Nik Heynen
Biographic Data
| ID | 153808 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nik Heynen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nik |
| FAMILY NAME | Heynen |
| SIGNATURE | HEYNEN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Georgia |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1299 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 20 |
Classics in human geography revisited
We're Still Here
Narratives of resilience to sea-level rise too often perpetuate social violence. An abolitionist climate justice praxis necessitates seeing beyond physical inundation to sea-level rise as the sole issue. We argue that sea-level rise is environmental racism, if not always in its racialized outcomes of disproportionate harms, then always in its racialized production of differential value. More than mitigating flood risk when developing Black land f…
I am Sapelo
The history of land struggles in the United States demonstrates how ongoing patterns of uneven development depend upon and codify the legacies of white supremacy. In this article, we show how the histories of white supremacy continue to be embedded and institutionalized into contemporary land and property politics through the processes of racialized uneven development using the case of Sapelo Island, Georgia. We trace the history of property rela…
A plantation can be a commons”
This paper is based on the 2018 Neil Smith Lecture presented at the University of St Andrews. It considers the plantation past/futures of Sapelo Island, Georgia, one of the Sea Islands forming an archipelago along the US Southeastern coast. I work through the abolitionist efforts of the Saltwater Geechee’s who have resided there since at least 1803 to better understand how we can mobilise an emancipatory politics of land and property and to produ…
Abolishing the frontier
In this paper, we situate the public university as a frontier where structures of settler colonialism, racialization, and citizen formation are both created and contested. We use the historical-geographical position of the University of Georgia, the first public land grant university chartered in the United States, to consider the broader implications of the settler-native-slave triad in the history of public higher education. We use these histor…
What Harriet Tubman and John Brown can teach us about abolishing ‘White men’
This commentary argues that one path toward Natalie Oswin’s ‘An Other Geography’ is through abolishing the institution of ‘White men’. Like other oppressive institutions, ‘White men’ have produced epistemic violence that has shaped and structured the discipline of geography in uneven and unjust ways. This essay is an effort to show appreciation and gratitude, and to stand in solidarity, with Oswin’s prophetic vision of ‘an other geography’. I mob…
Land Trusts as Conservation Boundary Organizations in Rapidly Exurbanizing Landscapes
Exurban development is occurring in many formerly rural areas nationwide, often outpacing the ability of institutions to update land use regulations. These pressures can negatively impact local ecosystems and natural resources, including reduced biodiversity and degraded water quality. Local nongovernmental organizations play an important role in promoting conservation in exurban landscapes, where there is relatively little regulatory and institu…
On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place
This introduction calls for political ecology to systematically engage with the ways that white supremacy shapes human relationships with land through entangled processes of settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism. To develop the analytic of abolition ecology, we begin with the articulation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ abolition democracy together with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s spatially attuned analytic of abolition geography. Rather than define com…
Community Solar as Energy Reparations
Community Solar as Energy Reparations:Abolishing Petro-Racial Capitalism in New Orleans Nikki Luke (bio) and Nik Heynen (bio) In a June 2019 interview on WHIV community radio in New Orleans, Logan Burke, executive director of the Louisiana Alliance for Affordable Energy, detailed the work underway at the New Orleans City Council to authorize community solar,1 which means "that rather than depending on the utility itself to procure renewables, a c…
Open Borders
Keywords in Radical Geography
Uneven racial development and the abolition ecology of the city
This chapter argues for paying more attention to deep urban history to understand the connection between racial capitalism and urban space. By excavating the “plantation history” of Atlanta, a city in southern USA, I develop “abolitionist ecology” to understand who decides who will have access to or be excluded from resources of the environment. This combines African-American political thought with urban political ecology (UPE) to enrich contempo…
Relational Poverty Politics
The antinomies of nature and space
Maria, Irma, Harvey, Katrina - these have become more than names. They represent several of the most recent hurricanes that have devastated communities across North America and the Caribbean. As nature-society encounters, these massive storms elevated a range of historical, sociocultural, and political economic issues to the fore - from colonialism and race, to growing patterns of inequality, government mismanagement, and the politics of knowledg…
The Enduring Struggle for Social Justice and the City
Myriad questions related to social justice have shaped urban geographic scholarship, among which two things remain clear: geographers maintain fidelity to the idea that the discipline should keep w
Urban Political Ecology
Urban political ecology (UPE) is a geographic approach geared toward understanding the ways in which political, economic, and ecological processes work together to transform cities and the lives of the people who live in them. Part of the challenge taken up in UPE is how to use critical social theory, especially theories associated with political economy, to better frame the problems faced by people living in cities. While UPE has a cohesive foun…
The Long War
I must single out the late Neil Smith for special thanks.I was very close to Neil at cuny, struggling like others to help him as the seriousness of his illness became clearer.I look back now with a deep sense of loss on
The Priority of Injustice
Shadows of a Sunbelt City
Urban political ecology III
Given the ongoing importance of nature in the city, better grappling with the gendering and queering of urban political ecology offers important insights that collectively provides important political possibilities. The cross-currents of feminist political ecology, queer ecology, queer urbanism and more general contributions to feminist urban geography create critical opportunities to expand UPE’s horizons toward more egalitarian and praxis-cente…
Priority of Injustice
Racial coastal formation
The United States' deeply racialized history currently operates below the surface of contemporary apolitical narratives on vulnerability mitigation and adaptation to sea-level rise. As communities, regulatory agencies, and policy-makers plan for rising seas, it is important to recognize the landscapes of race and deep histories of racism that have shaped the socio-ecological formations of coastal regions. If this history goes unrecognized, what w…
Neil Smith's Long Revolutionary Imperative
Whether writing about gentrification or nature, the production of space or the politics of scale, uneven development or public space, globalization or revolution, the geographer Neil Smith was nothing if not provocative. Neither Festschrift nor hagiography, this special issue of Antipode critically engages Smith's work-not to unpick the rich tapestry, but to draw the threads out and spin them on in new directions. Consisting of newly commissioned…
Beyond the Kale
Can Science Writing Collectives Overcome Barriers to More Democratic Communication and Collaboration? Lessons from Environmental Communication Praxis in Southern Appalachia
Despite compelling reasons to involve nonscientists in the production of ecological knowledge, cultural and institutional factors often dis-incentivize engagement between scientists and nonscientists. This paper details our efforts to develop a biweekly newspaper column to increase communication between ecological scientists, social scientists, and the communities within which they work. Addressing community-generated topics and written by a coll…
The Political Ecology of Uneven Urban Green Space
This article investigates the role of urban political economy, private-public property relations, and race and ethnicity in the social production of Milwaukee's urban forest. By integrating urban-forest canopy-cover data from aerial photography, United States Census data, and qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews, this analysis suggests that there is an inequitable distribution of urban canopy cover within Milwaukee. Since urban …
The neoliberalization of nature
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their co
Urban political ecology I
It has been over 15 years since the term ‘urban political ecology’ (UPE) was coined. While still often not incorporated into larger discussion of political ecology, its growing visibility in the published literature suggests that it has gone beyond an emerging theoretical lens to one that has fully emerged. This report characterizes the current literature that explicitly utilizes the language of UPE, discusses its theoretical evolution that is no…
The Geography of Survival and the Right to the City
The "geography of survival" describes the spaces and spatial relations that structure not only how people may live, but especially whether they may live. For very poor people, such as the homeless, the geography of survival is knitted together into a network of public and private spaces and social services. In this article we focus on three trends that are simultaneously restructuring this geography of survival—the rise of automated surveillance …
On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place
This introduction calls for political ecology to systematically engage with the ways that white supremacy shapes human relationships with land through entangled processes of settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism. To develop the analytic of abolition ecology, we begin with the articulation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ abolition democracy together with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s spatially attuned analytic of abolition geography. Rather than define com…
Urban political ecology II
Attention to the urban and metropolitan growth of nature can no longer be denied. Nor can the intense scrutiny of racialized, postcolonial and indigenous perspectives on the press and pulse of uneven development across the planet’s urban political ecology be deferred any longer. There is sufficient research ranging across antiracist and postcolonial perspectives to constitute a need to discuss what is referred to here as ‘abolition ecology’. Abol…
Racial coastal formation
The United States' deeply racialized history currently operates below the surface of contemporary apolitical narratives on vulnerability mitigation and adaptation to sea-level rise. As communities, regulatory agencies, and policy-makers plan for rising seas, it is important to recognize the landscapes of race and deep histories of racism that have shaped the socio-ecological formations of coastal regions. If this history goes unrecognized, what w…
Bending the Bars of Empire from Every Ghetto for Survival
Among the most important political achievements of the Black Panther Party (BPP) was the success of their Free Breakfast for Children Program. At the Breakfast Program's peak in late 1969 and early 1970, the BPP and other volunteers fed thousands of children daily before they went to school across the country. The historic importance of the BPP's Breakfast Program rests both in the fact that it was imperative for the social reproduction of many i…
Scalar dialectics in green
Walking through Milwaukee's affluent Eastside, it is difficult to imagine that the presence of its well-maintained trees has been produced by anything but decidedly local processes. However, it is
Urban political ecology III
Given the ongoing importance of nature in the city, better grappling with the gendering and queering of urban political ecology offers important insights that collectively provides important political possibilities. The cross-currents of feminist political ecology, queer ecology, queer urbanism and more general contributions to feminist urban geography create critical opportunities to expand UPE’s horizons toward more egalitarian and praxis-cente…
But it's Alright, Ma, it's Life, and Life Only
Hunger stole upon me so slowly at first. I was not aware of what hunger really meant [emphasis added]. Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger, staring at me gauntly ... this hunger baffled me, scared me, made me angry and insistent ... I would grow dizzy and my vision would dim. I became less active in my play, and for the first time in my life I had to pause and think of …
Community Solar as Energy Reparations
Community Solar as Energy Reparations:Abolishing Petro-Racial Capitalism in New Orleans Nikki Luke (bio) and Nik Heynen (bio) In a June 2019 interview on WHIV community radio in New Orleans, Logan Burke, executive director of the Louisiana Alliance for Affordable Energy, detailed the work underway at the New Orleans City Council to authorize community solar,1 which means "that rather than depending on the utility itself to procure renewables, a c…
Muddying the waters
This book forum extends a discussion that Laura Pulido first organized around Richa Nagar’s Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism at the 2015 Annual Meeting of
The antinomies of nature and space
Maria, Irma, Harvey, Katrina - these have become more than names. They represent several of the most recent hurricanes that have devastated communities across North America and the Caribbean. As nature-society encounters, these massive storms elevated a range of historical, sociocultural, and political economic issues to the fore - from colonialism and race, to growing patterns of inequality, government mismanagement, and the politics of knowledg…
Green Urban Political Ecologies
This research uses a Marxist urban political ecology framework to link processes of urban environmental metabolization explicitly to the consumption fund of the built environment. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I argue in this paper that Marxist notions of metabolism are ideal for investigating urban environmental change and the production of uneven urban environments. In so doing, I argue that despite the embeddedness of Harvey's circuits of …
Geographical Diversions
Working at the intersections of cultural anthropology, human geography, and material culture, Tina Harris explores the social and economic transformations taking place along one trade route that winds its way across China, Nepal, Tibet, and India. How might we connections between seemingly mundane daily life and more abstract levels of global change? Geographical Diversions focuses on two generations of traders who exchange goods such as sheep wo…
Knowing Climate Change, Embodying Climate Praxis
Whether used to support or impede action, scientific knowledge is now, more than ever, the primary framework for political discourse on climate change. As a consequence, science has become a hegemonic way of knowing climate change by mainstream climate politics, which not only limits the actors and actions deemed legitimate in climate politics but also silences vulnerable communities and reinforces historical patterns of cultural and political ma…
Cooking up Non-violent Civil-disobedient Direct Action for the Hungry
This paper examines the efforts of one of the fastest-growing (anarchist) social movement groups in the world, ‘Food Not Bombs’ (FNB), to redefine urban anti-hunger politics in the US . The aim is to understand how FNB contests the politics and processes of poor people’s containment through their efforts to develop new, decommodified modes of biopolitics. As it is central to their success, the paper focuses on how FNB uses non-violent civil-disob…
Inequitable access to urban reforestation
A plantation can be a commons”
This paper is based on the 2018 Neil Smith Lecture presented at the University of St Andrews. It considers the plantation past/futures of Sapelo Island, Georgia, one of the Sea Islands forming an archipelago along the US Southeastern coast. I work through the abolitionist efforts of the Saltwater Geechee’s who have resided there since at least 1803 to better understand how we can mobilise an emancipatory politics of land and property and to produ…
The Enduring Struggle for Social Justice and the City
Myriad questions related to social justice have shaped urban geographic scholarship, among which two things remain clear: geographers maintain fidelity to the idea that the discipline should keep w
Food Justice, Hunger and the City
We are amidst a long-overdue increase of interest in issues related food, cities and inequality within geography. While there has certainly been significant scholarship done on the issue, this area seems to be on the verge of defining many other sub-disciplinary trajectories as opposed to the opposite which has historically been the case. In this short review essay, we hope to signal the utility of the concepts of community food security, food so…
Transforming Participatory Science into Socioecological Praxis
Citizen science and sustainability science promise the more just and democratic production of environmental knowledge and politics. In this review, we evaluate these participatory traditions within the context of (a) our theorization of how the valuation and devaluation of nature, knowledge, and people help to produce socio-ecological hierarchies, the uneven distribution of harms and benefits, and inequitable engagement within environmental polit…
Nature Inc
With global wildlife populations and biodiversity riches in peril, it is obvious that innovative methods of addressing our planet’s environmental problems are needed. But is “the market” the answer? NatureTM Inc. brings together cutting-edge research by respected scholars from around the world to analyze how “neoliberal conservation” is reshaping human–nature relations.
Marginalia of a revolution
Having recently been writing about the geographies of survival, here in this brief essay I extrapolate a methodological and ethico-political sensibility from the scattered fragments of my personal interactions with foundational radical geographer William W. Bunge. This essay is intended to reconcile the marginalization that Bunge experienced, and experiences today, within geography, with the methodological approach he pioneered, even as he is oft…
Inequitable access to urban reforestation
Concrete and clay
Harlemworld
(2005). Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black Ameria. John L. Jackson; Race, Ethnicity, and the Politics of City Redistricting. Joshua G. Behr; Place: A Short Introduction. Tim Cresswell. Urban Geography: Vol. 26, The City of Transition and the Transition of Cities I, pp. 193-196
The neoliberalization of nature
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their co
Scalar dialectics in green
Walking through Milwaukee's affluent Eastside, it is difficult to imagine that the presence of its well-maintained trees has been produced by anything but decidedly local processes. However, it is
In the Nature of Cities
Including urban case studies and contributions from prominent urban scholars, this volume will give students, scholars and researchers of geographical, environmental and urban studies a better understanding of how interrelated, everyday economic, political and cultural processes form and transform urban environments.
Justice of eating in the city
I can think of no configuration of socionatural relations more debilitating to human potential than the one that produces hunger. Without food, human bodies simply cannot exist. Human bodies that do not consume a sufficient quantity of food, or food that does not contain sufficient nutritional quality simply cannot function. Without enough food, the everyday processes necessary for social production and reproduction become daunting and/or impossi…
But it's Alright, Ma, it's Life, and Life Only
Hunger stole upon me so slowly at first. I was not aware of what hunger really meant [emphasis added]. Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger, staring at me gauntly ... this hunger baffled me, scared me, made me angry and insistent ... I would grow dizzy and my vision would dim. I became less active in my play, and for the first time in my life I had to pause and think of …
Globalization's Contradictions
Section I: Globalization and Neoliberalism: Dominating Disciplines Chapter 1. 'Globalization's Dimensions' by Dennis Conway and Nik Heynen Chapter 2. 'The Ascendancy of Neoliberalism and Emergence of Contemporary Globalization' by Dennis Conway and Nik Heynen Section II: Globalization's Many Dimensions Globalization's Macro-Economic Faces Financial Globalization Chapter 3. 'Global Financial Architecture Transitions: Mutations through 'Roll-back' …
The Political Ecology of Uneven Urban Green Space
This article investigates the role of urban political economy, private-public property relations, and race and ethnicity in the social production of Milwaukee's urban forest. By integrating urban-forest canopy-cover data from aerial photography, United States Census data, and qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews, this analysis suggests that there is an inequitable distribution of urban canopy cover within Milwaukee. Since urban …
Green Urban Political Ecologies
This research uses a Marxist urban political ecology framework to link processes of urban environmental metabolization explicitly to the consumption fund of the built environment. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I argue in this paper that Marxist notions of metabolism are ideal for investigating urban environmental change and the production of uneven urban environments. In so doing, I argue that despite the embeddedness of Harvey's circuits of …
Neoliberal Environments
Conclusion to the book Neoliberal Environments: False Promises and Unnatural Consequences, edited by Nik Heynen, James McCarthy, Scott Prudham, and Paul Robbins.
Failing to Grow "Their" Own Justice? The Co-Production of Racial/Gendered Labor and Milwaukee's Urban Forest
Little attention is paid to the ways that labor market inequalities within urban institutions enforce governance regimes that (re)produce urban environmental unevenness. Milwaukee's Bureau of Forestry is one such institution that has historically been dependent on state-sanctioned labor market inequalities to perpetuate an explicitly White/male regime of environmental governance and production. Historically, the Bureau's management employed and p…
Social Justice and the City
Throughout his distinguished and influential career, David Harvey has defined and redefined the relationship between politics, capitalism, and the social aspects of geographical theory. Laying out Harvey’s position that geography could not remain objective in the face of urban poverty and associated ills, Social Justice and the City is perhaps the most widely cited work in the field. Harvey analyzes core issues in city planning and policy—employm…
The Geography of Survival and the Right to the City
The "geography of survival" describes the spaces and spatial relations that structure not only how people may live, but especially whether they may live. For very poor people, such as the homeless, the geography of survival is knitted together into a network of public and private spaces and social services. In this article we focus on three trends that are simultaneously restructuring this geography of survival—the rise of automated surveillance …
Bending the Bars of Empire from Every Ghetto for Survival
Among the most important political achievements of the Black Panther Party (BPP) was the success of their Free Breakfast for Children Program. At the Breakfast Program's peak in late 1969 and early 1970, the BPP and other volunteers fed thousands of children daily before they went to school across the country. The historic importance of the BPP's Breakfast Program rests both in the fact that it was imperative for the social reproduction of many i…
The Point is to Change it
Commissioned to celebrate the 40th year of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, this book evaluates the role of the critical social scientist and how the point of their work is not simply to interpret the world but to change it. Brings together leading critical social scientists to consider the major challenges of our time and what is to be done about them. Applies diagnostic and normative reasoning to momentous issues including the global e…
Introduction
The title we have chosen for this book, borrowed from one fo Marx's most famous injunctions, is an invitation to think and a provocation to act. We're in the midst of some exceptionally challenging, complex and mementous changes to the global economy, polity, society and ecology
Cooking up Non-violent Civil-disobedient Direct Action for the Hungry
This paper examines the efforts of one of the fastest-growing (anarchist) social movement groups in the world, ‘Food Not Bombs’ (FNB), to redefine urban anti-hunger politics in the US . The aim is to understand how FNB contests the politics and processes of poor people’s containment through their efforts to develop new, decommodified modes of biopolitics. As it is central to their success, the paper focuses on how FNB uses non-violent civil-disob…
Bloomberg's New York
William W. Bunge (1971) Fitzgerald
Making the San Fernando Valley
In the first book-length scholarly study of the San Fernando Valley--home to one-third of the population of Los Angeles--Laura R. Barraclough combines ambitious historical sweep with an on-theground investigation of contemporary life in this iconic suburb. She is particularly intrigued by the Valley's many rural elements, such as dirt roads, tack-and-feed stores, horse-keeping districts, citrus groves, and movie ranches. Far from natural or undev…
Introduction
This article, along with this special symposium, engages with the lasting significance of Neil Smith's Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space 25 years after its publication. Few books have made such productive contributions to expanding the horizons of political economy, particularly the spatiality of political economy, as has Uneven Development. This introductory article explores some of these aspects of the book's sign…
Surviving Uneven Development
This article takes the 25th anniversary of Neil Smith's Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space as an opportunity to consider the seminal contributions the book has made for pushing scholars to more deeply consider the connections between the persistence of capitalism and social reproduction. Furthermore, we move on from this connection to consider the emancipatory ideas within Uneven Development and their connection to pr…
Antipode in an Antithetical Era
Political science (49 works) · Sociology (43 works) · Politics (31 works) · Law (30 works) · Geography (25 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Ecology (14 works) · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities (14 works) · Biology (13 works)