In Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities, Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan gather together essays that take Asian cities as their focus of study to understand precarity in this age of the Anthropocene. By attending to a seemingly paradoxical term urban nature, the book invites its readers to think about how human activities affect and are affected by the built environment. The book, animated by its desire “to regard urban nature as a dynamic, ever-continuing, social-biophysical process” (1), resists viewing nature and culture as binaries to explore new ways of examining human-nonhuman interactions at a time when the world is hurtling toward environmental degradation and ecological collapse.
By situating this exploration in Asian cities, the book also resists the hidden Eurocentrism that has pervaded scientific studies that shed light on the interplay between humans and nature, such that social relations can be neatly explained using determinative...
