Amogh Arakali @amogharakali@scholar.social

#introduction #introductions

I'm an #urban researcher in #Bengaluru, #India with a background in economics, working at various intersections of resource conservation (mostly #water), economy, and institutions in #cities. Currently interested in #methods of #interdisciplinary research.

I also love teaching and am deeply interested in exploring new forms of #pedagogy and understanding challenges of interdisciplinary teaching.

Am here to share more about my work and learn from other scholars :)

And who knows, perhaps some of these new urban models could be applied outside cities as well?

(End of Thread. If you've lasted this long, thanks so much!)

Urban environments pose unique challenges for ecological and environmental preservation.

There are continuous forces of capital and labour which are perennially in the search for more land and resources within the city, for a variety of reasons - both benevolent and malicious.

Nevertheless, this also provides an opportunity to be innovative. These are spaces where new models of ecological and environmental preservation can be designed.

Forests are magical places. I'm fortunate to live 8-10 hours away from the Western Ghats, home to some of the most beautiful mountain forests in the world. I totally get the point of saving them and preserving them.

However, I don't believe that this should come at the cost of ignoring or dismissing the importance of the environment in less attractive spaces like our cities and towns.

One of my favourite scholars on this topic is ecologist and fellow Bangalorean Harini Nagendra ( @harininagendra@twitter.com) of Azim Premji University, who has written extensively on the ways ordinary Indians, esp in Bangalore, interact with non-human ecosystems in the urban.

Additionally, the idea of the big, heartless city which doesn't care about nature is not true, not in India.

Many residents of Indian cities care deeply about preserving and conserving however they can.

One of my favourite examples is this restaurant in #Bengaluru ( #Bangalore), planting #tree saplings outside their entrance at a time the government wanted to cut down 1200 trees for a road project.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bk2cpWjBJcD/?igshid=kglg5dlql09i

In other words, land will NOT be freed for large scale conservation projects like national parks, at least not to the point where it can be used as a model of planning.

On the contrary, demand for resources may rise as lifestyles change, putting greater stress on natural resources and ecosystems.

As a result, there's an urgent need for models of conservation within urban or urbanising spaces.

This need not happen in the stereotypical 'move to the big city' pattern.

In fact, current demographic trends indicate that a lot of urbanisation in India is actually about former rural areas turning to urban occupations and lifestyles rather than moving to big cities (see literature on India's census towns, which are quite well documented)

What this means is that urban settlements are likely to grow in terms of land area and not just population.

There are a few simple arguments as to why ecosystems like mini-forests, #parks, #wetlands, and #lakes are important for cities. I'll ignore the obvious 'benefits of nature' argument here.

First, Indian urbanisation is going to continue. As the country's population rises, agricultural landholdings will fragment, making farming unsustainable for many, many households.

All these households will shift to urban occupations and locations.

The most common argument I hear is "That Indian cities are burgeoning, obviously sacrifices have to be made."

It's bad enough to hear this from politicians and government officials to justify vanity infrastructure projects.

But it's even worse to hear the same thing from people who you thought would appreciate preserving non-human ecosystems in the city.

The most disturbing extension of this idea, however, relates not to conserving forests but to planning cities.

I'm often staggered by how easily some folks accept the destruction of #resources, #ecologies, and #ecosystems *within* cities, while fighting tooth and nail to preserve them outside city limits.

It's all considered the natural course of things, what will obviously happen within the evil city.

Nevertheless, the sentence "Let's encourage everyone to move to large cities so that everything outside can be conserved for nature" is something I've been hearing repeatedly in many places.

It's basically an extension of the Forests versus Cities binary.

As someone who works on urbanisation, I can say that this is a Utopian fantasy for multiple reasons.

Most importantly, people will go where they want to go and if they want to stay, they'll stay.

We can perhaps tweak existing migration trends here and there, but doing this to empty out smaller towns for new types of development is not a model that can be scaled up.

Thankfully, this bit of ugliness is now being countered by other models of forest conservation, which may involve the presence of the communities themselves.

But other ideas continue to persist. A recent one, which I keep hearing about, is the idea of encouraging large (populous) cities to grow and take in more people from villages and small towns. The idea being that smaller settlements can then be 'freed' for forest conservation.

That being said, the 'Forests versus Cities' binary can often lead to problematic consequences.

The most disturbing of these is the idea that forests should be untouched by human presence.

This is a relatively old idea in post-Independent Indian environmentalism. But it has often led to disturbing incidents, such as indigenous tribal communities being forcibly relocated out of their traditional homes to the forest edge.

To be fair, I see their point.

Indian cities aren't exactly the most eco-friendly spaces (though in some ways, they are a lot more eco-friendly than cities of the US or Europe) and it's hard to imagine anything worse than say, the mountainous waste heaps of Noida or the frothing, fire-catching lakes of East Bangalore.

Many people I've met often have a clear vision of the relationships which ought to exist between forests and cities.

Based on what they say, forests are the sites of deep, pristine, clean nature, which ought to be preserved at all costs from the hedonism of the dirty, polluted, soulless cities.

So this is something I've often experienced while speaking to (some) environmentalists in India.

I've found this to be especially true among those who work extensively on forests and do not engage much with cities.

Examples include officers of the Indian Forest Service, forest ecologists, and animal conservationists. Just to be clear, this is not a universal trend. (1/n)

#thread #urbanisation #cities #environment #India

The most confusing thing about the entire Star Wars franchise is that Palpatine executes Order 66 before the First or Final Orders.

At least call it Orders 67 and 68.