City-based citizenship (city-zenship) and its ecological ramifications increasingly inform people’s social and political lives, rendering the link between ecological citizenship and political city-zenship a topical subject for analysis. The questions analyzed here are: How can and how do citizens of cities promote sustainable urban development? What are their goals and motivations? And how do these forms of engagement reflect the theory of ecological citizenship in cities? The research is based on semi-structured and in-depth interviews with environmental and political activists in German and Israeli cities. The analysis indicates that the city is a meaningful political arena for ecological citizenship, with distinct patterns of political participation in relation to a city’s particular identity. However, political participation in cities is not independent of the state, but dependent on the political and civic rights enshrined therein.

This article analyses and interprets the works of Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000) as a source of inspiration for environmental ethics and offers an extended model of the Ecological Self based on an interpretation of his works. Hundertwasser was a prominent Jewish-Austrian artist and environmental activist, yet despite his commitment to environmental issues, he has not received the attention he deserves from the environmental ethics community. His works and writings suggest a critique and reformulation of the well-known concept of the Ecological Self. This concept implies that humans are essentially embedded in the natural world – that the Self is porous and open rather than disengaged and atomistic. This article suggests an alternative, holistic and extended version of this concept. It assesses and incorporates additional layers found between humans and nature – clothing, architecture, urban environments, and social and political environments.

Located in the theoretical triangle of urban, cultural, and political studies, this paper examines artists’ political engagement in cities. Applying a qualitative approach through inter-urban fieldwork in Hamburg and Hanover, Germany, and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel, we study how artists critically engage with their cities and urban spaces, and analyze how the artists’ themselves perceive and practice their own actions. Based on this, we offer a typology of artists’ attitudes and behavior patterns toward urban politics and policies, which we propose as a relevant theoretical tool for analyzing political engagement of artists in the urban environment.