At the Confluence of River and City: Urbanization, Modernity, and the Political Ecology of Urban Rivers

ABSTRACT Despite the close connection between urbanization and the ecology of rivers, the co‐constitution of rivers and urban space remains undertheorized. This advanced review asks how scholars across social science and humanities disciplines have understood the relationships between rivers and the cities they make possible. This review is aimed toward advancing an urban river research agenda that centers the mutual production of the urban nature space of rivers and the socially uneven geographies of the modern city. To this end, I draw from the literatures of environmental history, urban history, urban political ecology, and postcolonial studies. Urban and environmental history provide historical accounts of the role of rivers in the urbanization process. Urban political ecology usefully theorizes nature‐society relations as a dialectic wherein the metabolization of nature produces historically contingent forms of urban socio‐nature, always already imbued with asymmetrical power relations. More recent urban political ecology writing has incorporated insights from scholars of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, broadening the field for a deeper engagement with the role of social difference in the production of uneven urban natures. A postcolonial reading of the concept of the river‐as‐line highlights the continued imposition of colonial epistemologies upon both human and non‐human worlds. An engagement with Indigenous scholarship further troubles the epistemological basis for modern forms of social and environmental inquiry. An effective urban river research agenda will incorporate the insights of these literatures and center the historical, geographical, and social processes that constitute the urban river as both a material and discursive object. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Human Water > Value of Water Engineering Water > Planning Water