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What is a river? A transnational meditation on the colonial city, abolition ecologies and the future of geography

ABSTRACT This short essay, flowing through Nairobi and Toronto, represents a transnational conversation on what the contemporary status of urban rivers can tell us about the endurance of coloniality in these two spaces. Against the hegemonic bids for their “revitalization,” we attend to these two rivers, both of which helped propel the growth of their respective urban agglomerations, as symbols of people-centered struggles for abolition ecologies. We aim to provoke the incorporation of more plural understandings and narrations within the discipline of geography, and have been struck by the similarities across different post- and settler-colonial contexts, and, as well, the limited lenses that attend to these environments in academic scholarship. Accordingly, we also highlight the possibilities that emerge in thinking jointly with urban spaces across the “North” and “South” divide, in order to demonstrate the connected and pervasive nature of empire, and the variegated practices that resist coloniality in cities.