Abstract
Climate change is an increasingly important issue on urban policy and research agendas. As this agenda gathers pace, this paper argues for an approach that recognises the critical role of climate change experiments in meditating the response to climate change in the city. Drawing on a case study of a green housing development in the outskirts of Bangalore in India—Towards Zero Carbon Development (T-Zed)—the paper follows the emergence of an experiment in the simultaneous processes of making, maintaining and living low carbon alongside and in between existing infrastructure regimes. It is argued that this experiment has created space for social and technical innovation, reworking notions of urban development in Bangalore. At the same time, it has reconfigured existing urban infrastructure networks through new discourses and practices of urban ecological security, enabling the emergence of a new rhetoric of low carbon living within the city that effectively marries green forms of consumption with urban development. While the experiment serves as a means for modifying urbanism in Bangalore, its results are ambivalent in the context of ongoing inequalities within the city and beyond.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 393-414 |
Number of pages | 22 |
Journal | Contemporary Social Science |
Volume | 9 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2014 |
Externally published | Yes |
Funding
The research upon which this paper is based was supported by Harriet Bulkeley’s ESRC Climate Change Fellowship Urban Transitions: climate change, global cities and the transformation of socio-technical networks (Award Number: RES-066-27-0002). We are also grateful to the participants in the research for giving their time and insights to the project, and to the reviewers of this paper for their useful comments which have helped us to improve our arguments. Vanesa Castán Broto is a Lecturer at the Development and Planning Unit of the Barlett Faculty of the Built Environment in University College London. Her research looks at urban socio-environmental transformations and the production of environmental knowledge, examining how these processes are mediated by environmental governance mechanisms. She co-edited (with Harriet Bulkeley, Mike Hodson and Simon Marvin) Cities and Low Carbon Transitions (Routledge 2011). She is currently leading an action-research project developing partnership agreements for climate compatible development in Maputo, Mozambique (funded by DfiD through the Climate Development Knowledge Network). She is also a co-investigator in other projects investigating the relationship between urbanization, climate change, infrastructure and planning. From 2009 to 2011, she was a research associate on the Urban Transitions project.