This thesis explores the theoretical basis for expanding the definition of ecological gentrification to include apocalyptic narratives of climate change. It argues that apocalyptic narratives are increasingly used as a justificatory regime for continuing and expanding patterns of urban exclusion. The argument employs a number of key theoretical perspectives including: Lefebvrean Urban Theory, Marxist Value Theory, Debordian Spectacle, Political Ecology and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. The thesis takes the production of space, as presented by Lefebvre, as a starting point to understand the key tenets of Urban Political Ecology. A discussion of the production of nature gives way to an argument which holds the city as a particular moment in the urbanisation of nature, making the management of nature for various social purposes the key function of urban planning. The city is conceptualised, therein, as a commodification of nature, which leads in late modernity, to the circulation of apocalyptic spectacles and phantasmagoria, which further entrench capitalist enclosures of the commons. The argument explores how various forms of climate change narratives, from the scientific to the fictive, often fall into the tropes of apocalypticism, which reproduce and reflect contemporary anxieties about the future. As explored through Rancière, Swyngedouw, and Žižek, this gives rise to different forms of subversion and foreclosure of the political moment. Such political critiques question which forms of ‘the political’ urban apocalyptic narratives make possible or impossible, with the most likely outcomes being either a political moment proper, post-politics, or ultra-politics. Extant literatures indicate that sustainable urban regeneration may, in fact, lead to increased social inequality due to the attractiveness of these projects to more affluent residents seeking low-carbon lifestyles. I argue that, given the anxiety over climate change and the commodification of nature by urbanisation, low-carbon, elite focused urban planning, sometimes termed ecological gentrification, utilises apocalyptic anxieties to achieve its aims in a post-political moment. This argument emerges from the political ecological critique that nature is often conflated with truth, making any call for action in the name of natural imperatives, such as climate change mitigation, an incontestable call in contemporary society. One consequence is that various forms of gentrification become hard to resist as a false dichotomy is established: either gentrify with sustainable housing, or achieve social equality but fail to tackle climate change. Empirical analysis is conducted via critical visual semiotics in field-sites including London, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. Their contemporary urbanscapes are deconstructed for ideological meaning to reveal worrying significations surrounding heroism, immunity from crisis, and exclusivist communities created in opposition to climate change. I argue that in order to maintain coherency amongst community members, the commodity being sold, via spectacles of immuno-political signification, is protection from the apocalypse. For such immuno-politics to function, the apocalypse has to continue to occur, but not affect the consumers of the commodity. Immu-no-political fantasies thus enable the loss of the habitable planet to be reconciled through capitalist consumption of ‘solutions’. In conclusion, the thesis argues for a re-imagining of ecological gentrification as a more insidious process, one which, if allowed to continue uncritically, simply subverts the call for real solutions into cultural capitalism and further enclosure of the commons, weakening our ability to tackle, effectively, climate change.

Obscured in contemporary climate change discourse is the fact that under even the most serious mitigation scenarios being envisaged it will be virtually impossible to avoid runaway ecosystem collapse; so great is the momentum of global greenhouse build-up. And under even the best-case scenario, two-degree warming, the ecological, social, and economic costs are proving to be much deeper than first thought. The greenhouse genie is out of the bottle, but the best that appears to be on offer is a gradual transition to the pro-growth, pro-consumption discourse of “ecological modernisation” (EM); anything more seems politically unpalatable. Here, I aim to account for how cheaply EM has managed to allay ecology. To do so, I detail the operations of the co-optive, definitional strategy which I call the “high-ground” strategy, waged by a historic bloc of actors, discourses, and institutions with a common interest in resisting radical social and ecological critique. This is not an argument about climate laggards like the United States and Australia where sceptic views remain near the centre of public debate. It is a critique of climate leaders such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands—nations at the forefront of the adoption of EM policies and discourses.

Climate change is a powerful reminder of the interdependencies of the human–nature relationship and the fallacy of the modernist assumption about our ability to tame nature for our exploitation with little or no consequences. However, it is argued that such reflexivity is being subverted by the dominant discourses of climate change which portray: nature as risk, our relation to it in terms of security, and the quest for urban resilience as emergency planning. By construing nature as a threat to rather than an asset for cities, they signify a departure from sustainability discourses. They represent a hark back to a premodern conception of human–nature relations that was centred on what nature does to us rather than what we do to nature. Seeing nature as risk ushers in deep concerns with security. The ‘risk society’ becomes entwined with the security society. This paper examines the political implications of this discursive shift and argues that, as securitisation becomes the hegemoni...

Update: If you'd like to watch an accurate, funny, and brief take on Eco-Nihilism, please go to #wisecrack on Youtube: Did South Park Turn Anti-Capitalist, where the central argument from Eco-Nihilism is quoted at several junctures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_MglOKUFRg. I may not have made South Park directly--but Wisecrack--close enough!! Wendy Lynne Lee This is the preface for Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse. Lexington Books (Rowman and Littlefield), February 2017. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739176887/Eco-Nihilism-The-Philosophical-Geopolitics-of-the-Climate-Change-Apocalypse. Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road, tells the story of a dying father’s heroic effort to protect his child from starvation, violence, and disease as they struggle to cross the devastated landscape of a post-apocalyptic America. We don’t know what’s happened to bring about so tragic and terrorizing a circumstance, but we’re nonetheless drawn to the stark images McCarthy evokes and, though we work feverishly to deny that such a tragedy could befall us, we can imagine it. Indeed, for Syrian refugees, Niger Delta villagers, Northwest Kenyan pastoralists, Chukchi Sea coastal fishermen, Ecuadorian rainforest dwellers, Mexican fishermen, Pennsylvania farmers, indigenous Sengwer, the citizens of Kiribati Island’s thirty-two atolls, and many more, fables like The Road reek of a reality already poisoned nearly beyond repair and foreshadow future crises—environmental, economic, geopolitical, social, and moral—for which the prospect of recovery seems little more than fiction. Such crises are as predictable as are the implications of an economic system, namely, neoliberal or conquest capitalism, whose objectives and governing logic are, I’ll argue, inherently incompatible not only with the just, the good, or the beautiful—but with life itself. Conquest capital devours and digests values, ethical, civic, and aesthetic, reducing each to that single value without which it can neither replicate itself nor grow: exchange. In so doing it generates a state of affairs that can only rightly be described as pathologically nihilistic: capitalism destroys its own existential conditions through the wholesale commodification of the finite ecosystems upon which it depends. It cannot do otherwise and be capitalism. Hence, to continue down this road guarantees a future disfigured by the violence consequent on abject desperation and subjugation not only to domination by multinational corporations, but ultimately to more prosaic though terrorizing prospects—like thirst.

We outline a first framing of a conference and planned edited book: “Rupturing the Anthro-Obscene! Political Promises of Planetary & Uneven Urban Ecologies.” The book and event (in Stockholm 16-19 Sept 2015) is an intervention into the field of urban political ecology (UPE) in particular, and critical theory in general. We argue that while UPE has grown since the seminal article on “cyborg urbanisation” in 1996 (Swyngedouw, 1996), and asserted itself as a key mode of critical enquiry in a world with deepening socio-ecological crises, we have less to offer in terms of what to do; in terms of thinking with activists about new political imaginaries and practices of socio-ecological change. In search of ‘political performative theory’, we here start developing three “tectonic shifts” that the field and our speakers need to address: 1. Planetary and uneven urbanisation; 2. Multipolar world order (including the postcolonial critique of knowledge production); and 3. Pervasive ecological change (that destroys any fantasy of separating ‘nature’ and ‘culture’). We link these shifts to an argument of ‘the obscene’ as a playful but maybe necessary aesthetic position to start thinking about equality and freedom anew.

A consortium of property developers set out to occupy 345 hectares of sea bed near Fremantle Port by claiming that their project, North Port Quay, would demonstrate that the community of Western Australia could ‘lead the world in sustainable development’. However, this legitimization strategy collapsed by late 2009 after the consortium’s proposed urbanism clashed with pre-existing imagining of Fremantle and environmental sustainability in a discourse of public concerns about the project. This paper describes attempts by the consortium to claim the environmental high ground and their discursive failure in public encounters in Fremantle. The ecological risk of a carbon-constrained future articulated by proponents was transformed in the minds of their target audience into the ecological risk of the project’s construction while representations about investing in the city’s future meant unacceptable risk for Fremantle community. The threat of North Port Quay became an effective discursive tool, used successfully by a Greens party candidate to win the Fremantle seat in Western Australia’s parliament; producing an historic electoral victory for the Greens and ending 85 years of continuous Labor Party representation. The paper is adapted from PhD research examining how representations of ecological threats, such as climate change, are applied as discursive resources for social action in the field of urban development. The research design consists of a multi-method approach in which techniques of discourse analysis are applied to representations of ecological threat in public and media texts organized in an empirical study of North Point Quay. The paper provides insight into how community imagining affects the negotiation of green urbanism.

This is a draft of the fourth, penultimate chapter of my forthcoming book, Natural Catastrophe: Climate Change in the Age of Neoliberal Governance. It examines the claims of urban sustainability against the realities of rampant neoliberal gentrification. Theoretically, the work of Lefebvre, Arendt and Marcuse on the nature of work are examined in order to highlight dimensions of social sustainability that remain hidden in the current sustainability paradigm. This chapter also builds on the work of critical geographers such as David Harvey and Neil Smith in order to outline a more truly progressive production of the urban.