Politicizing the Environment in the Urban Century

This chapter focuses on the book’s central theme on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism. Framed against the background of five major transformations that deal with planetary urbanisation to de-politicization, we argue that while UPE and associated fields have offered ways to analyse the politics of nature, they have less to offer in terms of what to do, in terms of thinking with radical political activists about new imaginaries and practices of emancipatory socio-ecological change. In light of this, we present the chapters as enriching the approaches to re-centre the political in thought and action in environmental and urban studies.