Contradiction, intervention and urban low carbon transitions

This paper presents an analysis of contradictions in urban low carbon transitions as engines of change. Following Kojéve’s reading of contradiction in Hegel's oeuvre, I argue that contradiction is a constitutive feature of low carbon interventions. This is an alternative to conventional readings of contradiction as a provisional encounter of opposites in which one will eventually cancel the other. I unpack the concept of contradiction in three ways: first, by displaying a Hegelian-inspired understanding of contradiction in relationship with change, time and desire; second, by explaining how inherent contradictions can be read in relation to the excesses that characterise the deployment of methods of calculation in low carbon interventions; and third, by situating these contradictions within the overall dynamics of carbon governance and purposive attempts to bring about a low carbon transition. The paper explores the practical implications of this analysis in a case of low carbon interventions in social housing in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The case study shows that contradictions are at the heart of low carbon interventions. In this context, contradiction analysis may provide a direction towards broader reconfigurations of social and technological practices and generate a desire to change

Innovation Territories and Energy Transitions: Energy, Water and Modernity in Spain, 1939–1975

This paper engages with debates about the need for a deeper theorization of the political and spatial aspects of socio-technical transitions by examining the relevance of the concept of political technology for this body of theory. Political technologies are systematic and applied frameworks deployed to advance specific strategies to transform governments and societies. Looking at the role of political technologies within processes of systemic innovation, I propose that political technologies develop within socio-technical regimes in purposive attempts to transform them. From this perspective, socio-technical transitions emerge in relation to the visions that inspire them, the forms of knowledge that enable their implementation and how they relate to access to resources and innovations. To illustrate the argument, the paper presents a case study of a socio-technical transition that took place in Spain with the consolidation of the electricity industry and the development of a national electricity network during Franco's dictatorship (1939–1975). Such a transition was possible within the framework of a politics of building hydraulic works, whereby certain spaces were designated as reservoirs of water. The way in which such networks were constituted still resonates with Spanish energy policy today

Urban Sustainability and Justice

Urban Sustainability and Justice presents an innovative yet practical approach to incorporate equity and social justice into sustainable development in urban areas, in line with the commitments of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda. This open access work proposes a feminist reading of just sustainabilities' principles to reclaim sustainability as a progressive discourse which informs action on the ground. This work will help the committed activist (whether they are on the ground, working in a community, in a non-governmental organization (NGO), in a business, at a university, in any sphere in government) to connect their work to international efforts to deliver environmental justice in cities around the world. Drawing on a comparative, international analysis of sustainability initiatives in over 200 cities, Castán Broto and Westman find limited evidence of the implementation of just sustainabilities principles in practice, but they argue that there is considerable potential to develop a justice-oriented sustainability agenda. Highlighting current successes while also assessing prospects for the future, the authors show that just sustainabilities is not merely an aspirational discourse, but a frame of reference to support radical action on the ground. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of Sheffield

Maintaining Climate Change Experiments: Urban Political Ecology and the Everyday Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructure

Climate change governance is increasingly being conducted through urban climate change experiments, purposive interventions that seek to reconfigure urban sociotechnical systems to achieve low-carbon and resilient cities. In examining how experiments take effect, we suggest that we need to understand not only how they are made and assembled, but also how they are maintained within specific urban contexts. Drawing on literatures from urban political ecology and the specific debate on urban repair and maintenance, this article examines maintenance in two case studies of climate change experiments in housing in Bangalore (India) and Monterrey (Mexico). We find that maintenance is a crucial process through which not only urban obduracy is preserved, but also the novel and innovative character of the experiment is asserted and reproduced. The process of ‘maintaining’ experiments is a precarious one, which requires a continuous external input in terms of remaking the experiment materially and discursively. This process causes further reconfigurations beyond the experiment, changing the patterns of responsibility attribution and acceptability that configure the urban fabric

Government by experiment? Global cities and the governing of climate change

In this paper, we argue for an approach that goes beyond an institutional reading of urban climate governance to engage with the ways in which government is accomplished through social and technical practices. Central to the exercise of government in this manner, we argue, are ‘climate change experiments’– purposive interventions in urban socio-technical systems designed to respond to the imperatives of mitigating and adapting to climate change in the city. Drawing on three different concepts – of governance experiments, socio-technical experiments, and strategic experiments – we first develop a framework for understanding the nature and dynamics of urban climate change experiments. We use this conceptual analysis to frame a scoping study of the global dimensions of urban climate change experimentation in a database of 627 urban climate change experiments in 100 global cities. The analysis charts when and where these experiments occur, the relationship between the social and technical aspects of experimentation and the governance of urban climate change experimentation, including the actors involved in their governing and the extent to which new political spaces for experimentation are emerging in the contemporary city. We find that experiments serve to create new forms of political space within the city, as public and private authority blur, and are primarily enacted through forms of technical intervention in infrastructure networks, drawing attention to the importance of such sites in urban climate politics. These findings point to an emerging research agenda on urban climate change experiments that needs to engage with the diversity of experimentation in different urban contexts, how they are conducted in practice and their impacts and implications for urban governance and urban life

Sacrifice zones and the construction of urban energy landscapes in Concepción, Chile

This article examines how national energy policies in Chile constitute urban energy landscapes characterized by environmental and spatial inequalities. The concept of urban energy landscapes is deployed to explain the spatial patterns resulting from energy governance and energy conflicts in the metropolitan area of Concepción, a metropolitan region of strategic importance in the configuration of national energy policy. These urban energy landscapes result from the constitution of 'sacrifice zones' that reflect an extractivist model of energy production. The combination of qualitative interviews and transect walks reveals different aspects of a dual arrangement of energy infrastructure and urbanization. The city's fragmented landscapes emerge from the coexistence of energy infrastructure and associated industries, with daily activities of communities that have little to do with these industries but live in their shadow. Conflicts in these urban energy landscapes are intense, with every inch of space contested by competing modes of 'being urban.' The urban energy landscape in Concepción is an expression of a clash of social and economic power with local priorities

Urban Sustainability and Justice

Urban Sustainability and Justice presents an innovative yet practical approach to incorporate equity and social justice into sustainable development in urban areas, in line with the commitments of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda. This open access work proposes a feminist reading of just sustainabilities' principles to reclaim sustainability as a progressive discourse which informs action on the ground. This work will help the committed activist (whether they are on the ground, working in a community, in a non-governmental organization (NGO), in a business, at a university, in any sphere in government) to connect their work to international efforts to deliver environmental justice in cities around the world. Drawing on a comparative, international analysis of sustainability initiatives in over 200 cities, Castán Broto and Westman find limited evidence of the implementation of just sustainabilities principles in practice, but they argue that there is considerable potential to develop a justice-oriented sustainability agenda. Highlighting current successes while also assessing prospects for the future, the authors show that just sustainabilities is not merely an aspirational discourse, but a frame of reference to support radical action on the ground. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of Sheffield

Splintering Urbanism and climate breakdown

On the anniversary of the publication of Splintering Urbanism, climate breakdown heralds a new era in public investment in infrastructure. However, current proposals for infrastructure overlook two decades of work in infrastructure studies. For example, both the Green New Deal advanced by activists in the United States and the European Green Deal, proposed by the European Commission, establish a dual logic between investments in centralized systems and off-grid systems that reinforce, rather than challenge, the infrastructure models critiqued in Splintering Urbanism. The lessons of Splintering Urbanism debates, such as the rise of post-networked conditions of living in dialogue with everyday practices of living with and against infrastructures, are still missing from the policies that will likely shape urban futures

Climate change politics and the urban contexts of messy governmentalities

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. The first part diagnoses three limitations of current thought on the urban governance of climate change. First, current action emerges within a wave of urban optimism with limited historical sensitivity to previous climate change action. Second, the mobile nature of climate change policies is overlooked in studies that emphasize cities as the unit of analysis for climate action. Third, the focus on global cities or alternative locations that are constructed as exemplary sites takes attention away from the ordinary contexts of action where climate action is most needed. The second part of the paper uses this analysis as the main motivation for a call for studies of climate change governance to engage with the messiness of urban knowledge and action. Three theories of messiness are put forward. The first relates the idea of governance as messiness to postcolonial analyses of radical environmental action. The second emphasizes the messiness embedded in current methods of knowing the city, and the logic of situated knowledge. The third emphasizes messiness in the relations between the body, society and the emotions characterizing the interactions of everyday life

Employment, environmental pollution and working class life in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina

People's experiences of a polluted space are intimately linked with their relative concerns for quality of life and livelihoods. Thus quality of environment and security of employment are two closely related issues in social conflicts over environmental pollution. Rather than being implicated in a trade-off relationship, environmental quality and job provision are both part of the life of community residents. Bringing together the literature on the political ecology of environmental conflicts and the social constructionist literature on public perceptions of environmental risks, this article argues that the working class and disadvantaged sections of society are often confronted with alliances between the industry, institutions and other stakeholders which may serve to legitimate a particular configuration of things in which the appropriation of some resources by the industry is regarded as legitimate. However, these arrangements are unstable: they are subject to constant renegotiation between the social groups implicated. Thus, how the emergence of concerns about the local environment relates to preoccupations about the state of the local economy is related to a process whereby these relationships are constructed and re-negotiated. These questions are analyzed using a case study of environmental pollution from coal-energy production in the city of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The case shows that both concerns for the environment and unemployment are articulated simultaneously in the context of industrial pollution, together with the redefinition of the socio-economic landscapes of post-industrial Tuzla. Keywords: Environmental pollution, employment, working-class life, social constructionism, Bosnia and Herzegovin