Nik Heynen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Maria Kaika is Lecturer in Urban Geography, at the University of Oxford and Erik Swyngedouw is a Professor in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford.

Forward Part 1: The Production of Urban Natures and Urban Political Ecology 1. Introduction 2. Sylvan City 3. Urbanizing Political Ecology Part 2: Urban Metabolisms 4. Circulations and Metabolism 5. The Desire to Metabolize Nature 6. Cyborg Urbanization 7. Monuments, Medians and Metabolims 8 Clogging up the City 9. Urban Metabolism as Target Part 3: The Ecology of Urban Politics 10. Transnational Alliances and Global Politics 11. Constructing Scarcity and Sensationalising Water Politics 12. Dead Spaces in the City of Extremes 13. Reconnecting with the Means of Existence in Durban 14. Looking at the Public/Private Water Debate in South Africa Through the Prism of an Urban Political Ecology Framework 15. Turfgrass Subjects 16. At the Edge Conclusions and the Way Forward

The social and material production of urban nature has recently emerged as an important area in urban studies, human/environmental interactions and social studies. This has been prompted by the recognition that the material conditions that comprise urban environments are not independent from social, political, and economic processes, or from the cultural construction of what constitutes the 'urban' or the 'natural'. Through both theoretical and empirical analysis, this groundbreaking collection offers an integrated and relational approach to untangling the interconnected processes involved in forming urban landscapes.

The essays in this book attest that the re-entry of the ecological agenda into urban theory is vital both in terms of understanding contemporary urbanization processes, and of engaging in a meaningful environmental politics. They debate the central themes of whose nature is, or becomes, urbanized, and the uneven power relations through which this socio-metabolic transformation takes place.

Including urban case studies, international research and contributions from prominent urban scholars, this volume will enable students, scholars and researchers of geographical, environmental and urban studies to better understand how interrelated, everyday economic, political and cultural processes form and transform urban environments.