Re-articulating Resistance in Urban* Environments. For Edgy, Plural, More-than-human Good Lives in an Age of Translocalisation

With societies’ growing complexity, determining the ‘good life’ seems unrealistic. This paper re-asserts the plurality of locally specific ‘good lives’, by focusing on cohabitations and connections which enable more-than-human resistance to contemporary capitalist expulsion and ecological destruction. Linking discourses in gender studies, decolonial praxis, political ecology and urban studies, it discusses more-than-human intra-relatings emerging from global migration and intensifying ecological distress. An ethnographic account of fieldwork conducted in Italy, in a context of rural exodus, flawed EU agricultural policies and rain scarcity, reconstructs trajectories of adaptive seeds imported, developed, selected and cultivated by migrants from Bangladesh on vacant or underused fields. The case study reveals resilient human-vegetal connections supported by far-flung socio-ecological infrastructures in hybrid environments, conceptualised as ‘ urban *’. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .