Participants

Stefan Bouzarovski, University of Manchester
Noel Cass, University of Leeds
Simone Ferracina, University of Edinburgh
Aurora Fredriksen, University of Manchester
Sarah Knuth, Durham University
Ankit Kumar, University of Sheffield
Nate Millington, University of Manchester
Tarmo Pikner, Tallinn University
John Stehlin, UNC-Greensboro
Zac Taylor, TU-Delft
A crucial question in confronting climate change and creating just climate futures is the need to better understand the complex and geographically differentiated material footprint(s) of existing economies, infrastructures, and socio-technical arrangements. New frameworks for both mitigating and adapting to climate change require complex negotiations between that which already exists and that which is yet to come, and these articulations of past, present, and future carry divergent political orientations and possibilities. For example, programs for modifying the existing infrastructures of daily life through renewable energy substitution, more efficient transport, and a denser built environment now coexist with calls for radical overhaul of the existing built environment through deep decarbonization.

The variegated potential pathways for a just transition call attention to differing political orientations, possibilities, and relations to existing material life within current climate responses. We call these orientations  repairing , repurposing, and retreating. While these categories overlap in various ways, we suggest them as a means of cohering differing approaches to transforming the contemporary built environment that are being articulated by scholars, engineers, activists, and elected officials. We suggest that propositions for the future oriented through these categories are worth exploring further, both in and of themselves and in their complex entanglements in political visions on the ground – people’s everyday sense of their needs, possibilities for the future, foreclosed options, and grievances, whether present or imagined.

In this online workshop, we ask: How do we face the challenge of existing, obdurate built environments and infrastructures (and imaginaries and imperatives built upon and around them) in responding to the threat/s of climate change? Are such materialities as obdurate as is often imagined, and if so, to what degree? With what stakes, and with and for whom, do we engage this obduracy?

Sessions

Session 1: Collective politics (June 22, 1:30-3:00pm BST)
Zac Taylor, 'Climate risk, real estate and rent: Mapping the financialized frontiers of climate gentrification in Greater Miami' (with Manuel B. Aalbers, Division of Geography and Tourism, KU Leuven)
Ankit Kumar, 'Climate justice in postcolonial spaces: A politics of disorder'
Simone Ferracina, 'Radical co-authorship: Learning from waste'
Stefan Bouzarovski, 'Urban climate intermediaries as agents of everyday energy transformation'

Session 2: Contested durabilities (June 22, 3:15-4:45pm BST)
Nate Millington, Sarah Knuth, John Stehlin, 'Repairing, repurposing, and retreating: Climate change futures and the political obduracy of existing built environments'
Tarmo Pikner, 'Encountering terrains of de-carbonisation and related b/orderings' 
Aurora Fredriksen, 'Renewing infrastructural imaginaries: Retreating from the wreckage of big energy'
Noel Cass, 'Re-engineering the street: Low-carbon pavements?'