Conclusion

Abstract This chapter summarizes some of the preceding arguments, focusing on the question “why study cities?” and noting the importance of translocal analysis. The chapter then takes on an ecological focus, noting that although people clearly suffer deeply in the grip of colonial power, the land itself is also stifled by violent assertions of imperial and neo-imperial will. And while an individual can subversively claim a street corner for informal labor or paint a liberation slogan on a colonial monument, it is far more difficult to combat the devastating droughts or rising tides of climate change—environmental catastrophes that are already disproportionately affecting the urban poor. The chapter looks briefly at significant ecological problems, and at some local efforts to address these problems, in each of the four cities under study. It concludes with a reminder that the book’s argument is anti-imperialist in the broadest sense: it highlights the deleterious effects of direct conquest, of cultural and economic neo-imperialism, and of anthropocentrism’s colonizing vantage on the “vibrant matter” (Bennett 1) that surrounds us, and it examines the intimate interconnections between these forms of violence—and between the animal, vegetable, and mineral acts of insubordination that resist them.