When Is Housing an Environmental Problem? Reforming Informality in Kathmandu
- 1 August 2009
- journal article
- review article
- Published by University of Chicago Press in Current Anthropology
- Vol. 50 (4), 513-533
- https://doi.org/10.1086/604707
Abstract
Drawing on fieldwork among environmental activists and housing advocates in one of South Asia’s fastest‐growing cities—and the capital of one of the world’s most politically volatile nation‐states—this article explores how and when specific forms of urban housing were problematized and reformed through environmental logics. I ask when and how housing was framed as an environmental problem in Kathmandu. In so doing, I demonstrate that a fuller understanding of housing as an environmental problem rests not only in evaluations of public health parameters, risks of toxic exposure, and disaster vulnerability but also in the shifting ideologies of belonging, morality, and governance that animate urban environmental anxieties in specific cities. I illustrate how categories fundamental to the intersection of ecology and housing were produced, effaced, and reproduced over time in Nepal’s capital. I argue that the making and unmaking of these categories had clear material consequences that are often difficult to discern through global‐scale “slum ecology” logics. I suggest further that the moral and ideological dimensions of urban ecology are never predetermined or fixed and as such complicate global conceptions of housing as an environmental problem.This publication has 58 references indexed in Scilit:
- Spatial CleansingJournal of Material Culture, 2006
- Between violence and desire: space, power, and identity in the making of metropolitan DelhiInternational Social Science Journal, 2003
- Urban Ecological Systems: Linking Terrestrial Ecological, Physical, and Socioeconomic Components of Metropolitan AreasAnnual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 2001
- Deep democracy: urban governmentality and the horizon of politicsEnvironment and Urbanization, 2001
- Ecological Modernization and Its Critics: Assessing the Past and Looking Toward the FutureSociety & Natural Resources, 2001
- A New Urban EcologyAmerican Scientist, 2000
- The importance of being local: Villagers, NGOs, and the world bank in the Arun valley, NepalIdentities, 1999
- Writing for, versus about, the ethnographic other: Issues of engagement and reflexivity in working with a tribal NGO in IndonesiaIdentities, 1999
- Representing communities: Histories and politics of community‐based natural resource managementSociety & Natural Resources, 1998
- Urbanism as a Way of LifeAmerican Journal of Sociology, 1938