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 understan...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of urban and regional research 2013-11, Vol.37 (6), p.1934-1948
Main Authors: Broto, Vanesa Castán, Bulkeley, Harriet
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attribution
Bangalore
Cities
Climate Change
Ecology
Economic infrastructure
Experiments
Governance
Housing
India
Infrastructure
Intervention
maintenance
Mexico
Monterrey
Political Ecology
Repair and Maintenance
Urban Areas
urban political ecology
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0309-1317
1468-2427
DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12050