Prof Dr Anne Rademacher
Professor of Sustainable Urban Environments
Sustainable Urban Environments
I am an urban political ecologist, ethnographer, and lifelong student of the entangled processes of social and environmental transformation. I trained in the environmental sciences and cultural anthropology at the Yale School of the Environment, and served for over two decades as an assistant, associate, and full professor in the Departments of Environmental Studies and Anthropology at New York University. I joined the Technical University of Munich in June of 2024, where I currently serve as Chair of Sustainable Urban Environments in the School of Social Sciences and Technology.
Across my research and teaching, I use tools from the qualitative social sciences to better understand urban social-ecological change. My first monograph, Reigning the River, explored how contests over history and ideologies of belonging shaped urban ecological restoration in Kathmandu. This study showed how restoring an urban riverscape was intertwined with political transformation, migration and housing politics, and the volatile dynamics of statemaking in Nepal. In a second monograph, Building Green, I worked with, and learned from environmental architects in Mumbai. This work focused on the ways that ecological ideas were shaped by place and context, and how those ideas informed design principles and practices deemed to be more sustainable or environmentally responsible. In Building Green, I traced the emergence of environmental affinities — the sometimes unlikely alliances through which social agents form solidarities on behalf of the environment. I also described the formation of shared notions of the good and proper in matters of ecology— the moral ecologies — that form social bridges between environmental ideas and engaged practices of environmental stewardship.
For over a decade, I’ve worked with K. Sivaramakrishnan to develop an analytical rubric we call ecologies of urbanism. This work has brought together dozens of scholars working in cities across Asia to explore core social dynamics at play as urban environments change in varied contexts. Three volumes assemble the insights of our Ecologies of Urbanism Network: In Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism and Ecologies of Urbanism in India, we offered a rubric for examining the places of nature within and beyond the city. In our most recent volume, Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities, we focused on the fundamental questions of decay, regeneration, growth, and sustainability that arise in the context of urban transformation. The growth of cities is often narrated as a story of planning and disruption, the displacement of non-human life, or the depletion of human and natural resources to concentrate industry, commerce, and government. Our work considers how the environmental dimensions of cities are also narrated and experienced in terms of death and life. Death and Life of Nature explores the biophysical and cultural processes of death and life in Asian cities, drawing on specific cases to address when and how nonhuman nature was framed as essential to idealized forms of urban nature, and when and how it was deemed disposable.
- Urban Ecologies
- Rivers and Coastlines
- Urban Biodiversity
- Collaborations