Professor Matthew Gundy (Professor of Geography, University of Cambridge)
Please register below:
In person:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/459927915777
Online:https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/.../tJctdeirqzkoH9U8ts…
This talk will explore Prof Gandy’s new book ’Nature Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space’. In Natura Urbana, Matthew Gandy explores urban nature as a multi-layered material and symbolic entity, through the lens of urban ecology and the parallel study of diverse cultures of nature at a global scale. Gandy examines the articulation of alternative, and in some cases counterhegemonic, sources of knowledge about urban nature produced by artists, writers, scientists, as well as curious citizens, including voices seldom heard in environmental discourse. The book is driven by Gandy's fascination with spontaneous forms of urban nature ranging from post-industrial wastelands brimming with life to the return of such predators as wolves and leopards on the urban fringe. Gandy develops a critical synthesis between different strands of urban ecology and considers whether "urban political ecology," broadly defined, might be imaginatively extended to take fuller account of both the historiography of the ecological sciences, and recent insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought.