we reject them? Do we engage with them?
Sandra Jasper:Do you see shifts in ecology, ethology itself, and how to deal with these, very problematic terms?
Maan Barua:That's a great question. You know, because these metaphors are material, you know, they they transform actions and practice. And the moment you label something as invasive, then the whole question of very militarized sort of metaphors accompany it like eradication control and so on and so forth. And in the book, I, you know, as you mentioned, I talk about the history of this Charles Elton, the Oxford Zoologist who comes up with the field of, invasion biology. And I think his ideas were being incubated at a time when there was you know very likely possibility of a German invasion of Britain during the second world war.
Maan Barua:For a lot of biologists Elton is seen as the prophet of you know what in Elton's words in these bombs waiting to detonate which are not nuclear bombs but invasive species, but the debates I think are shifting quite a bit so more recently a lot of scientists are talking about you know using the term non native rather than invasive per se. I mean non native too has its own history of designating what belongs and what doesn't, it goes back as I discuss in the book, to English common law. But the argument that some scientists try to make is that well rather than labeling something as invasive, which is necessarily by definition harmful in the biological kind of discourse, to talk about something as non native would sort of would mean that you shunned some of this. I think others who are a bit more radical or you could say minor practices within ecology talk about recombinance. You know, it's another scientific metaphor, but the idea is that well, it's not that the species is entirely invasive or just simply non native and there, they actually combine with other elements of the ecosystem to forge ecological relations, or what I would call by not novel but post colonial because of the history of colonialism.
Maan Barua:So I think within the sciences there's been a move to talk about this in less problematic ways, but they are very very divided. There are all these pieces of nature and science where one group of scientists are at war with another group around this. But I think it's it's important to be kind of mindful of a range of ecological discourses or metaphors that are that are at work.
Sandra Jasper:Yeah. I think it's interesting also because and I know you explicitly don't use the word Anthropocene in your book. I've heard you say that. I've read the book. I haven't found it.
Sandra Jasper:So it's true. But in terms of the current debates around, you know, landscape change, climate change, also the conditions for many species or especially those, for example, that migrate are changing, certain birds do not migrate anymore. And I think there's so much shifting, in terms of the debate of the relationship between a place that is constantly changing in a way and radically changing maybe also in a contemporary context and the origin of a species that we need to really rethink. And I think especially, the work in urban context and your work and and other work on kind of this idea of the city as an experiment that has these kind of radical conditions that are also extreme in many ways might also help, this discourse. That's my hunch.
Sandra Jasper:I don't know if you agree there are different concepts now also being introduced. For example, the cosmopolitan ecology, your work around recombinance, exactly
Maan Barua:that. Yes and I think metaphors like recombinance we have to be careful of but I think they are much more generative than talking about things like invasives. I mean species can be invasive in in a particular sense they do have detrimental effects but they also then can have generative effects and I think the field of recombinant ecology tries to kind of get at some of these questions. But just on this point on the Anthropocene, I try to write this book without plonking the Anthropocene into the middle because I think a) the academic debates around the Anthropocene are getting very saturated and also analytically it's become a bit of a dead end. So I thought well can I write any I hope a fairly rich text without resorting to this term?
Maan Barua:And and I think we can talk about urban natures, the movement of fauna, the transformation of nature, and so on and so forth, without necessarily just resorting to the Anthropocene with a capital a. But I hope the text does something more generative than just plonking the term in the middle.
Sandra Jasper:Absolutely. So another question I have, obviously, I need to ask you that question because you you are one of the key people who have kind of worked at the intersection of political economy and animal research, trying to kind of navigate that space on the labor of other than humans and how to conceptualize these relations is that in your book, you write and I quote you now, not all life gets placed under the economic structure that is capitalism. So you're actually moving away from maybe making that argument, but you're not, obviously. But what you're trying to do is to show to me really powerfully, and in detail the differences between different relations, constellations, cattle, parakeets. We've already mentioned that.
Sandra Jasper:And I think it's really a key contribution to be empirically grounded and specific at where and how ecology and political economy and urban urbanity intersect in diverse way, what the relations actually are without generalizing. And I think there's in a way to me, a bridge to be made to centering in a more differentiated way what we might term the work of nature or the labor of nature, maybe. If we look at feminist theory around care, feminist work around the invisible labor in the care sector, care work more generally, that we could maybe draw in. And I was curious whether you have any thoughts around that and whether there are any thoughts around building a different kind of political subject, subjectivity, collectivity, out of this. I I think your work does this so I hope I'm not reading into it.
Maan Barua:No. Thank you. That's a very thought provoking question. I think what I'm really wary of again is a lot of political ecologists you know kind of arguing that oh there's everything is capitalist now and the more than human or the other than human will just get subsumed into capitalist production and capitalist time. And it's certainly not the case you know as I argue in the book you know there are economic practices that that evade being subsumed within the temporality of capitalism and its spatial ordering of the city but of course that doesn't mean that these practices are always benign they have their other forms of exploitation that go on within but they're not capitalist you know and I think that's it's really important to be mindful I think of these variegated urban economies largely because urbanism is not just a story of capital orchestrating how cities work from on top they're not And I think here the work of the feminist work on feminist political economy work on care is is is really really vital and I think it's that one step from the kind of factory model that Marx based his work on largely And trying to think about the work rather than the labor, if you, you know, Marx get very hung up about that term.
Maan Barua:The work that non humans do, or other than humans do, you know, the body work, the work of care, you could think of metabolic work and so on and so forth. And I think here the work of Laura Fortunati, Sylvia Federici and people are really vital to kind of affective labor in that economic aspect. I think, you know, that's where a lot of productive thinking can go. But I think what's also vital here is is to be mindful that these other economic practices are not without their share of exploitation. It's not it's all benign.
Maan Barua:What kinds of alignments might allow for a more just urban future? For that, I think we really need to turn to actually existing practices, all kinds of experimentations that happen. And just to give you the example of banana vendors who forge certain alignments with with macaques in the city, You know, the state wants to get rid of the macaques, but the vendors do, you know, want the monkeys to be there. And they forge these sort of alignments, which are not always about proximity. They are about being together, the kind of common table, but not yet speaking to one another.
Maan Barua:It's a loose arrangement. And I think those practices can tell us a lot more about creative ways of surviving, you know, majoritarian onslaughts, I think, you know. So I would always go back to some kind of actually existing practice to say, well, you know, how can one build from this? But, you know, as we begin to wrap up our conversation, you know, I had one last question for you where I think, you know, on this question of capitalism, we are seeing throughout cities in the world, this sort of this phenomenon of abandonment. Just as much as the urban is exploding, we also see the emergence of derelict spaces, the rise of sort of abandoned housing plots, and so on and so forth.
Maan Barua:Notably, for instance, the phenomenon of shrinking cities like Detroit. And how would you think does abandonment feature here? And you know what kinds of collectives could be formed economic collectives around these? And do you think the other than human has a role within these sort of formations?
Sandra Jasper:Yeah. That's a really, really good question, especially since we're organizing a session on landscapes of abandonment at the German geography conference. So I've I've been thinking about this, not only in an urban context, But, yeah, I think abandoned sites on the one hand to me in my historical research on Berlin have been productive in the sense that they were overlooked maybe by majoritarian capitalist logics, but also they were produced through geopolitical processes. And this we can also see happening today in other regions. So in a way, they, on the one hand, open up a space for thinking the city otherwise.
Sandra Jasper:They've been quite inspirational spaces for scientists, for hermecologists to study urban nature, for artists, for cultural practices, cultural reappropriation of people, urban citizens doing various things. So they've kind of become in the history of Berlin. Many of them were lost with development pressure, but also some of them became part of an urban commons. So there is this potential of formerly abandoned spaces to become part of an urban commons, I think. But I think we need to be really wary.
Sandra Jasper:And I think when you mentioned cities like Detroit, we really need to think about who's being abandoned by whom and the intersecting processes, that are at hand in terms of economy, but also racial abandonment and and certain types of structural abandonment. And those cannot be romanticized, I think, in many ways. So the romanticization comes in in these depictions about the resurgence of nature in coffee table books and films and sci fi. And we know these images of the return of nature as being kind of a happy thing, whereas there's a lot of structural violence going on at the same time. So, I think we need to be really, really wary about this.
Sandra Jasper:And I think your work really contributes to making that point that we cannot idealize marginal practices, although they might be really interesting to us as urban scholars, how people and other than humans on the margins do city making. Of course, this is happening in a particular context of abandonment. And, I think, yeah, this is an important thing to to keep in mind and also to to highlight.
Maan Barua:I totally agree because one has to be extremely wary of these sort of make do infrastructures being the next set of solutions right to everything especially when the onslaughts that people have to face and they don't have access to basic staples you know is this is not I think this book in some ways is written in a much more optimistic way but I've been doing more recent work on urban wetlands and I think one of the key themes that comes out from this more recent work is is carcerality the limits that majoritarian structures put on minorities across cities and you know the the foreclosure of futures and I think really important questions are also about the reproduction of surplus lives, lives that are kind of constructed as surplus how do people reproduce those lives. And I think you know within this sort of carceral frame that we are in in many ways I think the future isn't what a great great sort of where it's not one that we kind of really can look forward to with rosy eyes. But what where do you think though Sandra just to wrap up? Where do you think the kind of conversations are heading now and in the future?
Sandra Jasper:Yes. I mean, I absolutely agree with your point. In my current work, I'm starting to look at pollution, the pollution of urban rivers and also partly wetlands and and other areas and pollution that is happening through this kind of interconnected form of urbanization, through agriculture, through, the production of animals for consumption, all of that stuff filtering back into landscapes, into cities, through cities, and also in some of the rivers that we look at also through the melting of ice, substances that appear through that. So there's a lot happening that, as you say, it doesn't speak too much to happy, positive futures, but rather to processes of disassembling, dysbiosis, disintegration or carcerality, as you say. But I think, yeah, it is important to look at these processes and maybe also at how people respond to it.
Sandra Jasper:And in certain contexts, we can see again through activism, for example, that, people try to use the tools that are there, legal tools, for example, or other kinds of tools, to to counter these developments. Yes. But it's it's it's very, fragile relations. And I think a book to be written on these kind of cases will have maybe a very different outlook, and it's very hard to to celebrate to celebrate urbanism in these kind of, instances. I'm also not sure yet how I will respond to it, writing about, spaces like that.
Sandra Jasper:Maybe one thing I think that is really something that we should and need to do is work with different fields and push this work, this work you are doing with ethologists, the work that Matthew Gani has been doing with urban ecologists. I'm starting to do some work now with toxicologists. So to try to push that interdisciplinary boundary and try to get at that, those very complicated processes also that are complicated scientifically and biologically, and really understand what, what does microplastic do to our bodies, our non human bodies? What is being produced in spite of toxicity? Yeah.
Sandra Jasper:I think
Maan Barua:on your last point, there are there is some stuff in lively cities on on the kind of metabolic commons that that I refer to you know although they are toxic spaces they also provide ways of making do with the city. What's interesting you know going back to this question about wider conversations and collaborations I think is being attentive to the minor practices within other fields you know rather than taking ethology or ecology to be the sort of dominant science is to actually be attentive to those practices that digress that tell you another story and I think that's really really vital for coming up with alternative forms of practice and alternative ways of inhabiting urban futures. That's maybe where we could go and I think therefore kind of thinking about the minor thinking of the of these ecologies the actually existing practices as platforms from which something could be built upon, I think is really vital. But thank you so much, Sandra. It's really been wonderful chatting with you about lively cities, but also kind of urban theory, groundedness, practice more broadly.
Maan Barua:And, really, it's it's been wonderful. Thank you.
Sandra Jasper:Thank you, Maan, and thank you for contributing this book to the urban theory canon. It should hopefully also speak to rattle up the majoritarian perspectives in urban theory and, help us all to, rethink the urban in different ways through different lenses and perspectives, especially the other than human presences in cities and the co production of cities. So I'm really grateful for your contribution here, which is really, really important. Thanks, Marlon.
Maan Barua:Thank you. Thank you.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Lively Cities Reconfiguring Urban Ecology is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.