The London National Park City: More-than-human Urban Landscapes and Political Ecologies of the Anthropocene

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Firstly, I look to untangle the entwined relation between landscape, infrastructure and aesthetics - itself underpinning the co-constitution of urbanization - that lies at the conceptual core of the London National Park, and wider NPCF project. Following Richard A. Walker (2019; see also Myers, 2019), this involves elucidating the ways in which nature, and scientific ecology, are enrolled within the construction of the "metro-natural landscape" and imaginaries of urban space in the Anthropocene. I will ask how urban nature is enrolled within, and towards, the construction of post-apocalyptic framings of the Anthropocene (see Pre-/Peri-/Post-Apocalyptic Imaginaries in the Anthropocene, 2019)? How does the London National Park project aim to synthesize historically situated nature(s) towards the material-semiotic enframing of uncertain urban, and planetary, futures (and visa versa)? Does this AnthropoScene engage with techno-modernist and 'geo-constructivist' - smart, green, eco, securitised - or avantgarde design imperatives? If so, what role does landscape (non-)design play in informing the fabric of urban space and related aesthetic sensibility in the Anthropocene (Picon, 2018; Vidler, 2000)? In posing these questions, I aim to problematize the teleological unfolding of modernist urbanization - and the perceived temporal rupture of the Anthropocene - by situating the London National Park within a historio-geographical palimpsest of ecological and environmentalist movements and spaces. Secondly, this project analyses the extent to which the London National Park project is operationalized within the socio-technical edifice of capitalist urbanisation and governmentality (Heynen, 2018). To do so, it places a neo-Marxist interpretation of 'urban metabolism' into conversation with an understanding of governmentality as an ontological elaboration of the immunological biopolitical drive (Esposito, 2016; 2011 [2002]; Sywngedouw and Ernstson, 2018). Theoretically, I look to incorporate the post-structurally influenced work of Michel De Landa (1997), Katheryn Yusoff (2018) and Elizabeth A. Povinelli (2016) in order to illuminate the extent to which the London National Park looks to render visible and articulable only certain stratified forms of nature and landscapicity (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988 [1980]). How is urban ecological complexity geoontopolitically captured, condensed and consolidated into articulable discursive practices and spaces (Yusoff, 2018)? This, by necessity, involves questioning whether the project participates in the ongoing production and reproduction of uneven urban natures. In the process of scientific representation or policy presentation and implementation, what metabolic processes and more-than-human relationalities are obfuscated (Lachmund, 2019)? How do class, race, gender and sexuality intersect with spaces rendered actionable by the project (Gandy, 2012; Heynen, 2015)? Are the interstitial spaces of transport networks, hydrological gradations, inaccessible ledges, rooftops, or other 'ruderal' marginalia incorporated (Stoetzer, 2018)? Or, does the project perpetuate an institutionally heteronormative, and structurally racist, "militarized bio-diversity practice" (Gandy, 2018; Sandilands, 2016: 169)? These questions ultimately illuminate the distribution of sensibility that render more-than-human, spatial politics in the Anthropocene actionable, or otherwise restricted (Rancière, 2009).Finally, Finally, I look to adapt a post-phenomenological methodology, of specific urban spaces, in order to "stay with the tension of cohabitation" and illuminate the forms of agency, materiality, or imagination that co-exist, flourish or exist in tension with the potentially functionalist imperative of capitalist urbanization.