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

2017 ◽  
pp. 101-126
Author(s):  
Vanesa Castán Broto ◽  
Harriet Bulkeley
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Infrastructure ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
The Everyday

Water Insecurity in Disaster and Climate Change Contexts

2019 ◽  
pp. 51-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernadette P. Resurrección
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Heavy Precipitation ◽  
Water Shortages ◽  
Gendered Violence ◽  
Water Insecurity ◽  
Feminist Political Ecology ◽  
Dry Spells ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday

This chapter applies a feminist political ecology lens to episodes of climate change-related water insecurity in three Southeast Asian peri-urban area sites affected by flooding, water shortages, and pollution induced by long dry spells and heavy precipitation. It presents highlights from a 3-year research project that examined the everyday lives of women as they “deal with water” in the context of increasing water pollution, water scarcity, and flooding compounded by neoliberal socioeconomic conditions. These accounts illustrate how in water- and climate-change contexts, the neoliberal logics of privatization, commercialization, and reified separation between “the natural” and “the social” engage closely with emotions and intersectional gender subjectivities. The use of a feminist political ecology lens offers more holistic and grounded ways of probing into people’s experiences of climate-related water insecurity and stresses, aspects of which are often missed: gendered violence, hierarchies of place, affect, and insecurity in everyday life.

“Everyone wants this market to grow”: The affective post-politics of municipal green bonds

2020 ◽  
pp. 251484862097370
Author(s):  
Melissa García-Lamarca ◽  
Sara Ullström
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sustainable Society ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Green Finance ◽  
The World ◽  
Good Conscience

As more cities seek to address environmental and climate change woes, the issuance of municipal green bonds to finance such initiatives is growing. But how do issuers and investors conceptualise and enact green bonds in relation to building a more sustainable society? What socionatures are produced with these bonds, and for whom? Based on fieldwork in Gothenburg, the first municipality in the world to issue green bonds, we bring together the literature on green finance, post-politics and affect through an urban political ecology lens to unpack the processes, practices and discourses underlying green bonds. We argue that green bonds ultimately serve as a new path to attract and circulate capital within the consensual, non-antagonistic sustainable order, where claims of doing good and building a good conscience are affective mechanisms that play an important, yet underexplored, role. In the conclusion, we reflect on the broader role of green finance and the possibility of harnessing affect and the political towards building more transformative and emancipatory urban socio-environments.

scholarly journals Urban political ecologies of housing and climate change: The ‘Coolest Block’ Contest in Philadelphia

Urban Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 1126-1141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gareth A S Edwards ◽  
Harriet Bulkeley
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Address Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Objectives ◽  
Emergent Literature ◽  
Political Ecologies ◽  
The City

Urban authorities and a range of private and civil society actors have come to view housing as a key arena in which to address climate change whilst also pursuing wider social, economic and environmental objectives. Housing has been a critical area for urban studies, but often considered in sectoral terms and work on urban responses to climate change has followed this positioning. By contrast, an Urban Political Ecology (UPE) perspective would position housing in more integrated terms as part of the metabolism of the city. Yet so far there has been relatively little written in UPE about either housing or climate change. This paper therefore seeks to bring UPE into dialogue with the emergent literature focused on governing climate change through housing. It does so through a detailed study of the ‘Retrofit Philly “Coolest Block” Contest’. We argue that this contest highlights the ways climate change is changing the way housing is embedded in the circulations of the city, pointing to changes in who is governing housing, how housing is being governed and who is able to access the benefits of (climate change-branded) action on housing.

scholarly journals The Archive: Digital Art and an Unsustainable Future

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tallulah Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
Environmental Disaster ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
Sea Levels ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Ecological Implications ◽  
The Face ◽  
Rising Sea Levels

This short story, “The Archive”, grew out of the eco-critical research I underwent during my postgraduate degree at Goldsmiths, University of London. In recent years, literary studies have become increasingly invested in environmentalism. The damaging consequences of human endeavour are now widely regarded within environmentalist and scientific communities, and by environmental literary theory or “ecocriticism”, as a shift from the Holocene (the geological epoch that provided the appropriate conditions for mammals to thrive), to the “Anthropocene” (the epoch in which human activity has become the dominant driving force of climatic change). The ecological implications of the Anthropocene prompt questions regarding human enterprise and responsibility; fuelling dystopian or apocalyptic end of the world narratives and anxieties towards technology, capitalism and post-humanism. This short piece explores the current problems facing climate change activists, namely the inconsistencies between the scientific community’s attitude towards ecological degradation and popular culture’s. Slajov Zizek suggests that public denial and the disassociation from environmental disaster is not caused by a lack of scientific knowledge, but because we as individuals fail to corroborate what we already know about climate change with our sensory experience of the everyday: ‘We know it, but we cannot make ourselves believe in what we know’. The Archive questions this pervasive delusion, one that denies climate change even in the face of dwindling resources, increasing natural disaster and rising sea levels. We as a society consume natural resources excessively, without any regard for the consequences.  My work draws attention to the suicidal nature of this desire, and encourages its readers to take responsibility for their actions, for the sake of humanity’s survival.

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