Transition Urbanism and the Contested Politics of Ethical Place Making

Abstract

This paper explores the contested construction of more relational urban imaginaries within a movement that is simultaneously committed to enhanced systems of care for distant places/others, and intensified regimes of (re)localisation. Transition Culture initiatives explore ?how to prepare for a carbon constrained, energy lean world? and stem from a concern for a post peak-oil global future. While the radical political openness of Transition Culture is in keeping with the vision of a more diverse polity imagined by advocates of relational space (for instance Amin, 2004), we argue that this openness is predicated upon an apolitical pragmatism that masks latent tensions between an environmentally benign localism and an ethics of care at-a-distance. If a transitional ethics of space occupies the uncertain ground between a relational and territorial geographical imagination, the Transition Culture movement provides a rich context within which to explore the ethical conundrums that stem from different tactics of place-making.Peer reviewe

Cities and Systemic Change for Sustainability: Prevailing Epistemologies and an Emerging Research Agenda

“…Hence, differences between places in terms of discourses, cultural frames and identity result to be critical factors for transition governance that require attention through foresight, community participation and empowerment approaches [107][108][109][110]. The case of the UK Transition Town movement and its diffusion has received much attention from this perspective, giving rise to critical questions regarding transition visions, politics and culture [111][112][113]. These studies clearly recognize that cities provide far better opportunities for scaling up the impacts of grassroots initiatives than the villages and small towns that currently prevail in this particular movement.…”

“…Cities may thus prove to be either innovation incubators, actively empowering and promoting grassroots initiatives and networks, or regimes that offer structural resistance, or possibly both at once cf. [43,110,111,114,115,127].…”

Healthy Cities and the Transition movement: converging towards ecological well-being?

“…They are both based on a holistic and systems-based understanding of socio-environmental problems and their responses (10,13), and they each employ theories and techniques from diverse fields including behavioural psychology, community development, organizational management and ecology to address complex and interdependent challenges (5,14).…”

Common Sense Community? The Climate Challenge Fund's Official and Tacit Community Construction

“…Groups such as TEU were designed with the aim of successfully applying to the CCF knowing the CCF's desire to 'balance out' their successful bids away from the reified and rural. When bids were funded in Scotland's urban areas, they tended to be from the stereotypical middle-class neighbourhoods -'Radio 4 activists' (Aiken 2012, p. 95) -the Transition Town Network (TTN) has been identified with (Bailey et al 2010;Smith 2011;Mason & Whitehead 2012). When asked why urban 'communities' did not receive funding to the same degree or extent, a CCF panel member responded:…”