« Cities, climate change and the art of experimentation: a new urban politics? »

Harriet Bulkeley

Mercredi 2 décembre 2015

17h-19h

Sciences Po, salle H405

28 rue des Saints-Pères (75007)

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Abstract:

Theorizing urban climate governance as a set of processes that exceed the institutional boundaries of the local state, we argue that critical to the urban response to climate change is a mode of ‘experimentation’ where municipalities, private and civil society actors seek to demonstrate, experience, learn and challenge a multiplicity of interventions, projects and schemes as ‘solutions’ to the urban climate problem. Framed as ‘solutions’ (best practices, pilots, learning opportunities), climate change experiments provide a means for understanding the ways in which climate change is being problematized in the city, how actors, interests and various urban flows and materialities are being assembled in response, and the ways in which such interventions come to take on meaning within urban socio-technical systems and the spaces of the everyday. Rather than regarding ‘experiments’ as exceptional, our argument is that they are central to the contested urban politics of socio-technical transition taking place in response to climate change. The paper will explore these issues through the development of a new analytical approach for understanding the urban politics of climate change and case-studies from global cities.

Son intervention s’appuiera sur l’article publié en 2013 avec V. Castán Broto dans Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers intitulé « Government by experiment? Global cities and the governing of climate change », disponible sur demande pour les participants.

La discussion sera animée par Charlotte Halpern.

Biography:

Harriet Bulkeley is a Professor of Geography, Durham University. Her research focuses on the processes and politics of environmental governance. Her recent books include Governing the Climate: new approaches to rationality, power and politics (Ed. CUP 2014) Transnational Climate Governance (CUP, 2014), An Urban Politics of Climate Change (Routledge 2015), and Accomplishing Climate Governance (CUP, 2016). She is currently involved in researching the politics and practice of smart grids in the UK, Australia and Sweden, low carbon transitions in southern Africa, and continuing work on urban responses to climate change through the JPI Urban and ESRC project Governing Urban Sustainability Transitions (GUST 2014 – 2017). Harriet has undertaken commissioned research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Friends of the Earth, UN-Habitat and the World Bank. In 2014, she was awarded the King Carl XVI Gustaf’s Professorship in Environmental Science and a Visiting Professorship at Lund University, Sweden.

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