It is striking that most of the significant theoretical work in relation to the Anthropocene has only engaged indirectly with the urban arena. There are parallels here with the first wave of political ecology literature in the 1980s that focused predominantly on a rural or global South context. The Anthropocene debate has had an uncertain articulation with urbanization beyond the identification of specific empirical parameters or material traces. I have begun to explore these issues with a paper on urban biodiversity and will be developing these ideas further in my next book where I consider the role of “urban refugia” in relation to the sixth mass extinction.
