It has been over 15 years since the term ‘urban political ecology’ (UPE) was coined. While still often not incorporated into larger discussion of political ecology, its growing visibility in the published literature suggests that it has gone beyond an emerging theoretical lens to one that has fully emerged. This report characterizes the current literature that explicitly utilizes the language of UPE, discusses its theoretical evolution that is now seeing a second wave, as well as catalogs some of the new arenas through which the sub-field has offered novel insights into the socionatural unevenness of cities. A central contribution of this survey is to illustrate the myriad articulations of how urban environmental and social change co-determine each other and how these metabolic processes offer insights into creative pathways toward more democratic urban environmental politics.