The materiality of urbanization: Politics, regions, and networks in the work of Roger Keil

Roger Keil is widely recognized as a leading scholar of global suburbanism, infectious disease, and (sub-)urbanization. Over the last two decades, his work has generated a substantial body of scholarship and helped build an international research community around these themes. This article traces the intellectual continuities that animate Keil's evolving research and publishing practice. While his wide-ranging contributions have been central to shaping the field of Urban Political Ecology, a single conceptual claim runs through his work since the late 1980s: the idea that globalizing capitalism is best understood through the networked materialities of urbanization, which mediate social relations with nature in the modern world. We follow the development of this claim from his early work on urban politics in Frankfurt, Los Angeles, and Toronto in the 1990s to his more recent engagements with suburbanization and infectious disease. Structured around the themes of politics, regions, and networks, this article foregrounds Keil's critical and enduring project: to bring our understanding of capitalist globalization down to earth to the level of urbanization rather than treating it as a reified force acting from above.