Objectives
- Experiencing: forms in which groups inhabiting degraded littoral zones know, feel, and live with multiple pollutants in the water
- Evidencing: practices that make pollution visible using environmental data, archival documents, oral histories, sentinels, counter-mapping, Apps, DIY tools, and other forms of knowledge production
- Politicizing: trategies of intervention with which citizens, planners, and urban governments aim to mitigate pollution from the scale of the body to large-scale urban regeneration projects.
Abstract
Urbanization is on the rise, just like the environmental concerns surrounding its expansion. The dramatic consequences of rapid land use changes and environmental degradation are particularly challenging for rivers flowing across, from, and to urban areas. The different types of visible and invisible pollution found in streams are detrimental to the health of people and ecosystems. Yet, pollutants also trigger various responses leading to the proliferation of new ecological relations. While microorganisms metabolically adapt to the presence of components like arsenic and cadmium in the water, animals, plants, and humans engage in different forms of collaboration to address and mitigate the consequences of pollution in their environments. What do these collaborations have to say when reconceptualizing health from a multispecies perspective?
