On 3 July 2026, Valentin Meilinger and Sandra Jasper convened a double-session panel on the topic of “ecologies of pollution” at this year´s POLLEN conference in Barcelona. The panel explored how, amid today´s overlapping environmental crises, pollution continually resurfaces materially, socially, and politically in new forms, despite established ways of containing it. To investigate the forms and politics of urban pollutionscapes, the panel drew attention to how those become constituted through urban “ecologies of pollution,” the diverse, partial, and improvisational ways in which pollution is known, lived with and contested.
Eight presentations traced how these relations play out across a range of case studies worldwide: polluted small water bodies in Berlin (Guillermo Germán Joosten), struggles for safe sanitation in Mumbai (Purva Dewoolkar), sanitation commoning in Accra (Priscilla Pambana Gutto Bassett), drinking water pollution in Rio de Janeiro (Valentin Meilinger), racialized air pollution in Detroit (Ember McCoy), the ecological collapse of the Mar Menor (Sandra Jasper), invisibilized toxic waste in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (Ben Platt and Zuhri James), and light pollution in Zurich (Nitin Bathla and Sophia Heller).
Across these cases, three lessons stood out:
- Pollution is never simply past, contained, or resolved, but keeps resurfacing in new material and political forms. Reconceptualizations of the urban metabolism in social sciences can build on these shifting forms of pollution, taking its different materialities seriously.
- Humans and nonhuman beings live with and manage pollution through diverse, partial, and improvisational practices that institutionalized governance often fails to register. Especially, recognizing ongoing work of cleaning and remediating points to possibilities of repair that address the unjust histories and presents of urban pollution.
- The meanings and specific materializations of system-based approaches of governing urban nature such as planetary health, which promises to integrate human and environmental health, cannot be known in advance. Rather, they emerge around situated practices of knowing, experiencing, and addressing pollution.
We warmly thank all the contributors and the audience for making our panel a thought-provoking closure to POLLEN 2026