Climate change and urban-agrarian solidarities

As climate change has heightened the significance of urban-agrarian material entanglements and intellectual and political oppositions, the need to speak across them has become more urgent. Scholarship in agrarian and urban studies is concerned with specific social processes and political demands in agrarian and urban contexts, respectively. These processes and demands are often articulated in opposition to one another, despite the fact that the places and people each studies are materially and politically connected. This paper argues that scholars in these fields should not only work to understand how these dynamics across space are materially interconnected, but also where and how their politics converge, in order to move from a position of opposition to one of solidarity. We trace entanglements across urban and agrarian studies and spaces through the lenses of food, energy, and water to identify: (1) relational material and political dynamics and (2) through the lens of social reproduction, shared demands across differently articulated political claims. We conclude by describing work of translation, commensuration, and imagination that scholars might engage in to facilitate understanding and coalition-building across urban and agrarian studies and movements.