Urban Inhabitation in the Anthropocene

Urban Inhabitation in the Anthropocene conference programme 25—27 April 2023 Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, UK

contents Introduction

4

Programme at a glance

6

Session details

8

Public lectures

12

Panel sessions Session 1: Inhabiting a broken world

15

Session 2: Confronting capitalist ruins, living with precarity

19

Session 3: The construction of climate apartheid

27

Session 4: Living in a more-than-human world

35

Session 5: Challenging coloniality

41

Session 6: The plural meanings of climate justice, roundtable

48

Session 7: Affective homespaces

59

Session 8: Reimagining knowledge in the Anthropocene

65

Session 9: Dreaming up spaces of hope

71

Design workshop

73

Exhibition

75

Music event

77

Speakers biographies

78

Urban Inhabitation in the Anthropocene → a conference “Roads, buildings, pipes, wires, animals, viruses and humans feel each other out, each folding the other in without being completely subsumed, yet affected in different ways. Each occasion of feeling out and apprehending is always technical, always proposes for the world a surplus of patterned potential, a surplus of sensibility, inexplicable by any “programming” that might have generated it. Sociality is always a matter of recomposing, recombining, setting new terms for what it means to inhabit, justly.

Technicities orchestrate intersections. Intersections produce multiple perspectives, where everything that exists is being recalibrated and repositioned in their relationships with each other—because they are constantly being worked out and engaged by people and materials who are themselves continuously similar and different by virtue of these intersections. Inhabitation is always on the move, creating particular kinds of space where people, with their devices, resources, tools, imaginations and techniques, are always acting on each other: pushing and pulling, folding in and leaving out, making use of whatever others are doing, paying attention to all that is going on, fighting, manipulating and collaborating.”

The Urban Institute’s Prospectus (affectively known among the institute’s members as the ‘signature programme’ because of how it brings us together) is a thematic agenda of work directed at engaging with the unknown challenges of living in a precarious world in crisis. ‘Inhabitation,’ the way humans and non-humans make themselves at ease in the World, is the central theme. How do we inhabit a world in constant crisis?

This conference zooms in on one such ‘coming crisis’- or is it already here? - the global environmental crisis that we refer to in the twin ideas of climate change and biodiversity loss. This crisis redefines not what it is to be human but also what it is to be an ‘urban human.’ It also invites rethinking of companions and the challenges of ‘living-with’ a range of things that demonstrate their liveliness and intentionality in a range of ways. The conference’s themes engage with speculative thinking on the city and the Anthropocene, demonstrating that this is a debate that needs opening up perspectives rather than targeting closures.

Our programme offers a journey from exploring capitalist ruins à la Tsing to exploring avenues of hope in the urbanised Anthropocene, including through activism, love, and more-than-human worlds.

AbdouMaliq Simone, 2021

Prospectus available at:

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/urban-institute/news/urban-inhabitation-andurban-technical-inception-meeting

4

5

programme → at a glance TUESDAY 25TH

WEDNESDAY 26TH

THURSDAY 27TH

Welcome and registration

Session 4:

Session 7:

Living in a more-than-human world

Affective homespaces

crisis 9 AM —9:30 09:30—11

Session 1:

the other side

finding hope

Inhabiting a broken world With opening keynote by Matthew Gandy

11—11:30

Coffee break

Coffee break

Coffee break

11:30—1

Session 2:

Session 5:

Session 8:

Confronting capitalist ruins, living with precarity

Challenging coloniality

Lunch

Lunch

Care, love and social change in the Anthropocene Lunch

Session 3:

Session 6:

Session 9:

The construction of climate apartheid

The plural meanings of climate justice, roundtable

Dreaming up spaces of hope

1 PM —2 2—4

With closing keynote by Abdoumaliq Simone 3 PM: Close

4—4:30 4:30—5:30 5:30

Coach to Hall

6

4:30 PM: Coffee break

Public Lecture: Tim Morton: The Silence of the Lawn

EVENING

Design Workshop

Coffee break

Music Event: from 8 PM @ Shakespeare’s Pub

6 PM: Public Lecture: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson: Architectures of the Flesh

Conference dinner

7

9 sessions → details session details → session 1 Inhabiting a broken world

INTRODUCTION:

– Living with crisis – introduction to the conference.

OPENING KEYNOTE: – MATTHEW GANDY – Urban ecological

imaginaries in the Anthropocene

session details → session 3 The construction of climate apartheid

RESPONSE: – SIMON MARVIN – Inhabitation and the

pervasiveness of the urban technical

→ session 2 Confronting capitalist ruins, living with precarity

8

– TIMOTHY LUKE – From Surviving in the Ruins

of Nature to Thriving in the Rift Metabolites of Urbanatura – ADAM ABDULLAH – Marginal Anthropocenes: violent disruptions, meek defiance, and precarious autonomies – SASKA PETROVA – Unassuming energy activism

→ session 4 Living in a more-thanhuman world

– ANDREW BALDWIN – The mind of climate

apartheid – TANZIL SHAFIQUE – How not to plan a

necropolis: Moving beyond the Discursive partition against climate-impacted dwellers in Dhaka – MIRANDA IOSSIFIDIS – Exploring speculative urban ecofascist present(s) and futures through creative methods – ERWIN NUGRAHA – Inhabiting the climate: The origins and development of climate enclaves in Indonesia – HILDA LLORÉNS, CARLOS GARCÍA-QUIJANO –

Living with Land Crabs (Cardisoma guanhumi) in Puerto Rico’s Urbanized Mangrove Coasts – IHNJI JON AND PRINCE K. GUMA – Rethinking “humanistic” ethics in the more-than-human worlds: people, infrastructure, and spatial milieu – AYA NASSAR - The city as an object of desire: Reflections from Cairo – LUNA KHIRFAN – Transformative Nature-based Solutions: the daylighting (de-culverting) of urban streams for just and equitable climate adaptation

9

session details → session 5 Challenging coloniality

→ session 6 The plural meanings of climate justice, roundtable

– ANKIT KUMAR – Anthropocene justice: towards

an anticolonial politics of climate change – GUILLERMO DELGADO, PHILLIP LÜHL – Haunted

infrastructures: the delayed question of decoloniality in urban modes of inhabitation in Namibia, a visual display – NOBUKHOSI NGWENYA – Precarious assemblages, selective inclusion: Enduring colonial and apartheid legacies in Cape Town’s spatial form Part I: Energy and carbon – JULIE SZE – Reimaging a Just Urban Transition in

an Unjust World – VALERIE OLSON – Designing Multidimensional

→ session 7 Affective homespaces

→ session 8 Reimagining knowledge in the Anthropocene

Research for the Urban Anthropocene – LORRAINE DONGO – Climate action beyond the ‘global city’: place-based account of climate change responses in Quelimane, Mozambique Part II: Adaptation – CASSIDY JOHNSON – Reimagining questions

of environmental justice and how uncertainty and turbulence redefine current and future responses – ANJAL PRAKASH & PRANAV GARIMELLA – Gender, Disasters and Climate Change in Himalayan Towns: The Interrelations – PANAGIOTA KOTSILA – Embodied and everyday knowledges of immigrants over urban climate health vulnerability and adaptation in European cities

10

session details

→ session 9 Dreaming up spaces of hope

– MICHELE LANCIONE – Expulsion, Extraction, and

the Impossible Possibilities of Home – GEORGIA ALEXANDRI – Housing in climatechange crisis – TATIANA ACEVEDO-GUERRERO – Homescapes make the world we live in? Exploring urban inhabitation in Colombia – WILLIE J. WRIGHT – Ante-Austerity Urbanism – STEFAN BOUZAROVSKI – Love and labour in the

electric city – ETHEMCAN TURHAN – Tenants and terawatts:

Exploring residents’ viewpoints on local energy transition in Hoogkerk, the Netherlands – JULIA SPANIER – Rural-urban care? Interrogating the transformation of city-countryside relations in community-supported agriculture CLOSING KEYNOTE: – ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE – Strategic resignation in

the urban Anthropocene RESPONSE: – LINDA WESTMAN – Spaces of justice and

uncertainty RESPONSE: – BETH PERRY – Anthropocene epistemics

→ Design

Workshop

– ERIKA CONCHIS – What is everyday soft data

made of?

11

public lectures → online The Silence of the Lawns

Architectures of the Flesh

TIM MORTON

ZAKIYYAH IMAN JACKSON

The city of Houston is one of the four largest megacities in the USA, astonishingly diverse (humans and nonhumans included) and astonishingly unknown. Houston is a hyperobject whose haphazard, ramshackle brokenness rivals Beirut in some senses and London in others. It is a place whose structurally right-wing libertarian politics coexists with the worst features of the five hundred years of slavery and its legacy, the historical moment that is the principal driver of the Anthropocene. This is despite the fact that the humans in Houston vote consistently in the upper ninetieth percentile for Democrats whenever there is an election. In this lecture Tim will be showcasing what he has been doing for ten years to understand, cope with and modify Houston. He will be focusing in particular on his work with urban farming collectives, and his ongoing dialogue with the property owners in his neighborhood to abolish that persistent, ecocidal and structurally racist entity, the American lawn.

In Jacques Derrida’s Of Spirit, the late philosopher provocatively asks, “Is a metaphysics of race more or less serious than a naturalism or biologism of race?”

My paper will offer a meditation on the material consequences of the metaphysics of race for “the body” by asking another question, “Is ‘the body’ metaphysical?” I will argue that it is and provide an analysis of what metaphysics does to materiality, nature, and biology as well as our conceptualization of these terms. Thinking through the black(ened) zone Hortense Spillers has termed “the flesh,” this paper proceeds by revisiting and elaborating key terms from my book, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, specifically biocentrism, measurement, and ontologized plasticization.

Tim Morton will deliver this online, however we will watch it together in lecture theatre 2 Sir Henry Stephenson Building on university campus.

12

13

panel sessions → session 1

Inhabiting a broken world

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby As a metaphor for life, the river and the current stretch back to ancient histories and sideways to multiple cultures and myths. The modernist novel made the current a symbol of contemporary urban life without noticing how river thinking had previously shaped our conceptions of inhabitation. In this session, we jump into the river of stories people tell about themselves and about the World in the Anthropocene.

In this initial session, Vanesa Castán Broto will introduce the conference’s theme and how the UI prospectus inspired it. One aspect of the prospectus that requires further development is its engagement with urban ecological imaginaries. The conference will start with an opening lecture on Urban Ecological Imaginaries in the Anthropocene led by Matthew Gandy, and a response from Simon Marvin about the enduring influence of the Urban Technical in the Anthropocene.

15

Urban ecological imaginaries in the Anthropocene MATTHEW GANDY University of Cambridge Urban ecological imaginaries mark a cultural mediation of collective life, both existing and projected, that extend to the realm of the nonhuman. But where should we locate an urban ecological imaginary in space and time? Can alternative ecological futures be disentangled from a narrowly Eurocentric context in which future pathways remain constrained by the ideological tentacles of the past? My interest in cultural forms such as science fiction literature highlights an oscillation between neo-romanticist and technologically determined tropes. Much less frequent are posthuman accounts that reflect on new forms of sociability between human and nonhuman life within the more mundane settings of what the novelist J. G. Ballard once referred to as the “near future.” An ecological imaginary is simultaneously a topographic imaginary; it is a spatial rearrangement of material elements that denotes far more than a scientific metaphor. But what kind of literary or representational forms are apposite for future cities? Can critically reflexive dystopian genres enable alternative worlds to become part of a new kind of social and ecological imaginary?

17

→ session 2

Confronting capitalist ruins, living with precarity “The faces of the trees in my hands. I miss them. And miss and miss them. Until I fly out of grief’s arms, and the sky. Catches me in its thousand orange hands. It catches me, and I stay there. Suspended against the unrelenting orange.”

Franny Choi, How to let go of the World Capitalism is sustained by its own production of precarity. The very logics of capital accumulation, global circulation, the amassing of wealth is premised on parallel processes of dispossession, instability, and continuously recurring shocks. Still, life continues in the ruins left by capitalism, in the unsettlement of daily life, in fragile inbetween-spaces, and in direct defiance of a broken system.

Timothy Luke will start with an exploration of the possibilities for repurposing the critical Marxist imaginary of urban inhabitation. Beyond the critique, the session will also explore what life in the contemporary ruins of capitalism looks like. Adam Abdullah explores the state’s construction of precarity in Karachi’s peripheries and the parallel constitution of inhabitation pluralities. Saska Petrova engages with the Anthropocene as a time of precarity, of living in a state of constant insecurity.

Petrova turns to feminist wisdom to explore intimate forms of resistance as activism. Precarity invites thinking of the continuities of survival rather than reducing awareness to punctual moments of crisis. Luke, Abdullah and Petrova reflect on what it means to be an activist in a moment of precarity.

19

From Surviving in the Ruins of Nature to Thriving in the Rift Metabolites of Urbanatura: Cyborganicity as an Ontography for Urban Inhabitation Beyond the Anthropocene TIMOTHY LUKE University of Cambridge This analysis is a thought experiment: is the Anthropocene a “hyper-object” or “hype-object” mystifying what lies within, beyond, apart from “de-Holocenation,” or the corrosive shifts in the geological epoch of the present? It explores how rapid climate change during “the Great Acceleration” coevolves from the explosive and intensive development planetary urbanization. On the one hand, externalized pollutant by-products, overdrawn resource extraction, and spreading extinction of wild non-human life forms exemplify on a grand scale Marx’s “metabolic rift” during the Holocene. Yet, on the other hand, what comes from these “rifting metabolisms” as fossil fuels alter the planet’s atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and hydrosphere? Is too little attention paid to the infospheres, noospheres or technospheres whose most enduring presences are found in urban formations, from the megamachines of the Neolithic Revolution to the cybernetic stacks of the Information Revolution? These enduring phenomena whose material traces suggest antitheses: intellectually renewable productions, culturally enriching protraction, and cultivated life forms. They accrete as “rift

20

metabolites” in the terraformative systems, services and structures most manifest in cities as ecologies, economies and edifices that concentrate the information, energy, materiality and value of life -- human and nonhuman in today’s unstable world system. Whether these shifts are traces of “eco-urbanism,” “technonature,” “cyborganicity” or “dark ecology,” this speculative exploration suggests “planetary urbanization” in the Anthropocene possibly is a prologue to “exoplanetary” citification, and/or “endoplanetary” citification, as the surface-bound sustainabilities of the Holocene degrade beyond their historic renewability. Like other ideologies of good works, including “accountability,” “diversity,” “responsibility” or “sustainability,” does terraformative technicity constitute a new tactics of flexible control to maintain new globalizing regimes of strategic resilient power, whose emergent logics for sustaining order mobilizes disorder on the Earth to generate new power and knowledge for renewing forms of life beneath, beyond or beside the emergent post-Holocene planetarian conditions of the twenty-first century, which are now inadequately understood and embraced as “the Anthropocene”?

21

Marginal Anthropocenes: violent disruptions, meek defiance, and precarious autonomies ADAM ABDULLAH Karachi Urban Lab This contribution looks at the various fragmented ways in which marginalized urban populations conceptualize, interpret, communicate, and take action in the Anthropocene. The presentation is organized as a series of vignettes and trajectories drawn from individual stories, not necessarily intended to culminate into a cohesive commentary on practices of urban inhabitation. The stories are gathered from Lyari Basti, a resettlement site located on Karachi’s peripheries, where affectees of the Lyari Expressway (LEW) were settled starting in 200506. The site has spiraled into infrastructural and material disrepair, leading to the exclusion of these settlers not just from the material and spatial aspects of urban development, but also the anthropogenic imaginaries of the development state.

The LEW project was discursively institutionalized through a dual-discourse of illegality and flood protection, followed by rapid rounds of de-habitation and rehabitation for particular urban populations. Such simultaneous processes both disrupted the extant, and produced new kinds of, relationships and claims: spatial, material, and cognitive; between land, resources, the environment, and a particular population. Against the rational systematization of ‘development’ and ‘resettlement’, locked in through promissory notes regarding intergenerational gains in the distant future, the current state of the settlement is examined in the words of its dwellers. I explore how the state’s socio-geological formations are concerned fundamentally with the uprooting, dismembering, and blowing to the wind of the anticipated embeddedness of spatial relations; of processes of erasure and erosion, and of the selective removal of unsightly patinas.

22

What does it mean to inhabit, claim, and contest urban time(s) and the imaginaries of urban embeddedness where anthropogenic futures themselves are selective?

Through the voices of its interlocutors, the case explores the plural modes of urban inhabitation that not only result from the foreclosures of various anthropogenic potentialities, but at the same time also provoke and catalyze the germination of emergent practices in the face of failed urban technicities. Here, some urban subjects are forced to regress into an earlier, ‘non-urban’ living, into an enforced stasis no different from their ‘unenviable’ pasts. But from within such inhabitation, the hyper-objectification of the state’s urban imaginaries is countered with everyday micro-practices and individual initiatives whose aggregated impacts are not easily capturable or predictable. Mired by self-doubts as to their own efficacy, and facing hopelessness and non-agency on the one hand, and feelings of abandonment, forsakenness, and exclusion on the other, the dissonant actions of these populations range from the more intimate scales of the house and street to broader scales of the city proper; from waste and debris to greening and intergenerational development; and from expectations of political (in)action to the glorification of communal philanthropy, as an inversion of the state’s more abstract environmental and anthropogenic discourses. This case reflects upon the stories of those looking to define their place in the Anthropocene in their own words and by their own actions; and questions what this means for a student of the urban.

23

Unassuming energy activism SASKA PETROVA University of Manchester The presentation elucidates the intersectional politics of infrastructural activism by juxtaposing the domestic and public geometries of power. An ‘energy precarity’ framework is employed to scrutinise how intersectional vulnerabilities to energy deprivation are induced through political processes. Energy research tends to focus on conspicuous, often spectacular forms of public protest such a number of recent events sparked by increasing energy prices. By drawing insights from critical feminist scholarship on precarity and ambiguity, this presentation aims to unpack the less visible and almost intimate forms of resistance that emerge in the privacy of the home. I examine the ways in which such seemingly unassuming forms of resistance develop from bursts of emotions into forms of resistance with the ability to emancipate and empower. I pay particular attention to how people who are faced by uncertainty develop specific timeframes of action. The arguments made in the presentation are based on empirical evidence from research vignettes from Southern and Eastern Europe.

25

→ session 3

The construction of climate apartheid “We risk a ‘climate apartheid’ scenario where the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger, and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer.”

Philipp Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Climate change may force a moment of reckoning with extractivist economies, paradigms of perpetual growth, and with the practices of our everyday lives. As such, it may open spaces of resistance and diversity. But, in current climate policy, we more often witness the reproduction of dominant rationales, leading to the exacerbation of conditions of inequality. Climate change generates turbulence, and turbulence offers opportunities for the appropriation of climate futures with new forms of necropolitics that normalise climate-related deaths in urban life.

The notion of climate apartheid has been both proposed and criticised in equal measure- the term, however sticks because it evokes strong emotions directed at the new forms of inequality produced through climate change, as it heralds a new form of colonization.

The session will be started with Andrew Baldwin’s exploration of the logics of climate apartheid through a psychoanalytical frame. Climate apartheid is an appropriate term here, as climate change policy enables the consolidation of existing structures of precarity and privilege. Next, Tanzil Shafique will explore the urban necropolitics that emerge in the shadow of climate change, seeking to counteract the necropolis with a ‘vivipolis,’ the city where life is possible. Miranda Iossifidis examines eco-fascism, a key imaginary to understand the reproduction of climate apartheids, using creative methods to explore urban activists’ ecoanxieties around climate present(s) and futures, identifying racist, necropolitical, and authoritarian action in the name of the environment. Finally, Erwin Nugraha bring us to Indonesia, where he explores the development of climate enclaves, in new forms of what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has called ‘maladaptation.’

27

The mind of climate apartheid

How not to plan a necropolis: Moving beyond the Discursive partition against climateimpacted dwellers in Dhaka

ANDREW BALDWIN Durham University

TANZIL SHAFIQUE University of Sheffield

This paper is an attempt to think psychoanalytically about what many nowadays call ‘climate apartheid’. Climate apartheid is a concept used in green criminology, urban studies, and in scholarly and activist discourses on climate justice to designate a global structure of segregation that consolidates a racialised distinction between privilege and precarity as a response to the climate crisis.

Examples of climate apartheid would include, for example, urban enclaves in climate vulnerable locations alongside the systematic expulsion of the poor, or bordering and citizenship regimes that regulate the differential mobilities of people depending on how they are positioned in a racial hierarchy. The paper seeks to expand critical evaluation of ‘climate apartheid’ by examining the production of what we might call ‘the mind of climate apartheid’. To do so the paper draws on Derek Hook and Jonathan Coetzee’s respective psychoanalytical readings of ‘the mind of apartheid’. For these writers, the Apartheid system should be grasped not simply as a system of racial segregation structuring South African society from 1948 to 1991, but as a geographic expression of an historically specific psychic disposition at the core of which is an anxiety about the ‘undifferentiated’ and racial mixing. Coetzee would describe this disposition using Freud’s psychoanalytic diagnosis of the obsessive-neurotic. While Hook would seize on Coetzee’s characterisation of the mind of apartheid to launch his own ‘critical psychology of the postcolonial’ and psychoanalysis of race. The paper draws from both writers to consider how the psyche and the political converge to produce a historically specific political psychology in ‘the mind of climate apartheid’. The aim of the paper is to place insights from the psychoanalysis of race into dialogue with debates about climate apartheid in order to consider whether and how the historically formed ‘mind of climate apartheid’ might be conceived as a legitimate site for political and anti-racist contestation in the struggle for climate justice.

28

Around 14 million people are to be displaced internally in Bangladesh by 2050 due to climate change (World Bank 2021). The formal planning and urbanization mechanisms are inadequate to deal with such large numbers, and like the migrant before, these homeless and destitute will become “urban poor” and be actively building their own “informal settlements”, usually in places that would make them more vulnerable to adverse climate impacts, such as heat stress and flooding, affecting climate-displaced and economic migrants alike. Even in current conditions in Dhaka, where 4.5 million people live in such settlements, and are already adversely affected by climate change, there is a continual threat of cut-off, exclusion, eviction, arson, forced displacement, and demolition, which produces an affective atmosphere of death–a cumulative formation of a “necropolis” (following from Mbembe, 2008). Dhaka as a necropolis is actively constructed by the planning regime through coordinating what we call ‘discursive partition’, a disavowal of the multiple national policies that acknowledge climate migrant influx and actively suggest tenure security and upgrading policy. Shielding against such positive policy positions, local urban scale plans, particularly the latest Dhaka Detail Area Plan (2018 to 2035), fail to provide any directive for climate-impacted dwellers, Uncritical of colonial legacies of such forms of exclusionary planning, there is significant concern that these plans for Dhaka will continue to influence urban plans for the secondary cities, all of which are already dealing with increased migrant arrivals. Moving beyond the urban inaction, the presentation ends with a speculative vision of how the existing knowledge of these climate-impacted dwellers can be networked and amplified to allow locally-led counter-adaptation politics and action to emerge–an outline of a climate ‘vivipolis’.

29

Exploring speculative urban ecofascist present(s) and futures through creative methods MIRANDA IOSSIFIDIS Newcastle University Whilst global climate and environmental justice movements have burgeoned, so too have far-right environmental ideas become more mainstream in recent years. In particular, the supposed relationship between notions of overpopulation, migration, and environmental crisis and degradation (Bhatia et al, 2020; Strathern et al, 2019; Lewis 2017). The inter-relation of white supremacist ideology, racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy has to be central to our analysis, and we must take ecofascism seriously as a political myth which is increasingly evident in mainstream politics.

Focusing on ecofascism as political myth-making helps us to identify and analyse the ways in which environmental narratives are mobilised by varied actors to provide contemporary significance to far-right concerns. It also speaks to and names antifascist ecological anxieties around climate present(s) and futures. We must remain attentive to how, as a term that coalesces a cluster of discourses, ecofascism can help us identify specific tropes of far-right ecologism and their mainstreaming within right-wing and liberal environmentalism in diverse cultural, political and social settings. Being attentive to ecofascist political myth-making requires an anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-neo-Malthusian, intersectional feminist approach that centres reproductive, environmental and climate justice.

30

This paper shares work in progress from a project seeks to explore how creative methods can elucidate contemporary encounters with ecofascist present(s) and futures, finding ways to describe the everyday politics of climate anxieties about speculative futures. This resonates with Anson and Banerjee’s exploration of ecofascism as an ‘ongoing, metamorphosing politics of proximity in the places and practices of everyday life’ (2023: 143) which entails rescaling it from a ‘hypervisible series of unthinkable acts into a method and practice for negotiating a planetary eschaton of degradation and extinction’ (2023: 144). The paper is based on zine workshops with young people and activists held at the Star and Shadow in Newcastle upon Tyne, a volunteer-led space, and builds on work with recent speculative fiction that engages with the urban Anthropocene and ecofascist themes. This approach forms part of developing anti-fascist action, art and research that can identify necropolitical, violent, racist action and discourse deployed in the name of ecological crisis.

31

Inhabiting the climate: The origins and development of climate enclaves in Indonesia ERWIN NUGRAHA Resilience Development Initiative and Durham University How have climate enclaves been imagined, and by whom? What political contexts govern their development? What social and material responses do these enclaves engender? What are their implications for future planetary inhabitation? This paper is concerned with “climate enclaves” as an emerging mode of climate governance in Southeast Asia. “Climate enclaves” is part of a global debate on ecological urbanism and securitisation of premium urban enclaves. As a newly imagined space for living and localised response to climate emergency, climate enclaves are understood to give rise to new territorial logics and identities that diverge in social and material terms. Most concerning is the question of how the process of climate enclavisation contributes to new inequalities, e.g., social segregation and fragmentation. In Indonesia, these enclaves are part of the state’s socio-spatial imaginary and massive territorial mobilisation, targeting local sites and urban inhabitants as an Anthropocene experimentation to reduce carbon emissions and anticipate climate impacts such as longer drought, extreme weather, and sea level rises. Indonesia is a unique case where climate enclaves are mobilised as experimental, geographical, and political projects. This paper is part of ongoing

32

research that seeks to provide new conceptual thinking, critique, and empirical evidence on ‘situated’ climate enclaves within the understudied context of Indonesia. It will reflect and offer insights on how climate enclaves’ governance is accomplished in Southeast Asia – how it is performed, fulfilled, and contested rather than pre-emptively accepted as a policy imperative. The paper aims to contribute to the conceptualisation of urban inhabitation in the Anthropocene by theorising how particular imaginary(ies) of climate enclaves gain credibility in justifying what is “sensible” and using this justification to bolster claims for a certain vision. It will also examine the performative roles of climate enclaves’ apparatuses (e.g., selection, scientific models, assessment) in establishing a “legitimate” response. With Indonesia as one of the most vulnerable regions in the Asia Pacific affected by the climate crisis coupled with widening inequality and weakening democracy, the paper focuses on the origins and development of climate enclaves to analyse the “condition” of planetary urban inhabitation and global environmental future(s).

33

→ session 4

Living in a more-than-human world

“This dense network of interrelations may be called a ‘relational ontology’. The mangrove-world, to give it a short name, is enacted minute by minute, day by day, through an infinite set of practices carried out by all kinds of beings and life forms.”

Arturo Escobar ‘Anthropocene’ is thought to indicate the ‘time of humans,’ that of humanity as a driving force. Could there be greater arrogance? As journalist Peter Brannen has persuasively put it, in geological time, human civilization is not an epoch: it is a mere event. Instead, the climate and biodiversity crises reveal the reconfiguration of human relations to the non-human, broader recognition of the multiple agential powers of all kinds of beings and how they manifest in dynamic relations within an uncertain landscape. Where past modernities engaged with the non-human via relationships of mastery, appropriation, distance, or anonymity, new work on the non-human reveals a creative array of engagements that help rediscover human life as a humble part of the more-than-human world.

The session explores contrasting contributions to understanding non-human worlds in the Anthropocene. Hilda Lloréns and Carlos García-Quijano examine changing human-non-human relations in the context of urbanization, looking at, in this case, the multiple lives of Land Crabs in Puerto Rico. But rethinking the non-human in the Anthropocene also requires rethinking human relations. Ihnji Jon and Prince K Guma examine the new ethics that an engagement with morethan-human worlds requires and how that resonates with a collective project of decolonization. Aya Nassar offers a different perspective on the city of Cairo, developing a conceptual vocabulary that enables apprehending the precarious city as a city of ‘promises’ and ‘desires.’ Here the city itself is an object of study, itself composed of multiple material objects that condition affective relationships within the city. Luna Khirfan proposes direct engagement with the natural as it is appropriated in the idea of nature-based solutions and their deployment in the urban landscape. Her presentation will explore how urban histories shape the different ways in which such solutions are developed and delivered thinking of the more-than-human as a functional reality.

35

Living with Land Crabs (Cardisoma guanhumi) in Puerto Rico’s Urbanized Mangrove Coasts

Rethinking “humanistic” ethics in the more-than-human worlds: people, infrastructure, and spatial milieu

HILDA LLORÉNS & CARLOS GARCÍA-QUIJANO University of Rhode Island

IHNJI JON & PRINCE K. GUMA Cardiff University ļ University of Sheffield

This photo-ethnography will detail the relationship between people and the land crabs that populate their homes, backyards, and settlements in Puerto Rico’s urbanized mangrove coasts. The presentation will discuss how local ecological knowledge and Afro-Puerto Rican cultural practices and lifeways are central to the survival of mangrove communities in urbanized and rural coasts. It is in fact Black and Afro- intergenerational knowledge and practices about these “Othered” environments that have allowed residents not only to survive, but in some cases to thrive. In Puerto Rico, Black and Afro-descended communities have long been at the forefront of living sustainably and demanding that the ecosphere they depend on for sustenance and cultural integrity is protected. They have been stewarding their ancestral land and sea and passing down cultural lifeways and fugitive practices for generations, bringing these along wherever they go in the archipelago and in the diaspora.

36

In this oral/visual presentation, we revisit the concept of “human” and “humanistic values” in the Anthropocene. Embracing the decolonial critique on the Western humanism of which stratification of “what it is to be human” resulted in disregarding of heterogenous modernities, we advance the notion of the “humanistic city” that crosses the essentialized boundaries of “being human” via redescribing situated togetherness in spatial milieu. Learning from three key conceptual interventions— Abdoumaliq Simone’s “people as infrastructure,” Sylvia Wynter’s decolonial humanism, and Doreen Massey’s concept of “spatialization” of time—we discuss concrete urban scenarios highlighting (1) how life-sustaining webs of relationships (that exist across human and nonhuman materialities) manifest in a specific time and place; and (2) how such relationships are continually evolving, with new people, ideas and movements forging new political possibilities. In doing so, we draw on anecdotes and ethnographic sketches of spatially situated urban practices and philosophies from Kampala (Uganda) and Nairobi (Kenya).

These two cities are both undergoing contested processes of city-making; i.e. the pursuit of cosmopolitanism often divides the life-scapes of residents along the cultural and socioeconomic lines. They both portray an urbanization that signifies a contrast between the expansion of modernist “cityness” undergirded by the capitalist regimes of value and the non-Western cultural tendencies and everyday sociogenic living that resist the former. This generates a perpetual urgency of restlessness, agitation, and tension; a particular form of uneasy vibration that hovers over the general mood of African urban societies in transition. We attend to these provisional landscapes of new urban inhabitations in the hopes of rethinking “humanistic values” specifically from the perspective of more popular parts of the world.

37

The city as an object of desire: Reflections from Cairo

Transformative Nature-based Solutions: the daylighting (de-culverting) of urban streams for just and equitable climate adaptation

AYA NASSAR University of Warwick

LUNA KHIRFAN University of Waterloo

My presentation will look at the city as an object of desire, sets of promises and ambivalent attachments. In the presentation I move between two research projects. The first looks at the city through the “glitch”. It is an attempt at reading the city through what gets extended and/or suspended in it in a time of an interruption. It does this while thinking about Cairo’s curfew during the summer of 2020. Centering a collaboration with the Egyptian visual artist Azza Ezzat, I read some snapshots of this seemingly minor interruption through three ordinary objects that inhabit the city’s skyline: kites, billboards and bridges. Through these three objects that suspend at the interstices of a skyline, I trace suspensions and extensions of infrastructure, broadly defined. The second project reads the city through “ambivalence” and “disaffection”. In this trope I rely on the work of the Egyptian poet Iman Mersal and propose that she offers a geopoetics of coming to terms with an ongoing precarity of urban space. Both the glitch and the affective world of ambivalence and detachment provide lenses that disinvest from logics of exception, precarity, states of emergency that have dominated research on the country and even city. My contention here is that by looking at how the city gather promises, desires, and how these are born even when are not delivered, we could be better attuned to ongoing processes that makes Cairo going (for better or for worse).

38

Rapid twentieth-century urbanization led to burying urban streams in underground culverts to be replaced by hard, impervious surfaces. As extreme weather events like heatwaves and extreme rainfall increase in their intensity and frequency, these impervious surfaces exacerbate the urban heat island (UHI) effect and urban flooding events prompting a reversal of culverting through “urban stream daylighting.” This project compares Zurich’s (Switzerland) incremental, microscale, and spatially distributed approach to daylighting and Seoul’s (South Korea) abrupt, mega-scale restoration that concentrates along 7 kilometres of the Cheonggyecheon stream. I draw on historic and contemporary maps and archives, satellite images, contemporary planning documents, and flood and urban heat data to compare these contrasting approaches. I deploy geographic information systems (GIS) and photography to facilitate the spatial and sociocultural comparison and inform our understanding of urban stream daylighting as a transformative, nature-based solutions with a particular focus on spatial and social justice in adaptation interventions.

39

→ session 5

Challenging coloniality “What colonialism does is cause an identity crisis about one’s own culture.”

Lupita Nyong’o Occasionally we see glimpses of hope, as the old empires seem to be agonising, as when Achille Mbenbe wrote: “who among us can doubt that the moment has finally arrived for us to begin-from-ourselves… is it not time to lay the foundation for something absolutely new?” (Mbembe, 2013, p.6). Yet, it is impossible to deny the force and pulse of enduring colonialities. As Sylvia Tamale explains, long after colonization appears to be a mere distant memory, the deep roots of coloniality endure in our imaginations, ways of communicating, and most of all, ways of judging.

The papers of this session foreground a commitment to a collective project not just of de-colonisation, but also, of de-coloniality. Ankit Kumar will explore how coloniality is embedded in the notion of Anthropocene. The idea of inhabitation, in particular, poses specific challenges to advance anticolonial politics of climate change. Guillermo Delgado and Phillip Lühl take an architectural perspective to explore ‘the delayed promise of decoloniality’ as it is expressed materially in urban Namibia with a layered approach to the analysis of inhabitation practices.

Nobukhosi Ngwenya unpacks the urban fabric in Cape Town to explain the multiple co-constitution of more-than-human worlds and how they intersect with the colonial and apartheid legacies of the city.

41

Anthropocene justice: towards an anticolonial politics of climate change ANKIT KUMAR University of Sheffield The Anthropocene has thrown at us a challenge of urgent action on climate change while centring the slow and considered work that historical and contemporary justice questions demand. Yet, much of the literature on the Anthropocene veers towards the idea of a universal ‘one humanity’. The Anthropocene narrative’s framing of universal humanity connects to a long and dangerous history of what is human and what qualifies as humanity, a history of colonising, racializing, and dehumanising black, brown, and indigenous bodies around the world.

The Anthropocene with its universalising tendencies and emphasis on the urgency of unified action risks enhancing those racializing tendencies further.

For example, the historical and contemporary use of human physical energy in mines and factories for wood and fossil energy in the past and for solar and battery energy currently need to be tied together with Anthropocene justice through questions of slavery, indentured labour, and inequitable environmental impacts and responsibilities. At the same time, a more dominant politics of urgency in the Anthropocene focuses on “others” who seek hospitality in Europe and ignores acknowledging the hospitality, love, and friendship offered by these “others” now and at various critical junctures in history. A politics privileging urgency threatens to be othering and dominating, rather than inclusive and collaborative.

42

This leaves us with the question: how to advance justice rooted in difference when thinking of universal human agency? To answer this question, I enquire possibilities and initiatives of ethical communities working to reconcile the dilemma of finding unity in a climate-changed world while keeping a politics of difference alive. I draw from anticolonial studies and a number of case studies to seek different articulations of togetherness (for example, hospitality, love, and friendship) that exist beyond a normative idea of community. On the question of urban inhabitation, this work asks, if urban spaces around the world can take initiatives independent of states to tackle climate change by thinking of ways to contribute to ‘global’ mitigation and ‘local’ adaptation, might they also be able to reimagine an idea of ‘global’ adaptation rooted in anticolonial politics?

43

Haunted infrastructures: the delayed question of decoloniality in urban modes of inhabitation in Namibia, a visual display GUILLERMO DELGADO & PHILLIP LÜHL Namibia University of Science and Technology More than an urban crisis, Namibia’s urban spaces are haunted by a history of terror in its conception and implementation. The current urban debate locally is functionalist in reason, addressing issues of access to serviced land, housing construction, and infrastructure from an efficiency point of view. There are however new narratives proposing to engage with broader questions, situating the current urban crisis in the context of what academic and performance artist Mushaandja calls “the delayed promise of decoloniality”. We argue that conventional narratives can be considered anthropocentric, as they concern themselves primarily with servicing the human population. However, a decolonial perspective revisiting the past raises the question on whether human-centric accounts are in fact also colonial. To engage with this question, we propose to develop a visual display intersecting the technique of layering aspects conventionally acknowledged as part of “the urban” (material aspects like e.g., roads, infrastructure, housing; and immaterial ones like e.g., land use, property, socio-economic indicators) with lessons drawn from the practice of visual artist Tuli Mekondjo. The former aims to dissect the aspects occupying urban development practitioners, while the latter aims to engage with the various presences – including the more-than-human ones – inhabiting urban space. Mekjondjo’s technique overlays images of landscapes, infrastructure, and people in works composed of transferred images with embroidered elements piecing together a narrative that is present but – as Muñoz poses, based on his reading of Bloch – arguably not-yet-conscious. We focus on the site of the mass displacement of black inhabitants from the “Old Location” in the 1960s during the colonial apartheid regime in Namibia. Some argue that this event was the triggered the final phase of the liberation struggle. The site was treated as a

44

+

clear slate, and the white suburb of Hochland Park was developed in the decades that followed. Today it is still possible to pick up remnants of the demolition in the in-between spaces, while current modes of inhabitation remain oblivious of what took place then. Through teaching and independent practice, we have revisited the site through walks, projects, and studio work. The proposed contribution advances this work in a visual way, including an essay intersecting decolonial theory’s notions of animism; with Namibian thinkers’, activists’, and cultural producers’ theorisation; Ferguson’s writings on presence; and our own practice around the events in the Old Location. Through this process, we intersect the questions around the anthropocene with situated takes on decoloniality.

Concept. Left: CohStra. ‘The Other City: Exposing Tarwewijk’. Rotterdam: Cohabitation Strategies, 2009. https:// issuu.com/cohstra/docs/tarwewijk-research.; right: Guns & Rain. ‘Tuli Mekondjo. 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, London’. Guns & Rain, 2021. https://gunsandrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/NP-Tuli-Mekondjo-1-54Catalogue-2021.pdf.

45

Precarious assemblages, selective inclusion: Enduring colonial and apartheid legacies in Cape Town’s spatial form NOBUKHOSI NGWENYA African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town The division between people and nature has endured since the 1600s. This has been embedded into the very fabric of colonial cities within which it continues to be enacted through various spatial practices. However, in recent years the division between people and nature has begun shrinking with the aid of technological advancements, giving rise to spatio-temporal assemblages that give us insights into how, first, ‘the urban’ responds to questions posed by the Anthropocene.

Second, and of equal significance, these assemblages reveal how various forms of power influence changes to and stagnation of the urban form.

Drawing on research conducted in Cape Town, South Africa this paper begins by unpacking the diverse, and often conflicting logics and practices that drive change in the city’s urban fabric. The paper then goes to on to show how these logics and practices give rise to entangled people-nonhuman-technology assemblages that are precariously held together across time and different scales by a stated desire to shift the colonial and apartheid spatial legacies. However, as the paper concludes despite the emergence of these assemblages in Cape Town, the colonial and apartheid spatial legacies linger in many parts of the city. This is because the political discourse of the elite on the future city, upon which significant portions of the assemblage are founded, includes non-humans and technology but continues to exclude certain individuals, namely poor(er) urban residents in a manner that does not undo the colonial and apartheid city.

47

→ session 6

The plural meanings of climate justice “In 2022, over 100m people were displaced for the 1st time, with climate change more responsible than conflicts. Models show that for every degree of temperature rise, a billion people will be displaced.

You will either be among them or receiving them.”

Julian Agyeman on Twitter The impacts of climate change are deeply uneven. As a global challenge with roots in colonial capitalism, climate injustices are related to questions of responsibility, in particular which countries carry historical responsibility for greenhouse emissions and which countries are most severely affected. More recently, the intersectional nature of climate change impacts has moved to the fore of the conversation, highlighting the inextricable links with race, gender, poverty, ability – and the highly unequal grounds for shaping climate responses.

Climate justice emerges with reference to a long history of scholarship in environmental justice that has taken the city as a place of reference for both confronting power and enacting workable alternatives that recognise not only world interdependences but also the multiple perspectives that shape a shared pluriverse.

This section brings together different perspectives on environmental justice as this discourse shapes discussions on energy access, mitigation and climate change adaptation. The first part explores the meaning of environmental justice and how it

48

is being redefined by climate change and climate emergency debates. The session will start with Julie Sze’s reflections on the mobilisation of communities in California against, as she puts it, unjust climate action and inaction. Lorraine Dongo explores the actual contexts of climate action to understand the motivations to respond to climate change. This first section will conclude with Valerie Olson’s design proposal for the incorporation of multi-perspectival research, with the objective of bringing activism into academia.

The second part of the section will zoom in on practices of adaptation.

Cassidy Johnson will open the session with a reflection on the possibility of disaster protection and humanitarian action in the context of uncertainty and turbulence.

Anjal Prakash maps the complex gendered relationships around disasters in Hymalayan Towns. Finally, Panagiota Kotsila situates the emigrant at the centre of adaptation in the European city, seeking to foreground how their knowledges shape the possibilities for urban adaptation.

49

Part I

Environmental justice and the fossil fuel industry Reimaging a Just Urban Transition in an Unjust World JULIE SZE UC Davis This talk examines how working-class communities in majority black and Latinx communities in California are fighting against the spatial politics of climate action and inaction, from urban refineries in Vallejo in the Bay Area, to Los Angeles, and against oil wells in rural inland California. This talk connects climate justice activism and policy efforts to decarbonize California through the lenses of racial and spatial justice. In part, I examine how environmental justice organizers and movements are using just transition frameworks and decarbonization efforts to reimagine urban and rural landscapes. The organizers and movements (from California Environmental Justice Alliance, Communities for a Better Environment to name just a few) fight for policies and perspectives using just transition and decarbonization frames that also build upon long-standing campaigns to clean air and improve and strengthen labor conditions, and working-class perspectives.

They do so through a variety of public humanities programming, and story-telling in addition to traditional activism and policy agendas. I will give an overall snapshot of the California, but specifically, I will be presenting “Collecting Just Stories from Black Vallejo.” This project is a community-based collaboration between Julie Sze and Javier Arbona (Professor and Assistant Professor) of American Studies, and LaDonna Williams and her colleagues from All Positives Possible, a Black community based organization in South Vallejo. Vallejo, on the Northern edge of the Bay Area, is a geographically and racially stratified city with a particularly

50

fascinating history related to the US military (since the 1850s). Its history is based in racial struggle, class conflict and capital accumulation intertwined with the long shadow of militarized and oil-soaked places amidst staggering beauty. Postwar policies like freeway development and urban renewal removed and isolated Black and poor communities, increasingly concentrated into South Vallejo, the residents who became (and remain) the primary targets of disproportionately high police violence (which is the target of State investigation). Vallejo, and in particular, Black neighborhoods in South Vallejo, are defined by racism and invisibility, both in emergency situations, as well as in everyday neglect. It has a significant elderly population with severely compromised health, exacerbated by Covid. Black communities in South Vallejo have some of the highest rates of asthma in both children and adults, cancer, diabetes, stroke, heart attacks, and respiratory illnesses compared to surrounding communities. In a recent chapter, we asked “How does racial petroviolence haunt the present as a manifestation of ideological battlefronts on the waterfront?” We place the activism against the oil refinery in a historical and transnational context, linking Black activism on waterfronts globally against legacies of extraction of land, resources and labor. We argue that black community activism in Vallejo’s over contested places illustrates the contours of political resistance to militarized, carceral and petrochemical places, related to the US Military’s occupation of Mare Island.

51

Designing Multidimensional Research for the Urban Anthropocene

Climate action beyond the ‘global city’: place-based account of climate change responses in Quelimane, Mozambique

VALERIE OLSON University of Calfornia, Irvine

LORRAINE DONGO University of Sheffield

The Anthropocene is an epochal concept with unprecedented spatial, temporal, and conceptual dimensions: from molecular chemopolitics to solar systemic astrodynamics. Contemporary forms of urban, sub-urban, and ex-urban inhabitation are unfolding in this multidimensional field, presenting researchers with extreme challenges. Research on inhabitation today must account for extensive assemblages of beings, processes, places, and things, but also be feasible and manageable. How can researchers facing this complexity design projects that “implement imaginative research agendas and practical understandings of novel urban futures?” One approach is through “multidimensional” ethnographic research design, which is the topic of a forthcoming handbook. Rather than centering on methods, the handbook focuses on the most nascent and often hidden stages of a project’s emergence: namely imagining, conceptualizing, and cohering project intentions. Multidimensional research design is an iterative approach to assembling diverse research concepts and intentions within a congruent framework of inquiry.

52

As the calls for urgency and depth of action for a transition to more sustainable and resilient societies intensify, they come with the implicit assumption that everyone has to be part of this transition. Place-based responses to climate change, often led by local actors, abound. Yet most of these actions remain invisible in an action landscape dominated by technological-oriented responses and never-ending fads about greening the city. Part of the issue has been that attention has concentrated in the spectacle of climate action in global cities. Yet action takes place beyond global networks. Small and medium cities in Africa concentrate people, growth, investment, innovation, diversity, informality, and vulnerabilities to climate risk. They constitute unique locations for climate change action. This paper therefore focuses on place-based climate change actions in these cities, showing how local actors engage with and respond to the current ecological crises shaping everyday lives in these urban spaces.

The paper discusses local climate actions in the city of Quelimane, Mozambique.

In exploring place-based climate change actions in Quelimane, the paper demonstrates the central thesis of ‘climate urbanism’ about how climate change and urban space co- constitute each other. The case of Quelimane shows how action emerges within ever- changing and interactive processes that shape diverse social entities and urban spaces in the city without creating the boundaries between everyday living and broader structural drivers of climate change. This critical ‘climate urbanism’ lens that emerges in this case study hints at how understanding local climate actions in cities beyond the ‘global city’, particularly in Africa and wider global South, can go on to create more meaningful ways of thinking and engaging with the grammars explained as the constitution of ‘cities from the ground’(Amin and Lancione, 2022).

Co-constituted on an everyday basis through climate change and sustainability action, these urban spaces still echo ongoing spatial conflicts, and require negotiation with messy legacies, present dynamics, and future visioning to address everyday live. These are the essentials that urbanism and climate change scholarship needs to critically engage for just and sustainable urban climate solutions that create viable urban futures.

Part II

Environmental justice, adaptation and resilience

Gender, Disasters and Climate Change in Himalayan Towns: The Interrelations ANJAL PRAKASH & PRANAV GARIMELLA Bharti Institute of Public Policy

Changing climate, changing disasters: Reflections on the field of disaster risk reduction.

CASSIDY JOHNSON University College London The changing climate is affecting the type and severity of disasters. Climate related disasters in urban areas, such as heat events, flooding, windstorms and wild fires are increasing in number and severity, as are the related cascading effects of these disasters. The impacts are disproportionately felt by low-income populations living in low and middle-income countries. The aim of this paper is to examine how disasters are changing with our changing climate and reflect on what that means for the field of disaster risk reduction in relation to urban areas. Drawing the EMDAT database, the research will look at how the profile of climate-related disasters is changing over recent years, and consider the cascading effects of these disasters for low-income people. This analysis will then be used to make reflections on they key areas of urban disaster risk management that are needed, drawing on UNDRR’s Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient and to reflect on what this means for reimaging questions of environmental justice for the poorest and most affected by disasters.

54

Mountain communities in the Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH) live in a multi-hazard environment. The region is especially prone to floods, flash floods, avalanches, and landslides, as well as droughts and earthquakes, sometimes resulting in cascading disasters with upstream-downstream linkages and often with transboundary impacts. In recent years, there has been an increasing trend of disaster events in the HKH. Of the HKH population, only 3 per cent live in larger cities, and 8 per cent live in smaller towns. However, of late, there has been an increase in urbanization largely due to regional imbalances in providing economic opportunities for the poor. People are flocking to the nearest urban centres for employment and related economic opportunities. As a result, the share of the urban population is increasing while that of the rural population is declining. In HKH, increasing urbanisation and climate change are two critical stressors that adversely affect the biophysical environment of urban areas. When disasters hit the HKH, there is a differential impact, affecting women more. Inequalities in society are often amplified during disasters. Poor people, especially women, the elderly, and children living along riverbanks and in the plains and low-lying urban locations, are particularly vulnerable to flood hazards. Gender-based discrimination is one of the most significant factors affecting vulnerability to disasters in the region. This can be ascribed to women’s lack of access to information, power, money, and training relative to their men counterparts. The high rates of male out-migration and associated gender-based norms and barriers women face when men are not around are other stressors. This paper contributes to third-wave research on gender and climate resilience with special reference to Himalayan towns. It recognises that the economic empowerment of women and the development of women’s agency is vital to reducing the risk and impact of future disasters and is a vital aspect of all phases of the disaster cycle, from prior preparedness to the postdisaster recovery period. The chapter is divided into four sections. Section one provides the overall context of disaster in Himalayan towns and surrounding rural areas across eight countries in South Asia. Section two focuses on the gendered impact of disasters. Section three provides case studies of how disasters have created a differential impact on women, men, and poorer sections. Section four summarises the paper and provides a way forward.

Gender, Disasters and Climate Change in Himalayan Towns: The Interrelations ANJAL PRAKASH & PRANAV GARIMELLA Bharti Institute of Public Policy Mountain communities in the Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH) live in a multi-hazard environment. The region is especially prone to floods, flash floods, avalanches, and landslides, as well as droughts and earthquakes, sometimes resulting in cascading disasters with upstream-downstream linkages and often with transboundary impacts. In recent years, there has been an increasing trend of disaster events in the HKH. Of the HKH population, only 3 per cent live in larger cities, and 8 per cent live in smaller towns. However, of late, there has been an increase in urbanization largely due to regional imbalances in providing economic opportunities for the poor. People are flocking to the nearest urban centres for employment and related economic opportunities. As a result, the share of the urban population is increasing while that of the rural population is declining. In HKH, increasing urbanisation and climate change are two critical stressors that adversely affect the biophysical environment of urban areas. When disasters hit the HKH, there is a differential impact, affecting women more. Inequalities in society are often amplified during disasters. Poor people, especially women, the elderly, and children living along riverbanks and in the plains and low-lying urban locations, are particularly vulnerable to flood hazards. Gender-based discrimination is one of the most significant factors affecting vulnerability to disasters in the region. This can be ascribed to women’s lack of access to information, power, money, and training relative to their men counterparts. The high rates of male out-migration and associated gender-based norms and barriers women face when men are not around are other stressors. This paper contributes to third-wave research on gender and climate resilience with special reference to Himalayan towns. It recognises that the economic empowerment of women and the development of women’s agency is vital to reducing the risk and impact of future disasters and is a vital aspect of all phases of the disaster cycle, from prior preparedness to the postdisaster recovery period. The chapter is divided into four sections. Section one provides the overall context of disaster in Himalayan towns and surrounding rural areas across eight countries in South Asia. Section two focuses on the gendered impact of disasters. Section three provides case studies of how disasters have created a differential impact on women, men, and poorer sections. Section four summarises the paper and provides a way forward.

Embodied and everyday knowledges of immigrants over urban climate health vulnerability and adaptation in European cities PANAGIOTA KOTSILA Autonomous University of Barcelona Climate change, human health and immigration are arguably the most challenging issues of our times, with important implications for social and environmental justice. While many studies point to climate change as a migration push-factor, our understanding of climate vulnerabilities and adaptations that follow migration is relatively poor. While we know that non-EU immigrants and especially those from countries of the global South, occupy positions of increased health risk (due to low income, precarious working conditions, social exclusion, limited access to healthcare, etc.), we know little about how climate change is impacting their lives and livelihoods in the post-migration context of European cities.

I propose to look at non-EU immigrants as the postcolonial subjects in current processes of nation- and place-making in European cities, as the latter strive to build and fulfill agendas of climate adaptation. While adaptation has been heavily bounded by technocratic politics, political ecologists counter-pose an approach that pays attention to inequalities,emphasizing on “adaptation for whom”? This forces us to see climate impacts not as future and external threats but as part of the embedded processes of racial capitalism, colonialism and other oppressions that have historically been shaping socio-environmental vulnerabilities. Adaptation is a field where interests and knowledge/power dynamics clash, rather than an easily measurable and one-fits-all merely technical or managerial solution.

If adaptation is then to be re-defined as a critical metaphor for change, it must address the underlying drivers of inequality that inform it. Through an intersectional lens of vulnerability considering the multiple axes of difference that define positions of power and privilege, the first objective of this research is to understand how vulnerability to climate health impacts is shaped for non-EU immigrant groups. Examining both material and symbolic aspects, it looks how immigrant subjectivities are shaped in relation to climate change, and seeks to link struggles for livelihood, survival and belonging to efforts for climate adaptation in the city.

57

→ session 7

Affective homespaces The home, the house are shaped by “the solidarity of memory and imagination,” as Gaston Bachelard puts it in his exploration of the affective dimensions of home in The Poetics of Space. The home, he argues, is a source of comfort as it enables reliving memories of protection, central to the fixations of happiness that shape life. At the same time, the home is a source of discomfort for its ambiguous relationships with the individual and the universe, the topologies of the hiding place, and the impositions of morality ascribed to the home. The Anthropocene, however, has shattered those structures of comfort and certainty, exploiting uprooting anxieties with a double movement, inwards and outwards, individual retraction and outward expansion in search of inhabitable space.

Michele Lancione explores some of those contradictions that become tangible in the space of the home, with reference, in particular, to what it means to be without home or home-less in the context of constant external crises. Georgia Alexandri takes us to Greece to reflect on the possibilities of housing policy and the entanglement of climate policy with housing upgrades. Tatiana AcevedoGuerrero situates the domestic practice within a larger homescape that hosts the choreographies in everyday life, seen in this case through the lens of water infrastructure in Colombia. Willie J. Wright also engages with state-led projects of precarity-making in the home, this time invading intimate spaces through the racial organisation of home and home ownership in America’s history.

59

Expulsion, Extraction, and the Impossibile Possibilities of Home

Housing in climate-change crisis

MICHELE LANCIONE Politecnico de Torino

GEORGIA ALEXANDRI Leibniz Institute for Research in Society and Space

The ways in which being at ‘home’ and being ‘homeless’ are defined, managed, escaped from and fought for, are critical matters globally. And yet, despite ongoing struggles against homeless and wars waged to protect a sense of home, the relationship between these two supposedly distinct realms is rarely openly challenged. For many, these seem to be the opposite ends of the axis defining what needs to be fought against or for. But what if the solution to ‘homelessness’ is not ‘home’? What if one does not need to go back home but instead needs a more radical beyond? What if one needs the affirmation of a kind of ‘home’ that cannot be thought of with the available tools, but requires radical epistemic and material liberation to unfold? In this talk, I provide an initial response to these questions by transcending a binary reading of ‘home’ and its ‘other’. Rather than conceiving the two as opposites - being at the same time one the solution of the other and one the negation of the other - the proposal is to conceive ‘home’ and ‘homelessness’ as one. This does not mean to deny the existence of the latter, but to affirm that ‘home’ contains in itself the possibility of ‘not-being-at-home’: for one can be made to inhabit a space of the ‘less’ without requiring ‘home’ to alter its parameters. This is what I call the impossible possibility of ‘home’: a ‘salvation’ designed around its annihilation; a tensioned epistemic and material violence sitting very much at the heart of what is made to count as other and how that is governed, recursively so, from the level of individual subjection through the diagram of global boundaries.

60

In the face of the climate-change as well as the recent energy crisis, carbon emission mitigation through housing renovations and new energy-efficient constructions has transformed into key policy. Nonetheless, climate action for housing is prone to engage with rigid and deep-rooted housing institutional frameworks. Moreover, it further involves different forms of political agency, as represented by the variety of actors that constitute climate change governance.

Simultaneously, housing policy is operated across different state scales and involves non-state actors, like the financial industry as highlighted in the literature of housing financialisation. However, very little is known about how climate-change policies challenge or influence housing, nor how housing supply is reshaped to accommodate climate-change targets. Additionally, little is known about the social and spatial trade-offs from climate-friendly housing. This contribution aims to bridge housing, climate and energy justice discourse by looking at the case of housing renovations in Athens. As housing in Greece lies -still- in the jurisdiction of the central state, this research interrogates the top down policy capacity implementation for housing energy upgrades. It further interrogates the role of climate city networks as political agents with unique capacities to promote low carbon urban transitions, to question, who has -for the moment- access to the right for climate neutral housing.

61

Homescapes make the world we live in?

Exploring urban inhabitation in Colombia

Ante-Austerity Urbanism

TATIANA ACEVEDO-GUERRERO Copernicus Institute, Utrecht University

WILLIE J. WRIGHT University of Florida

Unequal and rapidly changing environments, global south cities have managed public services through a myriad of socio-technical configurations that provide differentiated alternatives depending on social position. Population living on low-income neighbourhood’s, which in the south accounts for 60–70% of urban housing, seldom has access to regular piped water on their homes. They rely on small-scale service providers, rain harvesting, and other ways of water provision ‘beyond the network’ and engage in domestic water storage practices.

This article takes water as an entry point, undertaking an investigation into the homes of urban Colombia. It follows water, as it is essential for sustaining everyday life, and goes beyond it, into other material and atmospheric components of the home. Stored (stagnant) waters are never only water but are also home to large communities of organisms such as bacteria and mosquitoes, that eventually continue their lives outside water. The concept of homescape is originally proposed to denote a produced place in which interdependent social, material and ecological processes unfold in and around the domestic, but are not independent of broader socio-economic power relations and ecological dynamics. By focusing on the everyday life inside and around homes, in low-income neighborhoods of Barranquilla and Buenaventura, the general aim of the article is to understand the interconnected infrastructural histories and arrangements, ecological changes, and social power relations that constitute homescapes. It then casts a spotlight on the domestic scale as a critical, yet overlooked, vantage point for understanding urban socio-ecological relations in a context of inequality and climate change. In doing so, the article suggests new ways to think about the processes sustaining the possibilities for life in southern cities (where most of humanity lives).

62

There has been a surge of interest in the role of race in America’s history of housing and homeownership. Of particular interest has been the deliberate exclusion of Black families from suburban homes and integrated housing markets. Relatedly, interest in the spatialized outcomes of neoliberalism and austerity measures have expanded our understanding of the scale and impact of post-war/postKeynesian shifts in global political economies. Drawing on postbellum histories of urban exclusion, this study presents anti-Blackness as a pre-neoliberal austerity measure. Though related to dominant models of austerity, this ante-austerity (i.e., anti-blackness) does not fit squarely within the geopolitical (the US or Eurozone), ideological (Thatcherism), and temporal (the 1980s) terrains often associated with the emergence of neoliberal policies and procedures. Moreover, I suggest that this method extraction was an undertone of the Keynesian brands of liberal democracy which some critical scholars decry the loss of. I conclude with suggestions for how a consideration of this alternative origin story may expand our knowledge of how urban extraction and expulsion reanimate, and what is required to develop truly sustainable cities.

63

→ session 8

Care, love and social change in the Anthropocene “We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination.

Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival.”

Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World Among the extensive menu of proposals for action presented in the 2022 Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, there is little attention to the possibility of collaboration and solidarity as situated strategies of action for climate change. Emphasis lies on regulatory strategies and private sector leadership, on finance and programmatic action through planning and design. Yet, there is a social protection story that, while untold, seeps through the pages of the report in the account of vulnerabilities, in the portrayal of social innovation, on the emphasis on social infrastructures for adaptation. A plausible response to “how are we going to deal with the challenges posed by climate change?” is “together.” Recent work on alternatives to climate urbanism has emphasised the multiple practices of care that sustain precarious systems and construct alternatives. Such practices of care are particularly important in the context of turbulent and unequal transformations of societies and infrastructures. However, as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa has explained, care is intertwined with a series of burdens, which in the case of the Anthropocene question the morality of being human.

The papers in this session approach the question of social change in the Anthropocene – transitions and transformations – from the perspective of alternatives that build on affective relations and care. Stefan Bouzarovski explains the affective labour that, increasingly, maintain working conditions in cities that increasingly depend on electricity. Urban electrification is now the new mantra of decarbonization, but its consequences are managed day-by-day by a set of labourers whose work is permeated by affective relations. Ethemcan Turhan looks at the energy transition but this time examines the perspectives of those who feel the transition takes place on themselves to explore how those changes modify their affects with given environments. Julia Spanier explores the potentiality of care-informed social innovation in the rural environment and how this manifests through the deployment of community-supported agriculture.

65

Love and labour in the electric city

Tenants and terawatts: Exploring residents’ viewpoints on local energy transition in Hoogkerk, the Netherlands

STEFAN BOUZAROVSKI University of Manchester

ETHEMCAN TURHAN University of Groningen

Metabolisms of energy in the city are predicated upon human labour, in ways that are often poorly recognized in relation to the global climate challenge. Building upon existing scholarship on the relationship between energy and labour across different spatio-temporal contexts, I seek to reveal overlapping networks that bind energy workers, consumers and producers. I draw upon geographical, feminist, social practice and political ecology insights, to emphasize the role of gender, domesticity and social relations in enabling and configuring a multiplicity of energy circulations, often below the radar of mainstream urban and infrastructure studies.

In particular, I seek to uncover the labour that intermediary workers – building tradespeople, energy advisors, designers, consultants – perform in assembling the motivations, technologies, competences, and contractual relations associated with low-carbon building retrofits. Their highly elaborate work is a key prerequisite for the establishment of low-carbon energy regimes, thanks to the interpretation, translation and negotiation of new infrastructural standards and circulations. I illustrate these arguments with the findings of a several energy advice projects undertaken across European cities of different sizes, encompassing retrofit interventions and energy advice for over 2000 households.

66

The lack of a thorough understanding of local community’s viewpoints and considerations, with regard to energy transition, frequently results in the unsuccessful implementation of top-down energy plans and interventions, to which local residents develop strong opposition. The purpose of this study is to gain insights into the way in which the residents of a city district perceive, prioritize and relate to the various aspects of the local energy transition process and spatial outcome. Here we focus on Hoogkerk district of Groningen, located in northern Netherlands, due to the energy transition challenges it faces, but also due to the active role of the recently formulated local citizen initiative. In order to explore diverse viewpoints, a Q methodological study has been conducted in close collaboration with the local citizen energy initiative. Three main viewpoints emerged at the end of our analysis, while insights into a number of overarching consensuses and disagreements were surfaced as well. Indicatively, the protection of social renters in the energy transition policy is prioritized by all the formulated viewpoints.

Furthermore, hesitation towards bottom-up processes with regard to the local energy transition, appeared in the results. Finally, the strong ‘village mentality’, that is often attributed to the district of Hoogkerk identity and expected to play an important role in the local energy transition process, is not perceived as such by the participants. We argue that these insights can support policymakers and the local citizen initiative towards the development of an integrated local energy vision taking into account the diverse viewpoints of Hoogkerk’s citizens.

67

Rural-urban care?

Interrogating the transformation of city-countryside relations in community-supported agriculture JULIA SPANIER Copernicus Institute, Utrecht University In line with a relational ontology of space and place, I propose to think urban inhabitation by transgressing the conventionally set ‘boundaries’ of the city and foregrounding its entanglements with rural and periurban realities. This is based on the premise that imagining novel urban futures necessarily entails imagining the role of the rural in these futures.

In this paper, I engage with these rural-urban entanglements by looking at the ways in which community-supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives transform the relationship between urban and rural dwellers. CSA connects food producers, most often based in peri-urban and rural areas, with consumers based in the nearby, and most often urban, areas who then commit to collectively bear the annual costs (and risks) of agriculture in return for a share of the harvest.

This paper draws on empirical research on four CSA initiatives in Germany, a total of 43 interviews, to explore the different, and more and less successful, ways in which CSAs contribute to the reconfiguration of cultural as well as material rural-urban relations. Specifically, I interrogate the concept of care in rural-urban relations, tentatively theorized as opposite and alternative to existing capitalist city-countryside relations, broadly characterized by socially unjust and ecologically unsustainable material circulation and exploitation alongside cultural polarization.

While problematizing the many absences and difficulties of rural-urban care and encounter in the everyday performance of CSA, the paper casts a new light on the affects of sympathy and compassion when practiced between consumers and farmers: these relations of care may constitute alternative relations between city and countryside; novel rural-urban relations desperately needed in the Anthropocene.

69

→ session 9

Dreaming up spaces of hope “You make community by showing up.”

Donna Haraway, Science Frictions Exhibition, Bilbao

“Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely.”

Mike Davis, LSE Blog The urban has been engaged as a means to bridge the gap between understanding and acting, between remembering and futuring, and between staying in place or flowing across scapes. The urban is a place of hope in the sense spoken by Brian Massumi, as a space of manoeuvrability, the opening of the space of possibilities. Many policy prescriptions and responses are transversed with the language of ‘pathways’, as the ‘management of possibilities.’ This ‘management of possibilities’ in the sense of futurity offers a different prescriptive future from that engaged in previous biopolitical projects of authority and domination.

In the thinking of futuring, however, we face a real choice between embracing dreaming and hope or living with a kind of ‘strategic resignation,’ in Abdoumaliq Simone’s words, that mediates irruption, assault and the end of overcoming. The concluding lecture by Simone will explain this rupture, following Sylvia Wynter’s proposal in her essay “The Ceremony Found” (2015: p. 244): “This rupture will be from our hitherto subordination, normally, to our own autopoetically and, thereby, genre-specifically invented and cosmogonically chartered, pseudo-speciating sociogenic replicator codes of symbolic life/death. For it is these codes which, while having been invented and transformatively reinvented by us humans – that is, from one genre of being human (or autopoetic field/“culture”) to another – throughout our speciesspecific history, have nevertheless been effected according to laws which have functioned hitherto outside our conscious awareness as the condition of the imperatively anti-entropic opacity to ourselves of our own agency” AbdouMaliq Simone’s lecture will be complemented with two responses that will extend the remit and application of the Urban Inhabitation prospectus, with Beth Perry examining notions of responsibility action in the context of urban epistemics and Linda Westman exploring the political mobilisation of discourses of environmental justice and the instrumental uses of hope discourses.

close

71

design workshop As part of our effort to contribute to urban research knowledge by developing and testing research methods that are creative and dialogic, we invite you to take part in this design workshop.

What is everyday soft data made of?

ERIKA CONCHIS Manchester School of Art The process of making to test concepts through materiality is inherent to design approaches. The designerly way of knowing is a term coined by Nigel Cross (1982) to express the designer’s capacity to articulate abstract ideas into tangible objects and processes. We often overlook that thoughts can be formed from the material (Bardt, 2019) and that everyone can make as a way of making sense of the world.

We propose to use materiality and the functions of language, image and making as entry points to uncover individual stories of climate actions that are anchored in everyday objects.

During this design-based workshop we invite researchers to explore their own climate stories through everyday objects. With a hands-on approach, participants are invited to share how they experience the materiality of everyday life through sharing their views for the futures, memories, clay-doh modelling and letter writing.

Tea and coffee available during the workshop. A sign up sheet will be available at the conference for those who want to participate in the workshop.

73

exhibition Everyday Life in Ekangala and Hawassa PAULA METH University of Sheffield

Photography by Mark Lewis

This exhibition draws us into the lives of young adults living in South Africa (Ekangala) and Ethiopia (Hawassa) in order to better understand their work/ housing nexuses in relation to wider structural realities and infrastructural changes.

Hawassa is the site of Africa’s largest industrial park, but the growing city is experiencing a crisis in housing provision following decades of underinvestment; Ekangala in contrast benefits from decent state housing for the urban poor but its collapsing Ekandustria industrial complex means secure employment is unachievable for most. The exhibition explores how young people navigate these work/housing nexuses.

The exhibition materials are a mix of those crafted by young adults engaged in a British Academy ‘Youth Futures’ research project (2020-2023) and materials produced by ‘professional photographers’ and project researchers. They include a song, ‘selfie portraits’, poetry, stories, and video recordings (produced by the youth), alongside photographs of them and their homes, and brief quotations from life history interviews. Through these, we gain insights into their domestic spaces, their relationships with their urban spaces, and we learn of their dreams and frustrations.

Their stories provide insights into urban mobility and stuckness, poverty and the challenges of ‘entrepreneurialism’, how housing is shared and used, and the significance of family in shaping youth’s futures.

75

music event As part of the program for the Urban Inhabitation in the Anthropocene conference, the Urban Institute is organizing a gig at the Shakespeare Pub. The event will take place on Tuesday April 25 2023 from 8pm till late.

The line-up features Lightning Threads, a dynamic trio that builds explosive energy and emotion into contemporary blues rock. They are joined by Dearthworms, an alternative rock phenomenon brandishing their own unique post-punk sound. The event will be finished by DJ Nightowls, who promises to bring the party to the Shakespeare until the end of the night.

76

77

speakers biographies ADAM ABDULLAH Adam Abdullah is an Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi (Pakistan), where he teaches courses on Urban Studies, Urban History, and Urban Mental Health. His research interests lie in discourse analysis, urban temporalities, and Foucauldian conceptual frameworks. As Associate Director, Karachi Urban Lab, he explores Karachi’s fragmented urban fabric through socio-demographic analysis, data visualization, and mapping. He is also trained in qualitative methods, particularly through MAXQDA. Currently, he is leading a 20000-respondent survey on urban heat and thermal perceptions in Karachi’s low-income communities and informal outdoor workers. He has recently won a grant to conduct thermal perception surveys in Hyderabad and Jacobabad (Sindh). Additionally, he has worked as a Data Analysis Specialist on a UNDP-IBA collaborative project on understanding the resilience of urban migrants living in Karachi’s informal settlements.

TATIANA ACEVEDO-GUERRERO Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero is an engaged researcher and educator from Barrancabermeja, Colombia. She currently works as Assistant Professor at the Copernicus Institute, Utrecht University, where she forms part of the Environmental Governance Group (as an academic, she is in her early career). She is also a visiting researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies CIDER (Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá). She has experience in interdisciplinary socialenvironmental studies, learned from --mostly public-- schools and universities, but also through the environmental and political struggles which she’s had the honor to accompany. Her work is situated broadly at the intersection of urban studies and political ecology, but she also cultivates inevitable interests in postcolonial/ decolonial, Caribbean, Colombian and Latin American studies.

78

GEORGIA ALEXANDRI Georgia Alexandri is a mid-career postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Research in Society and Space (Leibinz IRS, Erkner, Germany). Her main research focus is on housing, with an emphasis on the processes of gentrification, housing financialisation and displacement. She has collaborated as a researcher in two 7th Framework Programmes (FP7) of the European Commission (Divercities at the National Centre for Social Research in Athens, Greece and Contested_Cities at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain) and she led the transdisciplinary project “Contested Cities Athens” on urban studies, ancient Greek drama and displacement. In her recent Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship, she studied comparatively the process of housing financialisation in Athens (Greece) and in Barcelona (Spain). Her plan is to explore the novel modalities in housing financialisation as outlined by climate-change policies and the urban transition to carbon neutrality.

ANDREW BALDWIN Andrew Baldwin is a Geographer at Durham University, UK. Andrew’s research examines the intersections of race, nature and geography with a specific current focus on the ways in which discourses and practices of climate change and migration relate to questions of humanism, posthumanism, politics, culture, urbanism and the Anthropocene. Ultimately, Andrew’s work is motivated to ask how new forms of political community are coming into existence (or not) in relation to looming geohistorical phenomena like climate change and the Anthropocene. This work draws heavily from anti-racist scholarship and postcolonial theory.

Andrew is currently Co-investigator on a major ESRC-funded project called Inclusive Urban Infrastructure with colleagues from Sussex and Durham and our international partners in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and Somaliland.

79

STEFAN BOUZAROVSKI Stefan Bouzarovski is a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester, where he directs the People and Energy Programme within the Manchester Urban Institute. He also chairs the European Union Energy Poverty Observatory, as well as the international ENGAGER Action funded by CoOperation in Science and Technology. He is an internationally leading expert in energy poverty and sustainability policy. His publication portfolio includes over 120 peer-reviewed papers and chapters, three single-author monographs, one co-authored textbook and four edited books. He has provided expert advice to the European Parliament, European Commission, United Nations, World Bank, International Energy Agency as well as numerous governmental and charitable bodies.

VANESA CASTÁN BROTO Vanesa Castán Broto is Professor of Climate Urbanism at the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. She leads a research group on Climate Urbanism. Her project Low Carbon Action in Ordinary Cities (2019-2024) explores new urban innovation trends for climate change, funded by the European Research Council.

Her project Community Energy and Sustainable Transitions in East Africa, CESET (2020- 2023) explores the potential for off-grid energy access, funded by the UK Global Challenges Research Fund. Vanesa has authored and edited several books, most recently Inclusive Urban Development in the Global South (with Andrea Rigon; Routledge, 2022). Vanesa served as a Lead Chapter Author for the Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the 6th Assessment Report.

ERIKA CONCHIS Erika Conchis is a PhD researcher at Manchester School of Art (Manchester Metropolitan University). Her research focuses on the development of research methods; mapping practices; and the design of new approaches for the analysis and presentation of qualitative data which relate to key societal factors (i.e. climate change and urban health).

GUILLERMO DELGADO Guillermo Delgado is an architect-urbanist born in Mexico and based in Namibia.

He is currently adjunct researcher at the Department of Land and Property Sciences, at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST); where he coordinates the Institute for Land, Livelihoods and Housing. He was part of the leadership of the team that revised the national housing programme and policy in Namibia, and has served on different committees of projects of national importance there. He has also taught courses on research methods, urbanisation in Africa and housing at NUST, as well as supervised various students in their theses and work-integrated learning. He was previously associate researcher at the Labour Resource and Research Institute (LaRRI) from 2011-14, where he worked on issues of housing and living conditions, and led a feasibility study on the development of an informal market in Windhoek. He holds an architecture degree from the Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA) in Mexico City; a masters in architecture from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and a doctoral degree from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa. He has worked in several research, design, and cultural projects focused on issues of land rights, governance, housing, urbanization, social protection, and co-productive spatial practices.

LORRAINE DONGO Lorraine Dongo is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. Her current work is on the Low Carbon Action in Ordinary Cities (LO-ACT) project aiming to enable low carbon urban development in rapidly growing, ordinary cities through an understanding of the current demands and the conditions that enable climate action in such cities. With her wider work and research interests located within and at the intersection of climate change, urban development, sustainability, resilience, and policy making, Lorraine enquires on place, actors, power, politics, and justice. This is informed by the research and practices’ ongoing needs to critically explore, understand, and engage the interplay of climate risk, southern urbanism, with wider urban development practices in and for the global South, particularly so when the focus is centred on the rapidly urbanising parts of Africa.

81

MATTHEW GANDY Matthew Gandy is Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge and an award-winning documentary film maker. His research interests span landscape, infrastructure, biodiversity, epidemiology, and visual methods. He has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York; the University of California, Los Angeles; the Technical University, Berlin; the Humboldt University, Berlin; the University of the Arts, Berlin; and most recently the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study. His books include Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York City (The MIT Press, 2002), The return of the White Plague: global poverty and the ‘new’ tuberculosis (Verso, 2003, co-editor), Hydropolis: Wasser und die Stadt der Moderne (Campus, 2006, co-editor), Urban constellations (jovis, 2011, editor), The fabric of space: water, modernity, and the urban imagination (The MIT Press, 2014), The acoustic city (jovis, 2014, co-editor), Moth (Reaktion, 2016), The botanical city (jovis, 2020, co-editor), and Natura urbana: ecological constellations in urban space (The MIT Press, 2022).

EVELIEN GEERTS Evelien Geerts (Ph.D.) is a multidisciplinary philosopher, a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and a Posthumanities Hub affiliated researcher.

She holds a Humanities Ph.D. in Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz (United States) and (research) M.A. degrees in Philosophy and Gender & Ethnicity Studies. Her research interests include new materialist, posthumanist and Deleuzoguattarian philosophy, critical epistemologies, political philosophical questions of identity, difference, and violence, and critical and diffractive pedagogies. She previously has published in Philosophy Today, Women’s Studies International Forum, and Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge and recently edited special issues on “The Somatechnics of Violence” (Somatechnics:Journal of Bodies – Technologies – Power; forthcoming), “Dis/Abling Gender” (Journal of Gender Studies; 2022), and “Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment in Digital Spheres” (Journal of Digital Social Research; 2022)—publications that can be found at www.eveliengeerts.com.

At the moment, she is finalizing a Templeton Continental series monograph on agential realism and violence, while working on a manuscriptfor Routledge’s Morethan-human Humanities on the viral micropolitical affectivity of alt-right memes in times of pandemic neo-fascism.

82

PRINCE GUMA Prince K. Guma is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. His work, situated at the intersection of STS, urban studies and postcolonial studies, explores the multiple ways through which cities and infrastructure domains are constructed and reconstructed through the diffusion and uptake of new plans, ideas and technologies.

MIRANDA IOSSIFIDIS Miranda Jeanne Marie Iossifidis is a Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University, UK. Her research interests are around the collective and creative negotiation of environmental present(s) and future(s) through speculative fiction, everyday urban culture and collective action. She is currently working on a project that uses creative methods in workshops exploring speculative ecofascist presents and futures.

ZAKIYYAH IMAN JACKSON Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the literary and aesthetic aspects of Western philosophical and scientific discourse and investigates the engagement of African diasporic literature, film, and visual art with the historical concerns, knowledge claims, and rhetoric of Western science and philosophy. Professor Jackson is the author of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. Becoming Human is a call for rethinking the philosophical import of African diasporic literature and visual art. It demonstrates that gender, sexuality, and maternity are integral sites for producing a human-animal distinction that persistently reproduces the racial logics and orders of Western thought. Jackson argues that the literary texts and visual artistic practices featured in Becoming Human generate alternative possibilities for reimagining being by neither relying on animal abjection to define what we call human nor reestablishing “recognition” within liberal humanism as an antidote to racialization. Ultimately, Becoming Human reveals both the terrorizing peculiarity of reigning foundational conceptions of “the human” rooted in Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism and expressed in current multiculturalist alternatives as well as highlights generative, unruly senses of being/knowing/feeling existence put forward by black feminist theory, literature, and art. Becoming Human is the winner of the Harry Levin First Book Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association, the Lambda Literary Book Award for LGBTQ Studies and is featured in Artforum magazine’s “Best of 2021” issue.

83

CASSIDY JOHNSON Cassidy Johnson is Professor of Urbanism and Disaster Risk Reduction at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, at University College London. Her academic interests are linked by a commitment to improve the quality of life and livelihoods of low-income groups living in urban areas. Her research contributes to the area of disaster risk reduction and recovery and to the role of local governments and civil society in this – and to integrating an understanding of disaster-risk into development. This has encompassed issues of urban planning, housing quality, building code regulations, informal settlements (and upgrading) and evictions. Her work engages internationally with policy makers as well as with local communities and she has worked in more than eight countries across Asia and Africa, including Turkey, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi.

IHNJI JON Ihnji Jon is a lecturer in human geography at the school of geography and planning, Cardiff University. I am an early career scholar drawing on human geography, environment planning, and political philosophy. I am committed to expanding our discussions on political ecology with and beyond distributive justice, by bringing in feminist relational approach to identity, politics, and space.

LUNA KHIRFAN Dr. Luna Khirfan is Associate Professor at the School of Planning, the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada. In her research, she develops coupled humannatural systems models to inform planning, policies, and behavior while accounting for justice and equity. Her work, therefore, underscores the relationship between public engagement, place making, and place experience particularly, in the rehabilitation of historic cities and in adaptation to climate change. Khirfan is the author of fourty peer reviewed publications and two books: “World Heritage, Urban Design and Tourism: Three Cities in the Middle East”, published by Routledge in 2014 and “Order and Disorder: Urban Governance and the Making of Middle Eastern Cities” published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2017. Dr. Khirfan is also Lead Author for the recently published Chapter 6: “Cities, settlements and key infrastructure” which is part of the Working Group II contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report.

84

PANAGIOTA KOTSILA PANAGIOTA KOTSILA is a mid-career researcher, having completed her PhD in Development Studies (University of Bonn) in 2016. She is currently a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB), at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. She teaches and researches on political ecologies of human health, immigration and climate change, and has published widely on topics such as waterborne disease, malaria, and COVID-19 from a critical public health and medical anthropology perspective, mobilizing concepts such as bio/necro-politics, embodiment, and intersectionality. Through her work also on urban greening, she has unpacked processes of nature’s neoliberalisation and their contestation from below, as well as taken a close look at the practices and temporalities of care that nourish justice potentials in urban community gardens. More recently, she led the forthcoming (2023) book publication “Injustice in Urban Sustainability: Ten Core Drivers”

ANKIT KUMAR Ankit Kumar is a Geographer at the University of Sheffield. His research interests are situated around climate and energy justice. He enquires justice questions working at the nexus of culture, knowledge and politics, conceptually drawing from postcolonial/anticolonial studies, critical development studies and environmental geographies.

MICHELE LANCIONE Michele Lancione is Professor of Geography at the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom.

He is co-director of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, co-founder and editor of the Radical Housing Journal, corresponding editor at IJURR and advisory board member at the IJHP. His work focuses on radical forms of inhabitation and housing struggles (through a five-year European Research Council project) and the politics of life at the margins in the contemporary urban. Recent volumes include ‘Global Urbanism’ (Routledge, edited with Colin McFarlane), ‘Urban Grammars’ (Duke University Press, edited with Ash Amin), and the monograph ‘For a Liberatory Politics of Home’, forthcoming with Duke University Press.

85

HILDA LLORÉNS Dr. Hilda Lloréns’ research and writing are concerned with understanding how race, gender, socioeconomic class, the social practices of power and structural inequalities intersect in several areas of cultural, social, environmental, and ecological life. Her research interests include cultural production and national representations, migration, diaspora, and environment and ecology in the Americas. She has written widely about these topics in academic journals, as well as in popular readership on-line and print journals. She is a co-author of the bilingual children’s book La Justicia Ambiental es para Ti y para Mí/Environmental Justice is for You and Me (2021) and her academic books include Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family: Framing Nation, Race and Gender during the American Century (2014) and Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice (2021). Making Livable Worlds was awarded the 2022 Frank Bonilla Book Prize by the Puerto Rican Studies Association, and the 2022 Gregory Bateson Book Prize by the Society for Cultural Anthropology. Dr. Lloréns is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island.

PHILLIP LÜHL Phillip is an architect born in Namibia. He studied his Bachelor and MSc in architecture TU Delft with Prof Miguel Robles-Duran; and completed his PhD in 2020 at the university of Westminster with Prof Lindsay Bremner. He is currently the Head of the Department of Architecture, Planning and Construction at the Namibia University of Science and Technology; where he has been lecturing since 2011. He has worked in research and design projects in Namibia, the Netherlands, and Mexico; and collaborated with national and international offices in projects focused on issue of urban inequality, informal economies, housing justice, and cultural production. He is currently member of the task team revising the national housing policy, and led the revision of the national housing programmes for the Ministry of Urban and Rural Development.

86

TIMOTHY LUKE Timothy Luke is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His research focuses on the intersections of environmental political theory, international politics, social and political theory as they relate to global governance, political economy, and cultural change. He serves on the editorial boards of Capitalism Nature Socialism, Critical Social Policy, Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Fast Capitalism, International Political Sociology, New Political Science, Peace Studies Journal, Public Knowledge Journal, Spectra, Telos, and the minnesota review. His books include The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Politics and Theory, eds. Joel J. Kassiola and Timothy W. Luke (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); The Travails of Trumpification (Telos Press Publishing, 2021); Anthropocene Alerts: Critical Theory of the Contemporary as Ecocritique (Telos Press Publishing, 2019); Putting Knowledge to Work & Letting Information Play, Timothy W. Luke and Jeremy Hunsinger, eds.

(Sense Publishers, 2012); Museum Politics: Powerplays at the Exhibition (University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology: Departing from Marx (University of Illinois Press, 1999), The Politics of Cyberspace, co-edited with Chris Toulouse (Routledge, 1998), and Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1997). He also is the author of Shows of Force: Politics, Power, and Ideology in Art Exhibitions (Duke University Press, 1992); Social Theory and Modernity: Critique, Dissent and Revolution (Sage, 1990); Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination and Resistance in Informational Society (University of Illinois Press, 1989); and Ideology and Soviet Industrialization (Greenwood, 1985).

SIMON MARVIN Simon Marvin’s work is focused on the analysis of the changing relations between infrastructure and the urban condition. This body of work is recognized for the way it develops innovative, interdisciplinary perspectives to explore important social, economic and material interrelationships across diverse technologies in different urban contexts. Collectively, the outputs from this work have had major global influence within urban studies and beyond.

87

PAULA METH Paula Meth is a Reader in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. Her work explores everyday lives in the urban global South with a particular interest in socio-spatial intersections. Her recent funded projects have examined Youth and the Work/Housing Nexus in Ethiopia and South Africa (British Academy); Living the African peripheries (ESRC); and Gender and Housing formalisation in India and South Africa (British Academy). She co-authored ‘Geographies of Developing Areas’ (Routledge) with Glyn Williams and Katie Willis (2009/2014) and has a co-authored monograph ‘Living the urban periphery’ (Manchester University Press) forthcoming.

TIMOTHY MORTON Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and Director of the Cool America Foundation. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Olafur Eliasson, Pharrell Williams and Justin Guariglia. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton’s work has been translated into 16 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human (Open Humanities, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 270 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food.

88

AYA NASSAR Aya Nassar is an Egyptian scholar and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Warwick. Her PhD research looked at national Egyptian architects and Urban planners who imagined post-independence Cairo and narrated these imaginations through an attention to elemental geography. Since then, she has been interested in the geopoetics of the city, memory, storytelling and narrative and critical and creative geographies especially in relationship to the Middle East.

NOBUKHOSI NGWENYA Nobukhosi Ngwenya is the University of Basel-University of Cape Town postdoctoral research fellow, based at the African Centre for Cities. Her research interests are centered on urban morphology, with a particular focus on communityled planning, development and transformation of human settlements in South Africa. As an urban planner and community development practitioner, Nobukhosi has worked extensively with communities and community organisations providing innovative solutions to some of the most pressing challenges faced by residents living in informal settlements.

ERWIN NUGRAHA Erwin Nugraha is an early career Research Fellow at Resilience Development Initiative (RDI), Bandung, Indonesia and Postdoctoral Research Associate at Durham University, UK. His research focuses on the politics and governance of climate change adaptation, urban environmental justice, and planetary decolonisation with a specific interest in the Asia Pacific. He is a member of the Earth System Governance Asia Pacific Working Group and Overlooked Cities Collective. He is the co-editor of Overlooked Cities: Power, Politics and Knowledge beyond the Urban South. He was also one of the inaugural recipients of the Allianz Climate Risk Research Award in 2017.

89

VALERIE OLSON Valerie Olson is an environmental anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, who focuses on critical systems studies and political systematicity. I research the governance of large transboundary spaces in North America which are typically understood in “systemic” terms, such as ecosystems, watersheds, and marine cadastres. With Kristin Peterson, I am coauthoring a handbook (Duke University Press, forthcoming) on research design that provides a guide for the typically backgrounded aspects of early phase research development, such as beginning with open-ended imaginaries of research possibilities that foster the emergence of creative studies that have multidimensional political, cultural, and scholarly significance. The handbook advocates research design’s transformative possibilities as a communally shared, nonlinear, and iterative process.

BETH PERRY Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between knowledge, expertise and urban justice with a focus on the shifting roles between state and non-state actors and the theory and practice of co-production in urban governance and research. She publishes widely on these topics in monographs, journals and the popular press, and produces creative output for different audiences. Her latest books include Social Research: Issues, Methods and Process (with Tim May); Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production: A Guide for Sustainable Cities (with Kerstin Hemstrom, Henrietta Palmer, Merrit Polk and David Simon, Practical Action, 2021); Cities and the Knowledge Economy: Promise, Politics and Possibilities (with Tim May, Taylor and Francis, 2018); and Reflexivity: the Essential Guide (with Tim May, Sage, 2017).

SASKA PETROVA Saska’s research and policy contributions are situated at the intersection of precarity, gender, and energy resource use. Working in under-represented communities across the United Kingdom, Europe, South Africa and China, Saska has interrogated the political governance and contestation of social and environmental injustices. Saska uses insights from political ecology and feminist geographies in seeking to transform knowledge and practice on low-carbon transitions. Saska has been involved as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator in over 20 research projects funded by the European Union, several UK research councils, the Royal Geographical Society, Cheshire Lehmann Fund and the Higher Education Academy.

90

ANJAL PRAKASH Anjal Prakash is Research Director and Adjunct Associate Professor, Bharti Institute of Public Policy, Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad India. Before joining ISB, he worked with TERI- School of Advanced Studies, New Delhi, India as Associate Professor and as the Programme Coordinator of Himalayan Adaptation, Water and Resilience (HI-AWARE) Research on Glacier and Snowpack Dependent River Basins at International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), in Kathmandu, Nepal. Anjal is coordinating lead author for the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate.

He is also a lead author in the chapter on cities, settlements and key infrastructure in the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report. Recently he was nominated as a member of the Gender Task Group of IPCC to develop a framework of goals and actions to improve gender balance and address gender-related issues within the IPCC. His work focuses on water and climate change, urban resilience, gender and social inclusion issues covering south Asia

TANZIL SHAFIQUE Tanzil Shafique is a Lecturer of Urban Design where he co-directs the MA Urban Design program called “Ecologies of Care”. He is an early career researcher and his recent Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne investigated the everyday urban transformation of the largest informal settlement in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He coconvenes the Platform for Housing Justice and is currently working with YouthNet for Climate Justice, a local youth-led movement in coastal Bangladesh to develop a solidarity network of radical resilience of urban inhabitation under ongoing climate change impacts. Tanzil is an Honorary Member of the Informal Urbanism Research Hub at the University of Melbourne. Previously he was a Research Fellow and Faculty at the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design as well as a Project Designer at the Community Design Center, both at the University of Arkansas. He holds an M.Arch in Ecological Urbanism from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.

ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow, the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, co-director, the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, Polytechnic University of Turin and visiting professor at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town.

For four decades he has worked with practices of social interchange, technical arrangements, local economy, and the constitution of power relations that affect how heterogeneous African and Southeast Asian cities are lived.

91

JULIA SPANIER Julia Spanier is an early career researcher. She is a PhD Candidate at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her PhD is part of the “unmaking” research programme (https:// unmaking.sites.uu.nl/). She investigates the unmaking of capitalist ways of being and doing in agricultural grassroots initiatives, focusing particularly on communitysupported agriculture in Germany. She locates her research at the intersection of rural and urban geography, with a particular interest in the transformation towards degrowth societies and alternative, emancipatory rural development.

Julia holds an MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance from the University of Oxford, UK, with a thesis on the assemblage of futures in the countryside, and a shared BA/BSc in Political Science and Geography from Heidelberg University, Germany.

Beyond her academic work, she has been active in, as well as supported, social movements struggling for food sovereignty, from local activism at her place of residence to the global network of the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism for relations with the UN Committee on World Food Security (CSIPM).

JULIE SZE Julie Sze is Professor of American Studies at UC Davis. She has written 3 books, most recently Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (2020, UC press), edited Sustainability and Social Justice (2018, NYU Press) and written over 60 articles and book chapters, on environmental justice, the environmental humanities, geography, and public policy. She collaborates with environmental scientists, engineers, social scientists and community-based organizers in California and New York.

LINDA WESTMAN Linda Westman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Urban Institute of the University of Sheffield. Her research revolves around environmental politics, urban climate governance, transformations, and justice. Linda is co-founder of the urban working group of the Earth System Governance network and contributing author of chapter 6 of the Working Group III Contribution of the 6th IPCC Assessment Report

WILLIE WRIGHT Willie Wright is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Florida.

His research interest includes the formation and endurance of urban black geographies. In 2022, he was a Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning at Rice University. His research has been published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, City & Society, and The Black Scholar. In 2021, he co-curated Project Row Houses “Round 52: Gulf Coast Anthropocene,” an exhibition of public art interrogating the impact of climate change in the Gulf Coast South. His manuscript in progress, “On Live Oak and Holman: Place and Public Art in Houston’s Third Ward”, is a historical geography of black contemporary art which argues that Black artists from the historically black Third Ward neighborhood use public performance to elevate the use values of neglected spaces in the face of the community’s gentrification.

ETHEMCAM TURHAN Ethemcan Turhan is assistant professor of environmental planning at University of Groningen (Netherlands). He previously held positions at KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory and Istanbul Policy Center, Sabanci University. His main research and teaching interests are situated in the broadly defined field of political ecology with empirical attention to environmental conflicts, energy infrastructures, social movements, and climate mobilities mainly (but not exclusively) in Turkey, the larger Middle East, and the Mediterranean. Most recently, he co-edited the special issue of Social Text (Duke University Press) titled “Urban Climate Insurgency” (2022).

93

LO-ACT is a 5 years project funded by the European Research Council looks at the ‘ordinary actions’ taken by citizens to improve everyday life whilst tackling climate change.

The project examines specific examples of climate change actions and policies to find out how ideas, materials, technologies, and expertise moves across urban contexts.

The Urban Institute website: //sheffield.ac.uk/urban-institute twitter: @Urban_Inst

LO-ACT project website: //loactproject.com twitter: @loactproject

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme Grant Agreement No 804051 — LO-ACT — ERC-2018-STG Graphic design, front and back cover photography: Erika Conchis