Book Review Forum: Political Ecologies of Landscape: Governing Urban Transformations in Penang

Creighton Connolly, Political Ecologies of Landscape: Governing Urban Transformations in Penang, Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022; 204 pp.: ISBN: 978-1529214147, £80.00 (hbk), ISBN: 978-1529214154, £27.99

Introduction

Calvin King Lam Chung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

Amidst growing calls to decentre Euro-American knowledge production, more critical urban scholars have shifted their theory-building frontiers to city-regions in Asia, a rapidly urbanising continent. In this book review forum, we celebrate and reflect on Creighton Connolly’s Political Ecologies of Landscape, a laudable endeavour to compose a synthesis of theories of landscape and urban political ecology through the dramatic and often controversial transformation of Penang from – as Connolly noted –‘a largely rural state into an almost completely urbanized conurbation’ (p.135). Tracking its lengths and breadths since 2017, Connolly takes full advantage of Penang’s ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005) to demonstrate the versatility of his landscape political ecology framework in throwing light on a wide range of critical themes in urban studies, such as worlding ambitions, infrastructure expansion, heritage conservation and land reclamation, all within a postcolonial and regionalising setting.

This book review forum comprises the commentaries from four researchers whose work in various ways intersects with Connolly’s book, and Connolly’s response to their generous comments. Known for his critical research on infrastructure, Jonathan Silver applauds Connolly’s captivating analysis of the manifold tensions between the relentlessness of the ever-expanding array of property and infrastructure projects of accumulation in Penang, and the patience of the Penangites to resist and contest these threats to their hometown’s socio-ecological sustainability. Political ecologist Alex Loftus, whose work on everyday environmentalism has impacted Connolly, is most interested in – to quote Loftus’s words – the ‘aesthetic politics of landscape formation’ in Penang, where people’s sensuous exchanges with their landscapes underpin their struggles against large-scale urban development, and invites Connolly to elaborate the landscape political ecology framework with a bodily focus. For Gwynn Jenkins, who has researched Penang’s heritage governance, Connolly’s book is remarkable not only for its holistic coverage of Penang’s contested ‘megapolitian explosions’ but also for its theoretically disruptive power, dismantling dichotomies between rural and urban, and between nature and culture. Finally, Jamie Wang, an urban environmental humanities scholar, highlights how Connolly’s landscape political ecology framework could provoke more critical engagements with the more-than-human dimension of urbanisation, and how his nuanced account of the alternative urban governance pursued by the Penangites could bring hope to the quest for a socio-ecologically more progressive form of Asian urbanism.

I cannot agree more with the commentators that Connolly’s landscape political ecology framework will continue to inspire critical urban research of many rapidly transforming landscapes in Asia and beyond. Two of them that immediately come to my mind are the sprawling greenways that trouble urban–rural relations (Chung and Dai, 2024), and the informational peripheries (re)produced for urban digital economies (Datta, 2024). May Connolly’s wish for his framework to open up more avenues to achieve just and sustainable urban futures be realised.

References

Chung CKL, Dai J (2024) Rural greenways for urban environmental demands: Environmentalised urbanisation in the Pearl River Delta. Transactions in Planning and Urban Research 3(3): 202–215. Crossref; Google Scholar

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Commentary I

Jonathan Silver, University of Sheffield, UK

This book begins by asking some questions familiar to urban studies: How do the built environments of cities transform? How do the people in them inhabit urban space amid these massive changes to their everyday lives? In responding to these questions, the book establishes new openings to approaching these enduring concerns of the discipline. Drawing on, and expanding, a rich tradition of urban political ecology (UPE) (Heynen et al., 2006), Connolly guides the reader through contemporary Penang and the myriad of emerging futures being generated in more or less socio-ecologically just ways. Attempts at viable forms of inhabitation in Penang, as in other South Asian cities, are always in the cross-hairs of the juggernauts of rapid urbanisation, mega projects, reclamations of land from the ocean and massive development proceeding apiece, often in dizzying ways (Simone, 2019). This tension is at the heart of the book. As Connolly writes, it is a ‘fraught relationship between state and civil society’ (p. xii) that attempts to find ways through. In this book we are offered an original conceptual and deeply empirically informed response to such negotiations, navigations, relations, tensions and experiences.

I found a major quality of the writing in this book is a sense of relentlessness. New projects are envisaged and planned at a furious pace, a never-ending array of attempts to accumulate, build out, up and upon and profit from new urban development schemes, transport networks and logistical hubs. This city is framed as a real estate frontier (Gillespie, 2020) in which public land is mobilised to serve the next big, often imported idea of what a global city should be and who should accumulate from such designs. Quite early on in my reading I started to make a list of the range of projects to try and keep track of the massive projects being envisaged. It is an amazing assortment of real estate and infrastructure investments. Some of these seem to remain on drawing boards as urban fantasies (Watson, 2014) while some stutter or stagger forward. What is never lost amid the writing is a pressure that builds up as the reader moves through the book; another motorway is proposed, an assortment of luxury real estate enclaves is put into place, land reclamation projects proceed apiece, new tourist schemes take shape, etc. This relentlessness adds a power to the book that is a real credit to the way it is written, giving readers the impression of how rapid and yet simultaneously slow urban transformation in Penang can be.

Related to the sense of relentlessness that emerges from the pages is that of patience. Not simply of the capitalists and state bureaucrats pushing these projects but most prominently of the people that inhabit the city. In reading we gain a detailed knowledge and presentation of the activists challenging the growth machine and the ways that Connolly describes and analyses their movements, ideas, counterplans, contestations and I think above all what seems to be an enduring patience. This is a patience to engage in the difficult work of reading and understanding these plans, of finding ways to respond to them and mobilising not just public anger but the seeming respect of politicians and officials to think again, at least in some cases about badly hashed mega projects and real estate ventures. I think in this aspect the book offers a fascinating update to some of the work by McFarlane (2011) and others around learning the city. This involves attention to the often slowly learnt tactics that go into resistance and contestation. There is more which could be written about the histories of these movements in Penang (perhaps in another book!). In this aspect I wanted to know more about the ways in which momentum may have been built up from previous campaigns, about how knowledge transfers and travels within/across/beyond the city. The analysis does offer a considered understanding of the relations between these groups of residents and politicians/decision makers that interprets them as delicate but extensive, fraught but interestingly never particularly beyond the scope of potential dialogue.

While I had a fantastic sense of the civil society tactics and struggles around Penang’s environments what I felt Connolly could perhaps have been more explicit about, especially for those readers less familiar with Penang society, is the class composition of this civil society. I was left wondering who the people were that are involved or not. One gets a sense of a very professional middle class, people with skills to read plans, investment figures, environmental assessments and such like that might be characterised as a polite politics. This is fascinating and connects to the idea of a fraught but respected dialogue between those in power and those seeking to change plans, something I have rarely encountered in my own work without a more contentious politics also playing out on the streets.

I felt the book very much finds its scalar level at the extended urban region; the writing focuses on Penang and its hinterlands to a greater extent while also finding ways within the confines of one text to hint at and suggest other scales of analysis. This includes the wider global architectures that Penang and its mega projects attempt to fit into. I would have enjoyed another chapter, perhaps focused on the decade-old Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its profoundly urban dimensions (Apostolopoulou et al., 2024), the position of Penang in the ‘New Cold War’, the colonial British histories of the region (Nasution, 2002), the state-capitalist project and the modernisation paradigm that proceeded from independence in 1957. Such work is surely beyond the scope of one book but the analysis demonstrates how these integrations into an ever-shifting world economy/ecology might be understood. Equally, while the reader has a real sense of civil society as I previously mentioned I wonder what kind of book might have been written if it had started with the ‘everyday environmentalisms’ (Loftus, 2012) that are increasingly a focus in UPE. This is a starting position to see the city from the ground up, through the inhabitations of the people of Penang, the quiet encroachments, the everyday negotiations that swirl around mega projects beyond the reception they engender from surrounding populations. These points add to a broader question about how we might think across UPE (and indeed urban studies) in these myriad of scalar ways but within the confines of a paper or even a book. Connolly wrestles with the various scales of analysis that UPE has directed analysis towards while also leaving open the question of what political and analytical implications different scalar entry points establish.

The work on heritage is well informed and original. Penang Heritage Trust faces predicaments we can find in many neighbourhoods of entrepot cities that reflect these ocean facing histories. This is a kind of attachment to the built environment shaped through a connection with a previous global age of trade while under relentless pressure from the upheavals caused in the global economy. I was thinking how the book spoke to a myriad of places around the Indian Ocean, the old towns of Mombasa and Lamu on the Swahili coast or Jacksons Market in Karachi. They all have a geographic and spatial legacy of trade and port activity. However, to be modernised in this age of massive urbanisation and global logistics means to be completely, utterly transformed, deconstructed and shattered. I know the book is situated in relation to Southeast Asian cities but I think there are some fascinating potentials in the book about how its analytical framework has the capacity to ‘travel’ and be mobilised to interpret histories and built environment heritages elsewhere. I was also drawn to thinking about Butterworth, an example of proximate neighbourhood to the heritage site of George Town but without the protections against rampant development that have been established for its neighbour. Butterworth, Connolly (2022, p. 50) writes, becomes a focus of state/capital attention in its condition of what is described as ‘a brownfield site with a significant amount of post-industrial land, which could be replaced’. I think this opens fascinating new avenues of work for those engaged in heritage neighbourhoods and the need to pay attention to these proximate spaces and the ways development pressures spill out.

My final reflection is focused on ‘BioDiverCity’, an elite enclave made from reclaimed land that Connolly describes in detail. I read this section as a warning about how climate apartheid is already incorporated into real estate markets and the evacuation of the urban elite to supposedly safe spaces while leaving those who cannot afford access to deal with what is left. There is clearly a splintered urbanism that is being reinforced and amplified across the various spaces the book explores. And yet at the same time I was left questioning whether this segregated future is really so secure. Will those elites who find sanctuary at BioDiverCity from the inequality and environmental risks in Penang really secure themselves against what is coming? It is a question I am not sure can be answered at this moment but what Connolly does do is demonstrate that these separated lives are already happening.

I very much enjoyed reading this book. What Connolly offers at a general level is, I think, twofold: firstly, a very precise analytic built around the idea of urbanisation through socio-natures and applied in a series of generative and open ways that are likely to influence many scholars, especially through the idea of landscape political ecology; and secondly, a scholarly practice that steers away from generalisation in favour of anchoring/situating analysis in the unique geographies of a city such as Penang.

References

Apostolopoulou E, Cheng H, Silver J, et al. (2024) Cities on the new silk road: The global urban geographies of China’s belt and road initiative. Urban Geography 45(6): 1095–1114. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

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Gillespie T (2020) The real estate frontier. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 44(4): 599–616. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

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Commentary II

Alex Loftus, King’s College London, UK

Political Ecologies of Landscape opens up fascinating new conversations between urban studies, cultural geography and political ecology. It does so through laying out a framework that Connolly labels ‘Landscape Political Ecology’, and that brings together cultural geographical writings on landscape with insights from urban political ecology. Empirically, the book presents a detailed study of Penang – a state and a mid-sized secondary city in Malaysia that is undergoing profound socio-ecological and spatial transformation through infrastructural development, land reclamation and the construction of large numbers of new residential developments.

After a brief Introduction, the book goes on to lay out the landscape political ecology framework – something I discuss in greater detail below – before introducing the Penang Transport Master Plan in greater depth, situating the latter within broader debates around planetary and extended urbanisation. The next chapter considers these shifts from the perspective of landscape transformation, while the following one focuses more on socio-ecological change, discussing how urban development has led to biodiversity loss, deforestation and a heightened flood risk, while prompting new experiments in participatory governance and citizen science. It is in Chapter 6 that the landscape political ecology framework is perhaps the most explicit. Here Connolly weaves together his critical approach to heritage with further insights around place attachment, as well as ideas around how the latter might influence an incipient environmental consciousness and shape movements for biodiversity conservation in Penang. Chapter 7 considers the production of new urban spaces through land reclamation and the construction of new islands – a process referred to in previous chapters, and one that is absolutely central to the financing of massive transport infrastructure construction in the metropolitan region. The book concludes by bringing all these different threads together while considering the future of Jerejak Island in greater depth.

As an urban political ecologist – and not one with any great knowledge of Asian cities – one of the most compelling aspects of the book for me is the ability to bring together writings on landscape with those on political ecology. As Connolly makes very clear, there are so many shared assumptions and common theoretical reference points across the two bodies of work – Sauer’s writings on cultural landscape and the emergence of cultural ecology, to take just two – that it seems somewhat bizarre that conversations have not been more common. In particular, the kind of approach to landscape adopted by Don Mitchell seems to resonate so clearly with the production of nature thesis – a foundational work within urban political ecology. More than initiating a conversation, Connolly puts landscape political ecology to work, showing how it enables new insights on heritage, on place attachment and more. This is a hugely generative dialogue, and I have little doubt it will inspire new work.

The attention to large-scale infrastructural development is also insightful and productive, showing the flexibility of Connolly’s conceptual framing and his ability to move between governance concerns, Penangite’s sensuous engagements with the ecologies of which they are a part, and a broader concern with the political economy of extended urbanisation. By tracing out the longer histories of planned infrastructure projects, Connolly better contextualises these projects within normative visions of urban development in Penang. His longer term engagements with the region, following his PhD on swiftlet farming in George Town enable a much deeper and longer term set of insights. While some of the research for this new book was interrupted by the pandemic and an inability to travel to Penang during the final stages of research, Connolly continues to draw on existing networks while integrating data from social media sources – WhatsApp groups and online forums – in thoughtful ways.

In many respects Connolly foresees some of the questions that might arise from his study, and his analysis already responds to some of these. He therefore rejects the framing of Penangite social movements as a form of bourgeois environmentalism, using the landscape political ecology framework to show how activists resist a separation of nature and society while their praxis emerges from a sensuous engagement with the broader ecologies of which they are a part. One could query whether this is always the case, and I suspect there might also be times when a rather romanticised sense of a pristine nature is also mobilised against urban development in Penang, but the case Connolly builds is convincing.

One interesting aspect that I felt could have been explored in greater depth – given, in particular, the bringing together of cultural geographical writings and urban political ecology – is the aesthetic politics mobilised within these movements. A brief footnote quotes Duncan and Duncan (2001) on aesthetics as ‘the unarticulated, unmediated and naturalised pleasure one takes in the concrete materiality of things in themselves’ (quoted in Connolly, 2022, p. 145). Aesthetics – and perhaps this is implied within the quote – is deeply concerned with the senses. Within Marx’s writings, aesthetics becomes an effort to construct theory from ‘a bodily foundation’ (Eagleton, 1990). This effort strikes me as a similar project to that embarked on by some urban political ecologists, especially those who have become more concerned with a political ecology of the body. The aesthetic politics of landscape formation therefore opens up questions of how people produce landscape through their sensed engagements with those same environments. What, I wonder, might it mean to construct a landscape political ecology from ‘a bodily foundation’, from Penangites’ lived, breathed, smelt, seen and heard environments?

The book is also, of course, a contribution to ongoing debates around extended urbanisation. Connolly has been one of the most sensitive contributors to these debates, with his own gentle insistence that the critique of methodological cityism levelled at urban political ecologists does not quite stick. By teasing out the ongoing relations between a densifying urban region and its broader ecologies, Connolly shows that the rural and the urban cannot be so easily separated and instead need to be considered through their constitutive relations. While I think this framing works well, one might also question whether Penang is one more example of a city form expanding in a quite literal fashion to encompass its surroundings. One does not need a relational understanding to see the city supplanting the country here. It is not a question of finding the city in alpine meadows – as Christian Schmid might have it – but rather of the city form rearing up within the Straits of Malakar. I would like to know more about how form and process fit together within Connolly’s reading of extended urbanisation.

But these are all questions that emerge because of the productive and generative analysis already provided by Connolly. This is a brilliant book, and I look forward to working with the landscape political ecology framework in future years.

References

Connolly C (2022) Political Ecologies of Landscape: Governing Urban Transformations in Penang. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Google Scholar

Duncan J, Duncan N (2004) Landscapes of privilege: the politics of the aesthetic in an American suburb. London: Routledge. Crossref; Google Scholar

Eagleton T (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell. Google Scholar

Commentary III

Gwynn Jenkins, Consultant in Architectural Heritage and Cultural Anthropology

Since the last decade of the twentieth century the meteoric development, urbanisation and globalisation of Asia’s urban environment has been recognised for the challenge it poses to the ecological and social landscapes and to their equitable futures. Political Ecologies of Landscape illustrates these changes and challenges, using the rapid urbanisation of the Malaysian state of Pulau Penang as its case study. The state comprises the Island of Penang with its historic urban settlement recently encapsulated within the boundaries of a World Heritage Site, verdant hills, beaches, a few natural islands and a mix of small townships, factory areas, farms and recent/planned large-scale land expansion into the sea. In addition, the state includes a larger land area on the mainland, with similarly rapidly expanding older settlements, new urban landscapes and the inevitable interconnections and infrastructure required that are challenging the holistic balance of the state.

Creighton Connolly’s six years of research – while he lived in Penang, walked its streets and hills, interacted with NGOs, politicians, local Penangites, and the rural and urban landscapes–allowed him to unravel and present the dynamics of the political, ecological and social landscape of the state. Controversial historic, existing and planned urban development and social change had already left its mark on Penang’s eroded hill-scapes, extensive and destructive flooding, land expansion and more recently the threatened food security – all fuelling the rise of public awareness and social NGOs.

In order to untangle this contested landscape Connolly has refreshingly broken the distinctions between rural and urban, as demonstrated in the description and analysis of the case studies chosen. This in turn reveals the shaping of landscapes through the process of urbanisation and vice-versa. This timely recomposing and expansion of traditional approaches and analysis, and the inclusion of areas such as land reclamation and a World Heritage Site within the political, social and urban landscape, presents a stimulatingly holistic perspective. Consequentially, he has provided a springboard for future, broader investigations into and understanding of the relationships between political ecology, urbanisation, contesting stakeholders and governance.

By concentrating on the everyday lived practices of the users and producers of the given spaces it has been possible to focus on how differently the spaces and places were perceived and used, highlighting how ‘landscapes’ form affects daily experiences. This allows the relationship between nature and society to be understood from within the urban, suburban and exurban settings. The disturbance of this perception, use and relationship is where grassroots civil involvements energies and concerns can be explored.

Penang is also an ideal setting in which to consider the broad concept of political ecologies of heritage – the natural and cultural interconnections which are shaped by or shape the inhabitants’ lives and are challenged by development visions. While ‘heritage’ has its physical forms, the responses to them include identity, nostalgia, memory, emotion and cultural tradition, beliefs and practices. On a more physical level and in response to the constant need for the movement of people is the provision and development of ‘infrastructure’ perpetually heading for a future that is in permanent motion. Connolly’s examination of the landscape political ecology of infrastructure – central to urban research, spotlights the voices of Penang residents, activists, NGOs, ‘visionary’ developers and state power, highlighting the challenge infrastructure developments pose to environmental and social sustainability. The case study presented offers further empirical weight to existing studies found in recent literature and recognises Penang’s historical, present and future challenges in environmental sustainability and infrastructure planning.

In the aptly main-titled ‘Megapolitan Explosions’ (p. 38), Penang offers a myriad of examples of ambitious mega projects and the political and financial frameworks developed for their implementation. In the past, some have barely reached the ground-breaking ceremony, though they have never quite gone away; others have come into existence after local resistance and others are set for the long haul, becoming more convoluted in their set-up, making them more complex to challenge. On the government side checks and balances come from the implementation of Environmental Impact Assessments, but as illustrated in the book, in some cases these are not always undertaken or implemented.

Not all Penang’s ‘Megapolitan Explosions’ have been case-studied. Connolly has chosen not, for example, to examine in depth the Penang Global City Centre development proposal for the racecourse, which saw much public resistance creating a groundswell that gave birth to the highly vocal NGO Penang Forum. He has however, used these pages to explore, amongst other ‘explosions’, the development that links many elements of Penang’ social, cultural, ecological and political landscape – the Penang Transport Master Plan (PTMP). In so doing, he demonstrates that cities should be seen as interconnected to surrounding interdependent urban centres and natural landscapes, historically, culturally and physically. These mega interconnections are then part of both state and national promotion of world development.

Ironically, first promoted by civil society in order to increase public transport and reduce congestion, the ‘ownership’ of the master plan shifted into the political and development sphere and grew in ambition to include three reclaimed islands. These were then linked to the historic core, the beaches and the mainland through a new network of major road structures, echoing ‘world-class’ city-making strategies of the state and sidestepping social, economic and ecological implications. The state government’s promotion of a ‘green agenda’ seems hollow against their PTMP plans, and even more so when it seemingly abandoned a less ambitious and far more sustainable mobility plan from its original consultants. Civil society, keen to reduce the impact of such mega development, put forward their own plans as a counterbalance. However, as is illustrated within the pages of the book, the authorities saw and promoted these alternative voices as ‘irrational obstacles to progress’. As Connolly notes, the implementation stage is likely to be the point that the public experience the implications and controversies arise. The civil society groups, therefore, continue to question this and other projects, advocating the need for social and environmental justice, which may one day be heard.

Very much connected to the major infrastructure projects, the book turns to Penang’s forested hillslopes and the development pressure they are facing. Here man-induced disasters such as landslides and flooding are seen as technology-manageable acts of nature by the various state and local government bodies. Connolly argues that literature and empirical research have shown that is not the case and a fundamentally different approach to urban planning is required to avoid repetitions of past disasters.

Development is not new to Penang’s forested hillslopes, having sprouted a small hill resort mainly in the last century. This was eventually linked to the urban landscape by a funicular railway, and has been subject to various mega development plans over the years. The inclusion of the Penang Hill case study in the political ecologies of landscape discussion and the inter-relationship with urbanisation serves to illustrate the value of surmounting the overused tangible/intangible, cultural/natural and urban/rural categories. As a result, the book presents us with insight into the value of the holistic perspective.

The final chapter presents the vigorously contested land reclamation development to the south of the island. Despite the highly promoted Penang 2030 agenda which sets at its heart the aim to achieve sustainable and inclusive development, the reclamation project appears to be doing the opposite and through the very nature of the development will exacerbate inequalities and environmental degradation. Understanding why more holistic alternatives are not sought in order to truly achieve the stated aims of the agenda and why there is so little comprehension of cause and effect of such reclamation (despite the efforts of the civil society to ensure there is greater political and public awareness) is worthy of greater study and debate as this social and ecologically damaging phenomenon spreads across Asia.

Finally, and succinctly, Connolly, brings together all that has gone before in a compelling conclusion, choosing to present it through a further case study. His choice is that of the competing development proposals for Pulau Jerejak, a jungle-clad repository of natural biodiversity with a history of habitation, though currently an uninhabited island to the southeast of Penang Island. The vignette of its development debate and implications for its own and Penang state’s future reflects the ‘battleground for competing visions of Penang’, laid out in the preceding chapters.

By recounting his empirical research in Penang, told in a manner that breaks down theoretical boundaries, Political Ecologies of Landscape provides a rich exploration of complex issues brought about by the continual and often nonsensical development of our environment and the challenges this poses to our equitable futures. It argues that without a grounded and holistic understanding of social and geological landscapes, ambitions development agendas for the state risk the ability to achieve the voiced central aim of their plans.

Commentary IV

Jamie Wang, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Resistance and resilience: Mapping urban relations with Political Ecologies of Landscape

‘At the very beginning of Political Ecologies of Landscape, Creighton Connolly tells us that Penang is envisioned to be a green, smart and sustainable state under the Penang2030 agenda (p. 1). Both an island and state, Penang is now Malaysia’s most urbanised state, marked by ongoing mega-development projects. The rapid transformation in Penang is certainly not singular, rather the aspiration to be a ‘world city’ is contagious throughout Southeast Asia and beyond (Roy and Ong, 2011). In the face of climate change, the vision of creating a sustainable city has also been mobilised among cities. At the same time, Penang is home to George Town – a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, and Penang Hill – a forested area with rich biodiversity. Situated at the nexus of the historical past and changing present, Penang provides a fascinating site to explore contentions over urban redevelopment projects and competing desires for futures.

Grounded in long term ethnographic research in Penang, Connolly’s book explores various case studies, from the evolution of the Penang Transport Master Plan to the development of Penang’s forested hillside, and their socio-environmental concerns and consequences. The book navigates the politics of urban (environmental) imaginaries among diverse stakeholders, contested approaches to urban governance, and the entanglement of nature culture heritage in the urban context. Which and whose imaginaries of Penang are put to the fore? Who gains and who loses from the socio-ecological transformation within the process of urbanisation is central to Connolly’s analysis.

Coming to this book as an urban environmental humanities researcher, I am equally excited to learn how the proposed framework of landscape political ecology (LPE) may expand the more-than-human dimension in urban studies. In the first two chapters, Connolly proposes the concept of landscape understood as ‘quasi-objects’, moving beyond urban–rural and cultural–natural binaries that have long been entrenched in political ecology (pp. 4, 25; see Latour, 1993). In this sense, LPE provides a relational, critical lens to account for the environmental destruction and multispecies displacement as a result of urbanisation, and to further provoke and clarify the more-than-human relations in the city, opening up space for a fuller, and more just approach to urban planning.

Guided by the stories of the transformed and transforming landscape in Penang, a number of themes and interventions thread through the chapters. A key refrain is the concept and praxis of resilience and resistance. Connolly examines with great nuance the issue of resilience along with the aspect of (landscape) justice, and teases out the unevenly distributed multispecies impacts of the state’s invocation of resilience. Recently, there has been a growing attention on the way in which urban resilience may be co-opted for modernisation regime, or in urban studies scholar Goh’s (2021) words, ‘easily “greenwashed”—that is, overstated in their environmental claims or made to mask deeper harmful practices’ (p. 9; see also Kaika, 2017).

In the case of Penang, the state’s resilience rhetoric advocates the ‘implementation of “mitigation” and “restoration” techniques’ to allow ‘further development in a “sustainable” way’ (p. 84). In its focus on the pervasive hillside development, the book draws out the debates over the possible cause of intensifying flooding and landslides in the area. Although civil society groups, researchers and local residents suggest that these severe events are probably a result of relentless urban development and associated deforestation, the Penang state insists on positioning the issue ‘as acts of nature that require technical management’ (p. 93). The government, rather than slowing down the development work, emphasises the need to upgrade drainage systems (pp. 88–89). In other cases, mitigation narratives have enabled ‘special’ projects to bypass the existing legislation (p. 82). Connolly further points out the danger of a general inadequacy in following up on any necessary restorative work.

In urban planning, this kind of troubling conception of resilience is often rooted in human exceptionalism and ‘urban exceptionalism’ (p. 78; Houston et al., 2018), as well as a disregard for ecological limits. In this light, Connolly calls for a ‘different form of “resilient” and “sustainable”’ city, one that is not simply based on ‘“adding” nature or technological measures’ (p. 95). Here, what I take as another crucial point of the book is its storying and foregrounding the alternative possibility of urban governance devised by local civil society groups and their pursuit of a more socio-ecologically sustainable future. Early on, we have learned the inconsistencies identified by civil society groups between the state’s ‘Clean and Green’ rhetoric and the practices on the ground (p. 2). Throughout the book, and particularly in chapters 4 and 5, Connolly offers an illuminating account of local NGOs and activists’ resistances to the hegemonic visions of growth and creative approach to forming a more participatory mode of urban governance. The book details the way in which social media platforms and digital tools have played a significant role in shaping resistance tactics. For example, the initiative of Penang Hills Watch (PHW), co-organised by a coalition of local NGOs, encourages the public to take note of, and to report any ‘suspected illegal hill clearing from their mobile phones, which are then posted to an interactive map’ (p. 90). The information is also provided to the state government, who is requested to ‘provide clarification on the nature of the activity’ (p. 90).

In this way, PHW, equipped with expertise, embodied knowledge and live data, is able to engage with the government, or more accurately, forces the state to engage with and listen to civil societies. PHW also partners with other NGOs to create workshops and activities for the wider public to better understand slope ecology. As civil society groups centre the more-than-human elements co-shaping the landscape, their multi-dimensional approach enables local residents as well as the state to experience the surroundings and ‘attend to’ forested hill-slopes from a relational perspective (van Dooren et al., 2016). These acts of resistance, Connolly suggests, disrupt the normalised notion of resilience, enacting an alternative and more participatory form of urban governance (p. 19; see also Silver, 2023).

Moving to chapter 6, the book hones in on the cultural, natural heritage landscape, and the need to take seriously the ongoing co-constitution of heritage by human and other-than-human. In so doing, it demonstrates that heritage planning cannot be approached as preserving a static past for a human-centred present. Rather, Connolly encourages us to incorporate heritage landscape as part of sustainable urban making.

Political Ecologies of Landscape also grapples with the morphology of the Penang Transport Master Plan (PTMP), and the asymmetrical social–economic power relations and competing urban imaginaries underpinning its evolution. As a crucial part of Penang2030, the project has been promoted as a means to enable sustainable development while achieving great economic growth. In fact, the PTMP was first proposed by Penang civil society groups to the state as a possible sustainable (public) transportation initiative, yet the plan went on to become an expensive, mega-infrastructural project directed by consortiums specialising in property development (pp. 58–60). The implementation of PTMP is also hinged on the speculative value of the (reclaimed) land to come, which may cause serious environmental damage. How might infrastructural projects become shadowy places that continue to create injustice (Wang, 2019)? Connolly suggests that large infrastructural projects without meaningful, local consultation cause overlapping social, cultural and environmental issues. In addition, he points out the lack of engagement with, and inequity in more-than-human knowledge production. Looking through the framework of landscape political ecology, the book positions the natural environment as an ‘active agent’ in crafting future urban society (p. 141). These salient discussions highlight the urgent need not only for a more just urban governance structure, but also to move away from a human-centred approach to sustainable urban development.

In Connolly’s book, we come to learn that urban relations are mediated and shaped by various parties in urban societies, and that controversial urban development work can become the catalyst for political actions, social movement and creative tactics of resistance. The rich stories and analysis of the book capture the affect and dynamics imbued in landscape and the complex social–ecological concerns in a rapidly changing urban environment, as well as the tensions at work between everyday politics, lived experience and top-down planning. With intense urbanisation, there is a great necessity to attend to the rise of Asian urbanism, which is often characterised by a persistent ethos of progress, uneven development and environmental challenges. More importantly, Political Ecologies of Landscape shows us that this is a region that is vibrant and dynamic, and fecund of possibility and hope.

References

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Author response

Creighton Connolly, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

I feel very fortunate to have scholars who have inspired my research to take the time to read and engage with my book in such a detailed and constructive manner. While I once naively thought that my work on Penang might be finished with the conclusion of Political Ecologies of Landscape, it is now clear that there is still much work to be done. Indeed, as Wang asks, referring to her own work on Singapore, ‘How might infrastructural projects become shadowy places that continue to create injustice’ (Wang, 2019: 22)? This is indeed one of the most pressing questions confronting urban scholars and planners in the rapidly urbanising (South)East Asian region, which is constantly experiencing ambitious new speculative infrastructure projects. As Silver notes, ‘in an era of climate change(d) cities many of the costs of aspiring to be a world class city seem to be borne by people and their environments’. Yet, both Wang and Jenkins stress in their conclusions that this is also a region that is full of possibility and hope, in the form of political actions and resilience that can challenge top-down planning and uneven development.

Silver nicely uses the juxtaposition of the concepts relentlessness and patience in framing his review, and making sense of the ongoing transformations in Penang documented in the book. The relentlessness of urban (re)development in Penang is indeed one of the major factors that motivated me to write the book, and in spurring the grassroots governance initiatives and resistance to such development that are analysed. Yet, the actors behind these movements and the people of Penang more generally have exhibited a great deal of patience, indeed much more than I have had after 10 years of researching the city. On one hand, the people of Penang have exhibited a tremendous amount of patience in waiting for the promised improvements to the city’s infrastructure, which never quite seem to be realised. On the other, the actors resisting the large-scale development projects have been incredibly patient in continuing to analyse, point out flaws in, and provide alternatives to the government’s proposed mega projects and urban fantasies, even though they rarely result in the desired outcomes. While the BioDiverCity reclamation project discussed in the book has been significantly scaled back and reframed as a single ‘Silicon Island’, other disruptive infrastructure projects like the cable car from the Botanic Gardens to Penang Hill are going ahead.

It is great to see that my book left some of my readers wanting to know more. For instance, Silver mentioned that it would have been interesting to learn more about the histories of the organisations and movements in the book that gave rise to their current form. Jenkins mentioned the Penang Global City Centre development proposal in her review, which saw a groundswell of public resistance and gave birth to the NGO Penang Forum, which is featured in the book. There is some of this information in the text and in my other published articles on Penang. However, there are also several works by other urban scholars and historians – including by some of the activists featured in the book – that I would direct readers to. This is important context, which explains how and why Penang has developed the extremely fertile environment for grassroots activism that it currently has (see Connolly, 2019; Gibby, 2017; Goh, 2002; Hutchinson and Saravanamuttu, 2012; Jenkins, 2019; Khor, 1991).

In terms of future directions for research, the BRI is indeed one ‘larger scale’ research agenda that I would like to engage with in the future, though unrelated to Penang. Jenkins’ point about the need for understanding why alternatives are not sought in order to truly achieve the stated aims of the Penang Government’s 2030 agenda and ‘why there is so little comprehension of cause and effect of [large-scale] reclamation (despite the efforts of the civil society to ensure there is greater political and public awareness)’ is one that I am applying to proposed research on large-scale reclamation projects in Penang and other parts of East Asia. Such reclamation projects will indeed be worthy of greater study in the future as they proliferate across the region and research could shed more light on the nuanced forms and processes of extended urbanisation, which Loftus correctly takes issue with my treatment of in the book. On the more micro-scale, Loftus’ book on Everyday Environmentalism has been a major influence since the start of my academic career and the bottom-up view of the city that it encourages is also worth exploring in future work. In this regard, the host of a local book launch that I organised in Penang in 2024 lamented that my book missed the ‘silent voices’ of everyday people in Penang. As Jenkins’ review noted, the implementation stage of the various infrastructure projects featured in the book is likely to be the point at which these voices become louder as the general public experience their implications for everyday life and wellbeing. It is in this way that an ‘aesthetic politics of landscape formation’ suggested by Loftus would be particularly apt in opening up questions of how people experience and (re)produce landscape ‘through their sensed engagements with those same environments’.

References

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