Abstract

In the context of urban ecology, it has become imperative to think of the entanglements of nature with access and power, and of exclusion and accumulation. The conservation science does not seem certain anymore of what needs to be conserved and at whose cost in the cities. The bit of nature that exists, is hard to classify as wild, domesticated, horticultural or feral. The struggle of understanding nature in the city is riddled with the sheer variety of natures and the seemingly inextricable knotted-ness, in the human -non -human continuum extending into the biophysical and beyond. The comfort of doing conventional ecology, with a certainty that what we measure is nature, and urban nature can be understood with familiar toolkits is long gone. Perhaps a new framework for doing ecology in the urban is emerging, through these struggles and new optics. This discussion attempts to foreground the contested ecology of natural spaces and creatures in the context of Delhi, for comments and inputs.