Urban ecologies - Humans, Environment and Spirits in the City

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Recent reports about global urbanization are characterized by disastrous effects on the environment, in particular in economically booming Southeast Asia. As the majority of the world’s population is nowadays living in cities, calls for a complete rethinking of “the urban” as a subject of scientific research are getting louder and questions about a redefinition of sustainable and livable cities are becoming more urgent. In light of population growth, migration, climate change, pollution, urban renewal and abandoned construction sites, the research project explores diverse and contested ideas about the environment in rapidly transforming Southeast Asian societies. The research project focuses on urban renewal and environmental problems (air pollution, water, garbage) and corresponding policies about “clean and green” cities in Vietnam. Following the demolition of social housing buildings with green zones constructed in the early period of socialist urban planning in Hanoi, the cutting of old trees in inner city areas and the leveling of urban cemeteries, the reduction of public parks and the demolition of traditional marketplaces in recent years, companies are constructing high-rise buildings with offices and condominiums. Many of these buildings, due to economic crises, have been left to erode and crumble. Nevertheless, the future visions of the socialist government are directed to urban renewal and socialist progress. Urban planners, local authorities, architects, investors and contractors, environmental activists, city residents and rural urban migrants are actors in these processes. But spirits, ghosts and other non-human entities are also ascribed agency because, according to wide spread popular religious ideas in Vietnam and other countries in Southeast Asia, they are considered to be the proper owners of the earth and the territory. In specific contexts they interfere into the relationships among humans and environment. In politically charged situations, characterized by largely asymmetric power relations, residents, environmental activists and spirits create subversive activities, directed against the capitalist logic of investors and market socialist planning and construction projects.