Worlding cities through their climate projects?

Abstract

In recent years, the built environment has emerged as a critical target of climate change intervention for urban governments around the world, engaging developers, professionals, activists and communities in a range of new eco-urbanism projects. While important contributions have been made, this paper suggests that critical academic and policy debates on urban climate politics have so far paid insufficient attention to the sheer divergence in urban experiences, concerns and public–professional responses elicited through such experiments worldwide. By juxtaposing architectural and other eco-housing practices from diverse cities on three continents—Kyoto (Japan), Copenhagen (Denmark) and Surat (India)—this paper aims to conjure a more cosmopolitan research imagination on how climatic solidarities may emerge in the face of multiple urban differences and inequalities. Towards this end, the paper mobilizes assemblage urbanism as a set of methodological sensibilities towards issues of knowledge, materiality, multiplicity and scale-making within situated and contested processes of urban ecological change. Drawing on the politics of thick description favored by assemblage thinking, I deploy situated ethnographies to suggest that eco-housing projects in Kyoto, Copenhagen and Surat engage professional and public actors in variable world-conjuring efforts, potentially opening up new micro-arenas for the articulation of more attractive, sustainable and just urban futures. While shaped by inequalities of power, resource and knowledge, such eco-housing assemblages, I suggest, also serve as spaces of collective experimentation and learning, in and beyond the particular city.

Key words:

• assemblage urbanism
• climate change
• eco-housing
• scale-making
• cosmopolitics
• comparison

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by The Danish Council for Independent Research / Social Sciences, grant number 09-069066.

Notes

1 Importantly, apart from North–South divides (e.g. Copenhagen/Surat), heavily entrenched in urban thinking and practice, my work also traverses an (equally imagined) ‘West–East divide’ (e.g. Copenhagen/Kyoto).

2 Assemblage urbanism, and its contributions to critical urban theory, has recently been the topic of extended discussion on the pages of this journal. For the initial statement, see McFarlane (2011a); and for an extended critique, Brenner, Madden, and Wachsmuth (2011). Rather than attempting to summarize this multifaceted debate, my position will emerge from discussing the more confined domain of urban climate politics. In this sense, my paper may be read as an ‘application’ of assemblage urbanism to this domain.

3 As in other domains of urban study, ‘global cities’ (e.g. London, New York) tend to receive most attention in discussions on urban climate politics. Official population figures for the world cities under study in this paper are: 1.5 million in Kyoto; 1 million in Copenhagen; 4.5 million in Surat.

4 The notion of ‘problematization’, understood as an initial step in collective processes of semiotic-material reconfiguration work, is one that ANT and assemblage urbanism inherits from Foucault.

5 The notion of ‘explication’ stems from German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (e.g. 2009), whose ideas on design are also a source of inspiration to Latour's ANT work on architecture (e.g. Latour and Yaneva 2008).

6 While they use a different vocabulary, the point I am developing here resembles what Moore and Karvonen (2008) call ‘context-bound’ design thinking in sustainable architecture. However, contrary to their suggestion, cosmograms are, so to speak, what happens to Martin Heidegger's ‘thing as gathering’ once we abandon his anti-modernism and allow technological objects their own ‘onto-poetics’ (Tresch 2007).

7 The qualifier ‘new-build’ is important here: my choice to study projects aiming to build new eco-dwellings, rather than retrofitting existing buildings, is far from ‘innocent’, particularly in a city like Copenhagen, where the carbon-saving potentials of retrofitting (e.g. through better insulation) are likely to be huge.

8 In each city, the projects under study were initiated around 2008 or 2009, and are projected to run for at least another 10 (Surat), 25 (Kyoto) or even 35 years (Copenhagen).

9 All person names in the text are pseudonyms. All translations are by the author.

10 In Japanese, the link between past, present and future is built into the name: kyô-machiya connotes vernacular architecture (past), while heisei is the contemporary (emperor-measured) period of history.

11 Climate change has been on the urban agenda in Kyoto at least since 1997, when the city hosted the United Nations COP3 climate conference, resulting in the build-up of new local and national NGO networks (Reimann 2002). As a matter of binding municipal policies, however, most initiatives stem from the latter part of the 2000s onwards, mirroring also wider ‘global’ patterns (cf. Bulkeley and Broto 2013).

12 The notion of ‘Kyoto-ness’ (my own neologism) is a reference to wider debates on ‘Japan-ness’ in architecture (e.g. Guy 2010). It is meant to signal that, in this case, the collective identity frame is less the nation than the city itself.

13 As large-scale, strategic, technology-driven eco-city projects, Dongtan in Shanghai and Masdar in United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been widely hailed as global ‘templates’ of urban sustainability. In more critical ways, they have also tended to dominate the urban studies imagination (cf. Hodson and Marvin 2010).

14 Here as elsewhere, the ‘carbon-neutral’ label remains quasi-mysterious. For the calculative logic to add up, the city of Copenhagen will have to become a large-scale player on transnational carbon markets.

15 Correa is famous, in part, for his low-cost housing designs, relying on block architecture. Not all of his designs, however, have been uncontroversial: in the 1980s, his plans for redeveloping the Mumbai Dharavi slum, notably, met with public protest and was never implemented (Chatterji 2005).

16 I am paraphrasing here the title of Bruno Latour's (2004) response to Ulrich Beck's cosmopolitanism.

Additional information

Anders Blok is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. Email: [email protected]