Since the mid 2000s, climate change has appeared as a new matter of concern for urban planners. On the one hand cities have been identified as key sites for tackling global emissions raising questions about how urban planning might write carbon reduction into their imagination of future city development. On the other hand, city planners are also beginning to confront the question of whether contemporary cities are adequately prepared for the uncertain climatic futures that they are likely to face. In terms of both mitigation and adaptation, climate change is challenging planners to think anew about how to imagine, explore and enact the urban.

In this talk I delve into the way in which urban policymakers in the UK have been responding to these challenges. I focus in particular on how those charged with the responsibility for planning for climate change often articulate a frustration about how difficult it is to intervene in and to change the infrastructural foundations of modern urban life through which climate change has come about. They frequently experience attempts to do something about the problem of climate change to be one of deferral and ambition, rather than one of getting to the point of actually doing.

Yet these are people who are busy and active in all kinds of ways. Situated within local governmental and quasi governmental organizational structures, much of the work that they do to create the grounds for infrastructural interventions is oriented to the creation of an informational architecture which can provide evidence, justification, information and direction in order to create the conditions in which to plan for infrastructural opportunities to come. This talk explores the reasons why work to constitute this informational infrastructure fails to register as action, and explores what this might tell us about the nature and the limits of contemporary urban planning as it confronts global environmental problems in local settings.

 

Tuesday 13 September 2016 18:00 - 19:30

Location: MCTS, Augustenstraße 46 80333 Munich