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Maintaining Climate Change Experiments: Urban Political Ecology and the Everyday Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructure

Castán Broto, Vanesa; Bulkeley, Harriet

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Authors

Vanesa Castán Broto



Abstract

Climate change governance is increasingly being conducted through urban climate change experiments, purposive interventions that seek to reconfigure urban sociotechnical systems to achieve low-carbon and resilient cities. In examining how experiments take effect, we suggest that we need to understand not only how they are made and assembled, but also how they are maintained within specific urban contexts. Drawing on literatures from urban political ecology and the specific debate on urban repair and maintenance, this article examines maintenance in two case studies of climate change experiments in housing in Bangalore (India) and Monterrey (Mexico). We find that maintenance is a crucial process through which not only urban obduracy is preserved, but also the novel and innovative character of the experiment is asserted and reproduced. The process of ‘maintaining’ experiments is a precarious one, which requires a continuous external input in terms of remaking the experiment materially and discursively. This process causes further reconfigurations beyond the experiment, changing the patterns of responsibility attribution and acceptability that configure the urban fabric.

Citation

Castán Broto, V., & Bulkeley, H. (2013). Maintaining Climate Change Experiments: Urban Political Ecology and the Everyday Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructure. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(6), 1934-1948. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12050

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Nov 1, 2013
Deposit Date Jun 10, 2014
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
Print ISSN 0309-1317
Electronic ISSN 1468-2427
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 37
Issue 6
Pages 1934-1948
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12050
Keywords Climate change, Maintenance, Urban political ecology, Infrastructure, Experiments, Bangalore, India, Monterrey, Mexico.

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.





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