Prefiguring communist urban political ecologies

Urban political ecology (UPE) has over the past few decades matured into a thriving and sophisticated critical perspective in speaking to power and allying with a wide range of eco-social resistance movement, there is a shared assumption that substantive critical analysis in its revelatory mode articulates with or nurtures the making of progressive, radical, and effective political movements that aim at making a socially more equitable, politically more inclusive, and ecologically sensible urbanity. Nonetheless, this hypothesis requires careful critical scrutiny as exposing the mechanisms of power does not seem to translate in effective political action in the absence of a clear political desire to transform the present. In this commentary, we explore the new contours of capitalism and the pivotal importance to engage with communist urban political ecologies in order to cut through the deadlock of the present.