Towards a Postcolonial Perspective on Climate Urbanism

Abstract

The growing interest in urban areas as sites for climate action has led to new ways of conceiving and planning the urban. As climate actions reshape existing understandings of what cities are or ought to be, they constitute new modalities of what recent scholarship has referred to as ‘climate urbanism’. This research has framed climate urbanism as a climate‐inflected iteration of neoliberal urban development, geared towards the mobilization of ‘green’ private capital for large‐scale infrastructural projects, focused on carbon metrics, and conducive to population displacement through eco‐gentrification. In this intervention, we commend these efforts to deliver a critical perspective on how climate change gives rise to forms of urbanism that reproduce urban injustices without addressing the root causes of the climate crisis. However, we warn against two biases in recent scholarship, namely an emphasis on technological solutions and an overreliance on familiar contexts of climate action. The literature on climate urbanism does not yet reflect the diversity of urban responses emerging under the broad umbrella of urban climate action. Adopting a post‐colonial perspective on climate urbanism, we call for a greater engagement with the heterogeneous character of climate‐changed urban futures.

Subaltern forms of knowledge are required to boost local adaptation

“…61 At the same time, such scholarship has turned attention to the diverse alternatives that emerge within specific urban contexts, including what this paper refers to as subaltern knowledge. 62 Subaltern knowledge has the potential to challenge power relations both by turning attention to bottom-up activities and self-identified needs of subjugated actors and groups and by creating alternative sources of resources and finance that contest the imposition of external projects on the grounds of attracting big capital. 63 For example, adaptation initiatives in much of the Global South continue to be heavily influenced by external funders (e.g., donors, international organizations), which can lead to an instrumental focus and overlook complex social contexts and widely varying experiences, needs, and insights of diverse groups.…”

“…Many other factors that have to do with social consciousness, epistemology, and values come into play as well. Scholars of postcolonial climate urbanism 62 have noted that although considering and connecting different stakes and ways of knowing are challenging, such an approach can disrupt current power dynamics that capitalize on top-down, technocratic, and marketoriented forms of practice and knowledge. Social actors inhabit different social positions, including those who are marginalized and vulnerable due to a wide range of social, economic, and political reasons, many of which persist notwithstanding climate impacts.…”

Reimagining climate networking between cities: clustering cities based on a large dataset of mitigation actions

“…Cities exhibit extensive authority in taking mitigation actions, even in less privileged contexts. By expanding city comparison beyond a territorial trap based on the similarity of their actions [48], we believe our clustering approach is in line with the calls for postcolonial approaches to urban studies [13,24,49,50] and, more specifically, urban climate governance [13,[49][50][51]. Rather than the dominant and hierarchical lens that views global cities as the leaders in networking [2,22,52], our approach provides an opportunity for intermediary cities to be viewed as innovative actors and leaders based on their climate actions [12].…”

Urban geography II: Materially important cities

“…Finally, geographers, with their sensitivity to natural processes, land politics and socio-spatial inequality will generate new frameworks for urban theory. We can see, for example, how Nelson and Bigger (2022), Robin and Cástan Broto (2021), Wakefield (2021a, 2021b) and Long and Rice (2019), to name but a few, have built on urban political ecology to set out how material urban space might be framed in a new, climatically sensitized future scholarship. And there is deep terrain to be excavated: one that requires ‘earth scientists, social scientists, archaeologists, urban planners and civil engineers’ to work together on the city as landform (Dixon et al, 2018: p. 122) or marine biologists, consumption sociologists and urban governance theorists on how the water-based city might be freed from plastic waste (Hawkins, 2021).…”