A climate justice approach to urbanisation processes in the South: Oil axis in Ecuador

• Published in: Landscape and urban planning Vol. 239; p. 104845
• Main Authors: Jiménez, Manuel Bayón, Venegas, Melissa Moreano
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.11.2023
• Subjects: Amazon; Climate injustice; Ecuador; Extended urbanisation; Postcolonial and dependency theory; Uneven development; Ecuador; Extended urbanisation; Postcolonial and dependency theory; Amazon; Climate injustice; Uneven development
• ISSN: 0169-2046; 1872-6062
• DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2023.104845

•Extended urbanisation provides unparalleled framework for climate justice.•Struggles for climate justice are struggles to be part of the urbanisation process.•A series of multi-scales of climate injustice in the sphere of urbanisation.•The reproduction of climate injustices at different scales of urbanisation. The new geographies of climate injustice seek to displace the dominant analysis in urban studies that encapsulates urban inequalities in a static city. This article analyses the extractive axis of the Ecuadorian Amazon through extended urbanisation and unequal development in dialogue with Latin American dependency theory as a framework to decolonize urban studies. Consequently, it develops a theoretical and methodological proposal as a sample of the possibilities that this extension implies in the relationship between urban studies and political ecology. In a sequential approach, the analysis of the Ecuadorian extractive axis shows the possibilities of analysing urbanisation as an ongoing process, whose climatic injustices are reproduced multiscale. The analysis combines spatial-historical and ethnographic methods to understand how social relations are produced around disputes linked to developing or limiting climate injustices, which are inseparably racial and class injustices. The journey through the scales of the extractive enclave, the fluvial transport of oil, the city of oil services, the rentier capital city, and the export refinery, allows us to analyse that the forms of capital that guide urbanisation, the bases of social inequalities and inequity in access to spaces of environmental quality are a continuum along the oil axis, which demands a continuous look at climatic injustices. It allows for an exercise that explores the overlaps and limits of urbanisation and climate injustices, but also reformulates dominant urban theories through postcolonial and dependency critique.