REVIEW OF URBAN AFFAIRS JANUARY 13, 2018 vol lIiI no 2 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 46 Urban Jungles Wilderness, Parks and Their Publics in Delhi Amita Baviskar A modified version of this article will appear in Grounding Urban Natures: Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies, edited by Henrik Ernstson and Sverker Sörlin, forthcoming from the MIT Press in 2018. Amita Baviskar (amita.baviskar@gmail.com) is a sociologist at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. In an exploration of the processes through which urban India acquires or loses green spaces, this article examines how parks and urban publics are mutually constituted in Delhi. Social change has led to a re-imagination of cultural meanings and modes of ecological management. Ecological change, in turn, has created new social relations around the use and protection of nature. Analysing Mangarbani, a sacred grove on the edge of the metropolis, and the Delhi Ridge, a “wilderness” domesticated for recreational use, the author argues that the creation and preservation of certain forms of urban nature relate to the shifting sensibilities of elites, especially the section that acts as a self-appointed vanguard of environmental causes. However, other users of public green areas challenge the far-reaching effects of this “bourgeois environmentalism.” The contested meanings and practices around urban natures create new alliances and understandings that may promote ecology and justice. The Cultural Politics of ‘Socio-nature’ T he relationship between nature and society has been a focus of attention in the social sciences and humanities since their inception. In this article, however, I follow only one thread of a complex skein of theories, starting with Raymond Williams’s (1972) seminal essay “Ideas of Nature.” Williams argued that nature was a cultural artefact: not only was the natural world physically transformed by human actions, our very perception of it was shaped by socially produced ideas and sentiments. Referring to this material and imaginative work, Williams (1972: 83) wrote: “We have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to separate each other out.” His classic, The Country and the City shows how an urbanising society, with its “historically varied experience” of the Industrial Revolution, came to change its view of rural life and the countryside, a shift reflected in the literature of the period (Williams 1973: 2). Williams’s work precedes a more recent surge of writing in political ecology that tries to transcend dualistic conceptions of nature–society relations by tracking how nature is socially constructed and culturally produced in the past and present (Cronon 1996; Peet and Watts 1996; Castree and Braun 2001). One strand of this research explores cities, and how their apparently artefactual character is, in fact, based on material and discursive transformations of nature (Cronon 1991; Gandy 2002; Heynen et al 2006). This literature is also influ- enced by Bruno Latour’s (1987, 1993), Actor–Network Theory, the notion that complex networks of human and non-human “actants” combine in hybrid forms that defy the nature–culture divide. While Latour’s work pushes the boundaries of how “socio-nature” may be conceived, it tends to ignore the power relations that permeate such networks. As Williams (1972: 84) says, “If we say only that we have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces, we are stopping short of the truth that we have done this unequally.” Understanding processes of “socio-nature” demands keeping in mind social inequality as well as natural variability. Location matters: the cultural geography of class, caste, nation and gender and the materiality of biophysical processes in specific places are equally consequential. Studying environmental conflict and collective action requires relating human actors and their hab- itus to habitats that alter and exert power. This article app- roaches the contentions around Delhi’s green spaces from this analytical perspective.