Staged ecologies: Aesthetics, nature and infrastructure in the late‐modern metropolis

Abstract This paper critically examines a £1.5 billion regeneration project that is currently unfolding in Thamesmead, a town in south‐east London. Led by the housing association Peabody, the ongoing regeneration is attempting to transform the town into a new ecological refugium in the heart of London. One key focus underlying the regeneration revolves around the curation of a ‘wilder Thamesmead’, which is looking to incorporate new wild ecologies into the design of the urban landscape. Principally, this is manifesting in a network of rain gardens which are being transformed into new ecological infrastructures tasked with adapting and responding to the intensifying pressures of the climate crisis. These emergent gardens, however, are also being designed to perform an aesthetic mode of labour that Peabody refer to as ‘greening the grey’: an approach that is embracing a new, dishevelled ecological aesthetic across Thamesmead's historically grey and concrete urban landscape. These rain gardens are therefore merging the infrastructural with the aesthetic, straddling two key areas that the field of urban political ecology is yet to sustain engagement with: namely, expanded conceptions of agency as these relate to an ongoing ‘ecologisation’ of modern urban infrastructures, and the aesthetics of these emerging eco‐modernist infrastructures as they are staged across the urban realm. The paper works through the tensions and contradictions underlying this attempt to curate an aesthetically wild and infrastructurally responsive urban landscape, focusing on how the horizons of a liberal‐capitalist order are being refashioned under a new, duplicitous environmentalist guise. The paper concludes by arguing that the confluence between urban nature and landscape design needs to be further interrogated from a critically modified and ultimately interdisciplinary neo‐Marxian lens.