Towards an urban political ecology in rurality

Abstract

The treatment of urbanism as a field of study often disagrees from the rural topics as if they would not be intrinsically related. The Urban Political Ecology lens has proposed to understand the urbanism as an expansive process rather than a focused phenomenon. It constructs new perceptional ways and Nature’s manifestation though narratives, practices and representations that overcome the spatial characteristics. Therefore, it is necessary split the urban phenomenon from the physical space. As the rural parroquia of Lloa case, it is observable how the urbanization has kept a clear influence in the changes of the narratives and practices that have driven to marginalized and dependent processes. This document, based on five months of Ethnograpy, tries to explain the described previous phenomenon with the purpose to encourage the research in these areas, showing the potential of rural studies and the urban expansion from the Urban Political ecology lens.