Creating a more sustainable society is increasingly an urban challenge (Pincetl 2010). Upwards of... more Creating a more sustainable society is increasingly an urban challenge (Pincetl 2010). Upwards of fifty percent of the world’s population currently dwells in cities, and this figure is forecast to rise dramatically over the coming decades (Grimm et al. 2008). Cities both concentrate the activities that produce carbon emissions, and suffer disproportionately from their negative impacts such as air pollution, temperature increases, water shortages, and increased flooding. Given this, cities are increasingly being looked to as sites to develop long-lasting solutions to climate change (Hodson and Marvin 2007). This chapter focuses on the use of ‘living laboratories’ to drive innovation in sustainable urban development. The types of spaces designated as living laboratories are highly variable, from a single plot of underdeveloped land to a degraded waterway, from a clogged transportation corridor to a completely new city. Further, a wide variety of organisations – notably universities, government bodies, and private companies – are using the term in an unapologetically boosterish manner to develop and market their own approaches to sustainability. Their enthusiasm is underpinned by two assumptions. First, living laboratories are real life experiments that promise to produce more useful knowledge and second, they are highly visible interventions with the purported ability to inspire rapid social and technical transformation. Taking a series of examples, we consider the epistemological and political implications of living laboratories, asking whether such experiments really do hold the potential seeds of change, as this literature suggests, or whether there are other motivations at work. The chapter concludes with a discussion of role of the living laboratories approach as a form of experimentation in relation to theories of transition and sustainable urban development.
Optimising the energy performance of buildings is technically and economically challenging but it... more Optimising the energy performance of buildings is technically and economically challenging but it also has significant social implications. Maintaining comfortable indoor conditions while reducing energy consumption involves careful design, construction, and management of the built environment and its inhabitants. In this paper, we present findings from the study of a new low energy building for older people in Grenoble, France where conflicts emerged over the simultaneous pursuit of energy efficiency and comfort. The findings contribute to the contemporary literature on the sociotechnical study of buildings and energy use by focusing on intermediation, those activities that bridge the intentions of the design team and end users. Intermediation activities take many forms, and in some cases, can result in the harmonisation or alignment of energy efficiency goals and comfort goals. In other cases, intermediation is unsuccessful, leading to the conventional dichotomy between optimising technical performance and meeting occupant preferences. By highlighting the multiple ways that comfort and energy efficiency is negotiated, we conclude that buildings are provisional achievements that are constantly being intermediated. This suggests that building energy efficiency policies and programmes need to provide opportunities for intermediaries to negotiate the desires and preferences of the multiple stakeholders that are implicated in low energy buildings. Introduction The building sector is under increasing pressure to reduce energy consumption. Energy labels are now routinely attached not only to refrigerators and light bulbs, but also to houses and commercial buildings. New buildings are increasingly 'branded' with energy performance standards such as BREEAM and LEED as well as labels such as 'zero carbon'. To attain these higher levels of energy performance, energy efficiency strategies frequently involve the application of technologies ranging from super-insulation and thermal solar hot water systems to ground and air source heat pumps and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. However, the inclusion of these technologies in buildings does not guarantee optimal energy performance (Wilhite, 2008). The difference between modelled and actual energy performance can be substantial due to a variety of factors related to installation, operations, maintenance, and occupant activities. Numerous studies point to the discrepancy between a building's projected energy performance and its actual energy consumption which we shall call the 'energy performance gap' (Jaffe
We reflect on the decision to abandon the mainstreaming of zero-carbon house building in England,... more We reflect on the decision to abandon the mainstreaming of zero-carbon house building in England, in the context of our paper (Walker et al. 2015) that took this long-standing policy commitment as its case study. We consider this denouement as further evidence of how the exigencies of capital accumulation resist moves towards low-carbon transition. We reflect on what it reveals about the relation between politics and governance, the grounding and locating of carbon responsibilities and the necessary role of the state in enabling the everyday reproduction of low-carbon living. One of the hazards of researching ongoing policy processes is that events can catch up with you. As researchers we are only ever making interventions in an ongoing flow of discourse and action, but sometimes a particular coincidence merits comment. Such is the case for our paper on zero-carbon and zero-carbon living (Walker et al. 2015), which after much helpful reviewing, editor advice and revision appeared on-line just three days after the UK government scrapped the policy that the paper took as its case study. To recap this was (with an emphasis on the past tense) a policy applying in England to require all new homes to be zero-carbon (zero-C). This had been supported and developed (although also diminished) from 2006 onwards when the obligation was first announced and was due to come into force in April 2016. So after nine years of some degree of continuity and commitment through two political administrations, the 'rug was pulled' by the third, just as this particular example of carbon policy was set to bite. 1 There have been howls of protest from many quarters, not just those holding strong carbon commitments, but also from some parts of the housing and development industry who had been enrolled into the process of gearing up building designs, technology integration, supply chains and much else. So how to interpret this policy denouement, given our concern with better understanding the embroiling of carbon in the sociomaterial interdependencies between built form and everyday living? One interpretation is to see the abandonment of zero-C as further evidence of the resistances and inertias our paper identified as holding back change and actively reproducing the sense of 'normal' held by those concerned with market value, house-selling and capital performance. Accordingly the announcement scrapping the zero-C obligation was located in a government strategy document 'Fixing the foundations: creating a more prosperous nation' released as part of the UK Treasury's 2015 summer budget, with an overarching narrative of government needing to release the power of capital to do its work for the UK economy (HM Treasury 2015). The recurrent UK trope of 'red tape' is invoked in this document to wrap up zero-C with much else seen as getting in the way of the new house building needed to address housing shortages and generate new economic activity. A
A lower-carbon society supposes and requires significantly new ways of conceptualizing and realiz... more A lower-carbon society supposes and requires significantly new ways of conceptualizing and realizing conditions of comfort. Shove et al., 2008: 307 Demographic change has multiple implications for housing and energy policy, as well as for those who design and manage residential buildings. The living experiences of older people are enormously diverse due to differences in physical ability and health, financial resources, aspirations and domestic living situations. Some older people are in good health and are active; they are improving their homes, adopting new sustainable technologies and leading full and mobile lives. Meanwhile, others live comparatively sedentary lives and spend the majority of their time at home (HBF, 2005; DCLG, 2008; Hamza and Gilroy, 2011). The combination of lifestyles as well as variation in building quality and policies and regulations related to housing and energy produce a diverse landscape of domestic energy practices of older people. A particular implication of demographic change, housing provision, and energy consumption involves health and well-being. Those that live in poorer quality, energy inefficient houses and exist on low incomes can grapple with the challenges of fuel poverty (e.g., Wright, 2004; Day and Hitchings, 2009). Being too cold or too hot presents physical risks, as changes such as lower metabolic rates and poor blood circulation become important. Sight loss and dementia are two conditions common in older people that have implications on how they manage and control their domestic environments (see Van Hoof et al., 2010). All of these factors have implications on how housing and energy are implicated in the daily lives of older people. At the same time, a wide range of technological innovations is being developed and deployed to reduce the carbon emissions from domestic buildings. Low-carbon thermal technologies (LCTs) such as air and ground source heat pumps, solar hot water, underfloor heating, programmable thermostats, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery are designed to minimise energy consumption and utilise low-carbon fuels but their influence on thermal experience is often overlooked. For example, heat pumps substitute the high-temperature point sources of warmth in houses with low-temperature background heating, creating a relatively uniform thermal environment. The absence of a highly differentiated thermal landscape in dwellings may lead to the formation of new practices in the same way that central heating ushered in entirely new modes of household management and comfort. At the same time, heat pumps may disrupt existing social practices such as gathering around heat sources (i.e., the hearth) that have been part of everyday life for millennia (Fernández-Galiano, 2000; Rudge, 2012) as well as drying clothes, getting warm after entering from a cold exterior, and so on. Hence, how such technologies become implemented in practice (through networks of actors, governance measures and in relation to existing or new building and energy infrastructures and institutions), how they contribute to thermal experience from users'
Relational Planning: Tracing Artefacts, Agency and Practices, 2018
Planning has always been relational. Since its founding in the first decades of the twentieth cen... more Planning has always been relational. Since its founding in the first decades of the twentieth century, planning has involved multiple processes of aligning people and things in specific configurations through policy making, regulation, zoning, masterplanning, participatory decisionmaking, and visioning. Macmillen and Pinch (this volume) note that the planner's worldview is a holistic one that identifies and knits together the city as a whole. From this perspective, the term 'relational planning' is a tautology. What would a non-relational form of planning look like? And how would it achieve planning's general aims and objectives? However, acknowledging that planning is relational is a far cry from understanding this relationality. Interpreting and shaping the multitude of human and non-human relations in cities is a perennial challenge for planning scholarship and practice. This is where Science and Technology Studies (STS) comes in. By employing a range of theoretical approaches and ideas, STS disrupts conventional approaches to planning that are based on certainty, control, and prediction. Instead, the STS perspective champions the indeterminate, multiple, and muddled character of cities. Such a post-positivist perspective is a ready target for critique as intellectual grandstanding that employs unnecessary and opaque terminology to create arguments that ultimately lead nowhere. But this would overlook the usefulness of STS concepts to decentre and destabilise prevailing planning theory and practice and to produce deeper and more nuanced accounts of cities as relational achievements. At the root of this scholarship is a profound dissatisfaction with the technocratic, modern origins of planning as well as the discursive, post-modern communicative approaches that have dominated since the 1980s (Kurath, this volume). Instead, an STS-inspired planning explicitly engages with associated disciplines – geography, architecture, sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics, among others – to develop a non-modern perspective on how planning theory and practice shapes cities. A non-modern view of planning recognises that existing urban conditions are not inevitable, stable, and easily understandable; instead, cities are contingent, incomplete, and always in the making. This opens up planning to new ways of knowing and doing and has the potential to make the discipline more vibrant, engaging, and relevant. An STS approach to planning theory and practice Traditional planning is based on a positivist understanding of a singular world where linear chains of cause and effect invoke change. In contrast, STS scholars take a post-positivist stance to unpack the modern underpinnings of planning theory and practice. They emphasise the significance of contingency, uncertainty, fluidity, and plurality (Metzger, this volume). Adopting such a sociotechnical perspective recognises that humans are bound up in technological systems and there is a need to understand how these systems are conceived, designed, constructed and maintained, and by whom and for what purposes. At the centre of STS analysis is an inquiry into knowledge production and how competing claims about the world are developed, debated, and ultimately settled. There are many parallels here between scientific and technological knowledge production and the ways that planners conceive of and shape cities with competing knowledge claims and expertise. In addition to its epistemological stance, STS forwards an alternative ontological perspective that encourages us to interpret the world differently. Non-humans such as animals, plants, bricks, automobiles,
Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change: Devices, Desires and Dissent, 2016
Introduction In recent years, a wide variety of actors including the UK government, local authori... more Introduction In recent years, a wide variety of actors including the UK government, local authorities, social housing providers, civil society groups, and private homebuilders have initiated domestic retrofit programmes based on the notion of 'community'. The embrace of community is an attempt to create a shared network of inquiry as well as action in an arena that is largely fragmented and driven by the individual preferences of homeowners. Advocates of community retrofit argue that lowering the carbon emissions of domestic buildings requires closer connections between building owners, occupants, designers, builders, financiers, local authorities, and civil society groups. These programmes have the potential to make significant changes to the overall housing stock but have particular implications on the devices and desires of low-carbon culture as well as the broader politics of climate change.
Matthew Gandy is a British geographer who studies the social and cultural production of nature in... more Matthew Gandy is a British geographer who studies the social and cultural production of nature in cities. Drawing on ideas from the social and natural sciences as well as the humanities, he has conducted research on infrastructure networks, parks and open spaces, environmental management practices, and public health and disease in prominent cities of North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He is best known for his contributions to the field of urban political ecology including key ideas about metropolitan nature, urban metabolism, ecological imaginaries, and cyborg urbanism. This body of work challenges Marxist, Neo-Marxist, and post-structuralist thinking on urban nature by introducing cultural ideas from film, art, and sound to forward an expansive perspective on the hybrid relations of nature, technology, and humans in cities.
The existing housing stock in the UK will make a significant contribution to national carbon emis... more The existing housing stock in the UK will make a significant contribution to national carbon emissions for many decades to come. Existing houses present a significant challenge to systemic upgrades because they are influenced by a disparate set of regulations, incentives, and stakeholders. Unlike the new build industry, there is no single set of standards to regulate and steer the energy performance of the existing housing stock. To address this challenge, a wide range of government bodies and non-governmental organisations have initiated domestic retrofit programmes based on the notion of 'community'. The aim of community retrofit programmes is to create a collective of various actors who influence domestic buildings to make retrofit activities more effective and widespread. This rescaling of domestic housing retrofit from the individual household to the community level counters the fragmented and incremental character of domestic retrofit activities by creating shared networks of inquiry and action. This chapter explores the social and political aspects of community domestic retrofit programmes to understand their implications to sustainable urban transitions. The chapter begins with a summary of the challenges to systemic domestic retrofit in the UK and the deficiencies of the 'rational choice' model that is commonly employed by Government and other organisations to reform the existing housing stock. Then, four emerging approaches to collective domestic retrofit are presented to illustrate how the notion of community reframes the relationship between individuals and the state. Finally, the chapter concludes with reflections on the emerging civics of low-carbon transition that are embedded in community housing retrofit programmes.
Over the last decade, a multitude of urban climate change experiments have emerged to go beyond t... more Over the last decade, a multitude of urban climate change experiments have emerged to go beyond traditional role of the state in environmental governance. These activities provide a real world evidence base for how a low-carbon world could be realised and they have the potential to fundamentally change the way that cities are conceived, built, and managed. Most urban climate change experiments are designed to be geographically and temporally bounded to accelerate innovation activities and realise actual changes on the ground. But what if urban experiments did not scale up? What if, instead of informing existing modes of urban governance, they became the dominant approach to governing cities? What would a 'city of permanent experiments' look like and how would it function? This chapter speculates on the implications of experimentation as the new mode of governance for twenty-first century cities. Here, experiments are not interpreted as one-off trials to provide evidence and justification for new low-carbon policies, regulations, and service provision; instead, they are emerging as a new mode of governance in themselves. This emerging form of urban governance is characterised by uncertainty, recursive learning processes, and spatial fragmentation with multiple unknown implications on the politics of cities in the future.
Experimentation is increasingly being promoted as an alternative to 'urbanization as usual' with ... more Experimentation is increasingly being promoted as an alternative to 'urbanization as usual' with cities serving as laboratories for radical change. Policymakers, designers, private companies, and third sector organizations are initiating one-off activities of innovation to trial various future visions of local economic development, social cohesion, environmental protection, creative sector expansion, policy evolution, infrastructure provision, academic research, and so on. The rhetorical power of the experiment has the ability to hypnotize urban stakeholders by making them feel as if they are a party to cutting edge innovation as it unfolds on the ground. However, these activities also reinterpret and reframe the trajectories of contemporary urban development in ways that are often unrecognized. In this chapter, we examine the drivers, pressures, and interests involved in the recent rollout of urban experiments using insights from science and technology studies, environmental governance, and political economy. We look specifically at how the concept of 'experiment' has emerged in urban debates about ecology and resilience, climate change governance, and socio-technical transitions. The novel and indeterminate character of experiments provides a refreshing alternative to the standard policy mechanisms of urban sustainability but these experiments are often couched in the dominant urban agenda of neoliberal economic growth and tend to privilege those actors who align with this particular perspective. We conclude that the allure of experiments has the potential to open up cities to new modes of governance but there is a pressing need to understand the politics of experimentation in order to unlock the radical potential of these activities. Introduction When Jean-Francois Mayet was elected mayor of the French city of Châteauroux in 2001, he inherited a mass transit system that was functional but under used by residents. The city, located about halfway between Paris and Bordeaux, had collective aims that were similar to other medium-size cities in Europe: to reduce the city's ecological footprint while improving the local economy and fostering a more equitable society. Instead of drafting a new regional transit plan, upgrading and enhancing the existing bus system, or devising regulations and incentives to encourage residents to use mass transit more frequently, Mayet made a simple yet radical decision: make the transit system free and monitor the results. Within a year, ridership had increased by 81%; after ten years, the average number of annual trips per resident had tripled. Lost revenues were negligible as bus fares only covered 14% of the total system expenses. Meanwhile, the benefits of reduced traffic and exhaust emissions, reinvigorated local businesses, and lower transportation expenses for low-income residents were significant and widespread. Châteauroux is now viewed as a 'canary in the coalmine of transportation policy', Mayet has been feted as one of the most popular mayors in France, and his 'experiment' in free local transit is now being duplicated in other cities such as Aubagne, France and Tallinn, Estonia (Grabar 2012).
Nature is a central component of the twenty-first century city. Beyond parks and open spaces, urb... more Nature is a central component of the twenty-first century city. Beyond parks and open spaces, urban nature is implicated in strategies of economic development, climate change mitigation and adaptation, public art, biodiversity enhancement, local food production, health and livability, social justice, community identity, and more. 1 This " pluralization " of urban nature has come about in the last four decades as a result of the mainstreaming of environmental protection activities; the proliferation of knowledge about how natural systems support and maintain cities; a wide range of innovative and inspiring projects, policies, and technologies that feature urban nature; and a gradual shift away from cultural perceptions that nature and cities are diametrically opposed. Greening activities continue to be undertaken by environmentalists and community activists, but also include a broader array of stakeholders including private development interests, natural scientists, artists, social justice advocates, and others. The broadening of the urban greening agenda to a wide variety of actors and strategies is a welcome development but it can result in confusion due to a cacophony of voices and ideas on how and why we green cities. How can we make sense of the multiple ways that nature is being reworked in today's cities? The aim of this chapter is to propose a pathways approach to interpret the multiple ways that urban nature is being realized today. The notion of " pathways " has been used by a wide variety of scholars in the social sciences and the design disciplines to deal with the multiplicity of ways that sustainable development and design has been conceptualized and acted upon in a variety of contexts. Pathways are useful for identifying key actors and their perceptions of improved urban futures with an emphasis on the means by which they frame and enact their particular visions in particular social and physical contexts. It serves as a heuristic tool to structure and assess the various approaches to urban greening that are shaped by particular cultural and political pressures. I begin the chapter by defining the theoretical underpinnings and intentions of the pathways approach. I then use three vignettes of urban nature projects in Manchester, England, to demonstrate how the pathways perspective can be used to reflect upon and scrutinize urban green activities. I conclude by arguing that the greening of cities not only involves the introduction and rearrangement of nature in the city, but also has implications for how human societies are governed. In this way, we can understand the greening of cities as a deeply political process of reinventing the relations between humans and their physical surroundings. The Pathways Approach to Urban Development The pathways approach has been developed over the past two decades by scholars in architecture, planning, geography, sociology, anthropology, political science, and environmental studies to challenge positivist tendencies towards a single definition of sustainable development. Inspired by post-colonial, feminist, and post-structural critiques of modernity, these authors share a belief that sustainable development involves a plurality of logics and practices rather than one ideal approach. The notion of pathways rejects the predefined norms and universal assumptions that underpin the
This article critically examines the approach of technical experts, including engineers, natural ... more This article critically examines the approach of technical experts, including engineers, natural scientists, architects, planners, and other practitioners, who are attempting to create more sustainable forms of economic development, environmental protection, and social equity. The authors identify four principal characteristics of expertise–ontological assumptions, epistemological approaches, power inequalities, and practical issues–and employ this framework to test the capability of traditional experts to deliver sustainable development. The authors then provide four alternatives to conventional forms of expertise: the outreach expert who communicates effectively to non-experts, the interdisciplinary expert who understands the overlaps of neighboring technical disciplines, the meta-expert who brokers the multiple claims of relevance between different forms of expertise, and the civic expert who engages in democratic discourse with non-experts and experts alike. All of these alternative forms are needed to manage the often-competing demands of sustainable development projects and they can be described collectively as an “ecosystem of expertise.”
The UK housing stock will play an important role in achieving the 2050 national carbon reductio... more The UK housing stock will play an important role in achieving the 2050 national carbon reduction targets. Upgrading the energy performance of the existing housing stock is a significant challenge because retrofit activities are shaped by a wide range of fragmented policies, programmes and actors. Existing approaches to housing retrofit focus on regulations, financial incentives and information provision, but it is argued these are insufficient to realize large-scale, deep changes in energy consumption. An agenda is proposed for systemic domestic retrofit to realize radical changes in the housing stock through community-based partnerships. These programmes are based on a social practices approach that promotes social innovation. Wide-ranging energy-efficiency upgrades can be achieved through the development and realization of customized solutions to local groups of houses through facilitated engagement between occupants, housing providers, community groups, local authorities and construction professionals. Community-based domestic retrofit programmes serve to reframe the governance of household energy performance and suggest alternative routes for realizing significant reductions in energy demand through changes in the socio-technical configuration of materials, competences and images of domestic energy practices.
Creating a more sustainable society is increasingly an urban challenge (Pincetl 2010). Upwards of... more Creating a more sustainable society is increasingly an urban challenge (Pincetl 2010). Upwards of fifty percent of the world’s population currently dwells in cities, and this figure is forecast to rise dramatically over the coming decades (Grimm et al. 2008). Cities both concentrate the activities that produce carbon emissions, and suffer disproportionately from their negative impacts such as air pollution, temperature increases, water shortages, and increased flooding. Given this, cities are increasingly being looked to as sites to develop long-lasting solutions to climate change (Hodson and Marvin 2007). This chapter focuses on the use of ‘living laboratories’ to drive innovation in sustainable urban development. The types of spaces designated as living laboratories are highly variable, from a single plot of underdeveloped land to a degraded waterway, from a clogged transportation corridor to a completely new city. Further, a wide variety of organisations – notably universities, government bodies, and private companies – are using the term in an unapologetically boosterish manner to develop and market their own approaches to sustainability. Their enthusiasm is underpinned by two assumptions. First, living laboratories are real life experiments that promise to produce more useful knowledge and second, they are highly visible interventions with the purported ability to inspire rapid social and technical transformation. Taking a series of examples, we consider the epistemological and political implications of living laboratories, asking whether such experiments really do hold the potential seeds of change, as this literature suggests, or whether there are other motivations at work. The chapter concludes with a discussion of role of the living laboratories approach as a form of experimentation in relation to theories of transition and sustainable urban development.
Optimising the energy performance of buildings is technically and economically challenging but it... more Optimising the energy performance of buildings is technically and economically challenging but it also has significant social implications. Maintaining comfortable indoor conditions while reducing energy consumption involves careful design, construction, and management of the built environment and its inhabitants. In this paper, we present findings from the study of a new low energy building for older people in Grenoble, France where conflicts emerged over the simultaneous pursuit of energy efficiency and comfort. The findings contribute to the contemporary literature on the sociotechnical study of buildings and energy use by focusing on intermediation, those activities that bridge the intentions of the design team and end users. Intermediation activities take many forms, and in some cases, can result in the harmonisation or alignment of energy efficiency goals and comfort goals. In other cases, intermediation is unsuccessful, leading to the conventional dichotomy between optimising technical performance and meeting occupant preferences. By highlighting the multiple ways that comfort and energy efficiency is negotiated, we conclude that buildings are provisional achievements that are constantly being intermediated. This suggests that building energy efficiency policies and programmes need to provide opportunities for intermediaries to negotiate the desires and preferences of the multiple stakeholders that are implicated in low energy buildings. Introduction The building sector is under increasing pressure to reduce energy consumption. Energy labels are now routinely attached not only to refrigerators and light bulbs, but also to houses and commercial buildings. New buildings are increasingly 'branded' with energy performance standards such as BREEAM and LEED as well as labels such as 'zero carbon'. To attain these higher levels of energy performance, energy efficiency strategies frequently involve the application of technologies ranging from super-insulation and thermal solar hot water systems to ground and air source heat pumps and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. However, the inclusion of these technologies in buildings does not guarantee optimal energy performance (Wilhite, 2008). The difference between modelled and actual energy performance can be substantial due to a variety of factors related to installation, operations, maintenance, and occupant activities. Numerous studies point to the discrepancy between a building's projected energy performance and its actual energy consumption which we shall call the 'energy performance gap' (Jaffe
We reflect on the decision to abandon the mainstreaming of zero-carbon house building in England,... more We reflect on the decision to abandon the mainstreaming of zero-carbon house building in England, in the context of our paper (Walker et al. 2015) that took this long-standing policy commitment as its case study. We consider this denouement as further evidence of how the exigencies of capital accumulation resist moves towards low-carbon transition. We reflect on what it reveals about the relation between politics and governance, the grounding and locating of carbon responsibilities and the necessary role of the state in enabling the everyday reproduction of low-carbon living. One of the hazards of researching ongoing policy processes is that events can catch up with you. As researchers we are only ever making interventions in an ongoing flow of discourse and action, but sometimes a particular coincidence merits comment. Such is the case for our paper on zero-carbon and zero-carbon living (Walker et al. 2015), which after much helpful reviewing, editor advice and revision appeared on-line just three days after the UK government scrapped the policy that the paper took as its case study. To recap this was (with an emphasis on the past tense) a policy applying in England to require all new homes to be zero-carbon (zero-C). This had been supported and developed (although also diminished) from 2006 onwards when the obligation was first announced and was due to come into force in April 2016. So after nine years of some degree of continuity and commitment through two political administrations, the 'rug was pulled' by the third, just as this particular example of carbon policy was set to bite. 1 There have been howls of protest from many quarters, not just those holding strong carbon commitments, but also from some parts of the housing and development industry who had been enrolled into the process of gearing up building designs, technology integration, supply chains and much else. So how to interpret this policy denouement, given our concern with better understanding the embroiling of carbon in the sociomaterial interdependencies between built form and everyday living? One interpretation is to see the abandonment of zero-C as further evidence of the resistances and inertias our paper identified as holding back change and actively reproducing the sense of 'normal' held by those concerned with market value, house-selling and capital performance. Accordingly the announcement scrapping the zero-C obligation was located in a government strategy document 'Fixing the foundations: creating a more prosperous nation' released as part of the UK Treasury's 2015 summer budget, with an overarching narrative of government needing to release the power of capital to do its work for the UK economy (HM Treasury 2015). The recurrent UK trope of 'red tape' is invoked in this document to wrap up zero-C with much else seen as getting in the way of the new house building needed to address housing shortages and generate new economic activity. A
A lower-carbon society supposes and requires significantly new ways of conceptualizing and realiz... more A lower-carbon society supposes and requires significantly new ways of conceptualizing and realizing conditions of comfort. Shove et al., 2008: 307 Demographic change has multiple implications for housing and energy policy, as well as for those who design and manage residential buildings. The living experiences of older people are enormously diverse due to differences in physical ability and health, financial resources, aspirations and domestic living situations. Some older people are in good health and are active; they are improving their homes, adopting new sustainable technologies and leading full and mobile lives. Meanwhile, others live comparatively sedentary lives and spend the majority of their time at home (HBF, 2005; DCLG, 2008; Hamza and Gilroy, 2011). The combination of lifestyles as well as variation in building quality and policies and regulations related to housing and energy produce a diverse landscape of domestic energy practices of older people. A particular implication of demographic change, housing provision, and energy consumption involves health and well-being. Those that live in poorer quality, energy inefficient houses and exist on low incomes can grapple with the challenges of fuel poverty (e.g., Wright, 2004; Day and Hitchings, 2009). Being too cold or too hot presents physical risks, as changes such as lower metabolic rates and poor blood circulation become important. Sight loss and dementia are two conditions common in older people that have implications on how they manage and control their domestic environments (see Van Hoof et al., 2010). All of these factors have implications on how housing and energy are implicated in the daily lives of older people. At the same time, a wide range of technological innovations is being developed and deployed to reduce the carbon emissions from domestic buildings. Low-carbon thermal technologies (LCTs) such as air and ground source heat pumps, solar hot water, underfloor heating, programmable thermostats, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery are designed to minimise energy consumption and utilise low-carbon fuels but their influence on thermal experience is often overlooked. For example, heat pumps substitute the high-temperature point sources of warmth in houses with low-temperature background heating, creating a relatively uniform thermal environment. The absence of a highly differentiated thermal landscape in dwellings may lead to the formation of new practices in the same way that central heating ushered in entirely new modes of household management and comfort. At the same time, heat pumps may disrupt existing social practices such as gathering around heat sources (i.e., the hearth) that have been part of everyday life for millennia (Fernández-Galiano, 2000; Rudge, 2012) as well as drying clothes, getting warm after entering from a cold exterior, and so on. Hence, how such technologies become implemented in practice (through networks of actors, governance measures and in relation to existing or new building and energy infrastructures and institutions), how they contribute to thermal experience from users'
Relational Planning: Tracing Artefacts, Agency and Practices, 2018
Planning has always been relational. Since its founding in the first decades of the twentieth cen... more Planning has always been relational. Since its founding in the first decades of the twentieth century, planning has involved multiple processes of aligning people and things in specific configurations through policy making, regulation, zoning, masterplanning, participatory decisionmaking, and visioning. Macmillen and Pinch (this volume) note that the planner's worldview is a holistic one that identifies and knits together the city as a whole. From this perspective, the term 'relational planning' is a tautology. What would a non-relational form of planning look like? And how would it achieve planning's general aims and objectives? However, acknowledging that planning is relational is a far cry from understanding this relationality. Interpreting and shaping the multitude of human and non-human relations in cities is a perennial challenge for planning scholarship and practice. This is where Science and Technology Studies (STS) comes in. By employing a range of theoretical approaches and ideas, STS disrupts conventional approaches to planning that are based on certainty, control, and prediction. Instead, the STS perspective champions the indeterminate, multiple, and muddled character of cities. Such a post-positivist perspective is a ready target for critique as intellectual grandstanding that employs unnecessary and opaque terminology to create arguments that ultimately lead nowhere. But this would overlook the usefulness of STS concepts to decentre and destabilise prevailing planning theory and practice and to produce deeper and more nuanced accounts of cities as relational achievements. At the root of this scholarship is a profound dissatisfaction with the technocratic, modern origins of planning as well as the discursive, post-modern communicative approaches that have dominated since the 1980s (Kurath, this volume). Instead, an STS-inspired planning explicitly engages with associated disciplines – geography, architecture, sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics, among others – to develop a non-modern perspective on how planning theory and practice shapes cities. A non-modern view of planning recognises that existing urban conditions are not inevitable, stable, and easily understandable; instead, cities are contingent, incomplete, and always in the making. This opens up planning to new ways of knowing and doing and has the potential to make the discipline more vibrant, engaging, and relevant. An STS approach to planning theory and practice Traditional planning is based on a positivist understanding of a singular world where linear chains of cause and effect invoke change. In contrast, STS scholars take a post-positivist stance to unpack the modern underpinnings of planning theory and practice. They emphasise the significance of contingency, uncertainty, fluidity, and plurality (Metzger, this volume). Adopting such a sociotechnical perspective recognises that humans are bound up in technological systems and there is a need to understand how these systems are conceived, designed, constructed and maintained, and by whom and for what purposes. At the centre of STS analysis is an inquiry into knowledge production and how competing claims about the world are developed, debated, and ultimately settled. There are many parallels here between scientific and technological knowledge production and the ways that planners conceive of and shape cities with competing knowledge claims and expertise. In addition to its epistemological stance, STS forwards an alternative ontological perspective that encourages us to interpret the world differently. Non-humans such as animals, plants, bricks, automobiles,
Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change: Devices, Desires and Dissent, 2016
Introduction In recent years, a wide variety of actors including the UK government, local authori... more Introduction In recent years, a wide variety of actors including the UK government, local authorities, social housing providers, civil society groups, and private homebuilders have initiated domestic retrofit programmes based on the notion of 'community'. The embrace of community is an attempt to create a shared network of inquiry as well as action in an arena that is largely fragmented and driven by the individual preferences of homeowners. Advocates of community retrofit argue that lowering the carbon emissions of domestic buildings requires closer connections between building owners, occupants, designers, builders, financiers, local authorities, and civil society groups. These programmes have the potential to make significant changes to the overall housing stock but have particular implications on the devices and desires of low-carbon culture as well as the broader politics of climate change.
Matthew Gandy is a British geographer who studies the social and cultural production of nature in... more Matthew Gandy is a British geographer who studies the social and cultural production of nature in cities. Drawing on ideas from the social and natural sciences as well as the humanities, he has conducted research on infrastructure networks, parks and open spaces, environmental management practices, and public health and disease in prominent cities of North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He is best known for his contributions to the field of urban political ecology including key ideas about metropolitan nature, urban metabolism, ecological imaginaries, and cyborg urbanism. This body of work challenges Marxist, Neo-Marxist, and post-structuralist thinking on urban nature by introducing cultural ideas from film, art, and sound to forward an expansive perspective on the hybrid relations of nature, technology, and humans in cities.
The existing housing stock in the UK will make a significant contribution to national carbon emis... more The existing housing stock in the UK will make a significant contribution to national carbon emissions for many decades to come. Existing houses present a significant challenge to systemic upgrades because they are influenced by a disparate set of regulations, incentives, and stakeholders. Unlike the new build industry, there is no single set of standards to regulate and steer the energy performance of the existing housing stock. To address this challenge, a wide range of government bodies and non-governmental organisations have initiated domestic retrofit programmes based on the notion of 'community'. The aim of community retrofit programmes is to create a collective of various actors who influence domestic buildings to make retrofit activities more effective and widespread. This rescaling of domestic housing retrofit from the individual household to the community level counters the fragmented and incremental character of domestic retrofit activities by creating shared networks of inquiry and action. This chapter explores the social and political aspects of community domestic retrofit programmes to understand their implications to sustainable urban transitions. The chapter begins with a summary of the challenges to systemic domestic retrofit in the UK and the deficiencies of the 'rational choice' model that is commonly employed by Government and other organisations to reform the existing housing stock. Then, four emerging approaches to collective domestic retrofit are presented to illustrate how the notion of community reframes the relationship between individuals and the state. Finally, the chapter concludes with reflections on the emerging civics of low-carbon transition that are embedded in community housing retrofit programmes.
Over the last decade, a multitude of urban climate change experiments have emerged to go beyond t... more Over the last decade, a multitude of urban climate change experiments have emerged to go beyond traditional role of the state in environmental governance. These activities provide a real world evidence base for how a low-carbon world could be realised and they have the potential to fundamentally change the way that cities are conceived, built, and managed. Most urban climate change experiments are designed to be geographically and temporally bounded to accelerate innovation activities and realise actual changes on the ground. But what if urban experiments did not scale up? What if, instead of informing existing modes of urban governance, they became the dominant approach to governing cities? What would a 'city of permanent experiments' look like and how would it function? This chapter speculates on the implications of experimentation as the new mode of governance for twenty-first century cities. Here, experiments are not interpreted as one-off trials to provide evidence and justification for new low-carbon policies, regulations, and service provision; instead, they are emerging as a new mode of governance in themselves. This emerging form of urban governance is characterised by uncertainty, recursive learning processes, and spatial fragmentation with multiple unknown implications on the politics of cities in the future.
Experimentation is increasingly being promoted as an alternative to 'urbanization as usual' with ... more Experimentation is increasingly being promoted as an alternative to 'urbanization as usual' with cities serving as laboratories for radical change. Policymakers, designers, private companies, and third sector organizations are initiating one-off activities of innovation to trial various future visions of local economic development, social cohesion, environmental protection, creative sector expansion, policy evolution, infrastructure provision, academic research, and so on. The rhetorical power of the experiment has the ability to hypnotize urban stakeholders by making them feel as if they are a party to cutting edge innovation as it unfolds on the ground. However, these activities also reinterpret and reframe the trajectories of contemporary urban development in ways that are often unrecognized. In this chapter, we examine the drivers, pressures, and interests involved in the recent rollout of urban experiments using insights from science and technology studies, environmental governance, and political economy. We look specifically at how the concept of 'experiment' has emerged in urban debates about ecology and resilience, climate change governance, and socio-technical transitions. The novel and indeterminate character of experiments provides a refreshing alternative to the standard policy mechanisms of urban sustainability but these experiments are often couched in the dominant urban agenda of neoliberal economic growth and tend to privilege those actors who align with this particular perspective. We conclude that the allure of experiments has the potential to open up cities to new modes of governance but there is a pressing need to understand the politics of experimentation in order to unlock the radical potential of these activities. Introduction When Jean-Francois Mayet was elected mayor of the French city of Châteauroux in 2001, he inherited a mass transit system that was functional but under used by residents. The city, located about halfway between Paris and Bordeaux, had collective aims that were similar to other medium-size cities in Europe: to reduce the city's ecological footprint while improving the local economy and fostering a more equitable society. Instead of drafting a new regional transit plan, upgrading and enhancing the existing bus system, or devising regulations and incentives to encourage residents to use mass transit more frequently, Mayet made a simple yet radical decision: make the transit system free and monitor the results. Within a year, ridership had increased by 81%; after ten years, the average number of annual trips per resident had tripled. Lost revenues were negligible as bus fares only covered 14% of the total system expenses. Meanwhile, the benefits of reduced traffic and exhaust emissions, reinvigorated local businesses, and lower transportation expenses for low-income residents were significant and widespread. Châteauroux is now viewed as a 'canary in the coalmine of transportation policy', Mayet has been feted as one of the most popular mayors in France, and his 'experiment' in free local transit is now being duplicated in other cities such as Aubagne, France and Tallinn, Estonia (Grabar 2012).
Nature is a central component of the twenty-first century city. Beyond parks and open spaces, urb... more Nature is a central component of the twenty-first century city. Beyond parks and open spaces, urban nature is implicated in strategies of economic development, climate change mitigation and adaptation, public art, biodiversity enhancement, local food production, health and livability, social justice, community identity, and more. 1 This " pluralization " of urban nature has come about in the last four decades as a result of the mainstreaming of environmental protection activities; the proliferation of knowledge about how natural systems support and maintain cities; a wide range of innovative and inspiring projects, policies, and technologies that feature urban nature; and a gradual shift away from cultural perceptions that nature and cities are diametrically opposed. Greening activities continue to be undertaken by environmentalists and community activists, but also include a broader array of stakeholders including private development interests, natural scientists, artists, social justice advocates, and others. The broadening of the urban greening agenda to a wide variety of actors and strategies is a welcome development but it can result in confusion due to a cacophony of voices and ideas on how and why we green cities. How can we make sense of the multiple ways that nature is being reworked in today's cities? The aim of this chapter is to propose a pathways approach to interpret the multiple ways that urban nature is being realized today. The notion of " pathways " has been used by a wide variety of scholars in the social sciences and the design disciplines to deal with the multiplicity of ways that sustainable development and design has been conceptualized and acted upon in a variety of contexts. Pathways are useful for identifying key actors and their perceptions of improved urban futures with an emphasis on the means by which they frame and enact their particular visions in particular social and physical contexts. It serves as a heuristic tool to structure and assess the various approaches to urban greening that are shaped by particular cultural and political pressures. I begin the chapter by defining the theoretical underpinnings and intentions of the pathways approach. I then use three vignettes of urban nature projects in Manchester, England, to demonstrate how the pathways perspective can be used to reflect upon and scrutinize urban green activities. I conclude by arguing that the greening of cities not only involves the introduction and rearrangement of nature in the city, but also has implications for how human societies are governed. In this way, we can understand the greening of cities as a deeply political process of reinventing the relations between humans and their physical surroundings. The Pathways Approach to Urban Development The pathways approach has been developed over the past two decades by scholars in architecture, planning, geography, sociology, anthropology, political science, and environmental studies to challenge positivist tendencies towards a single definition of sustainable development. Inspired by post-colonial, feminist, and post-structural critiques of modernity, these authors share a belief that sustainable development involves a plurality of logics and practices rather than one ideal approach. The notion of pathways rejects the predefined norms and universal assumptions that underpin the
This article critically examines the approach of technical experts, including engineers, natural ... more This article critically examines the approach of technical experts, including engineers, natural scientists, architects, planners, and other practitioners, who are attempting to create more sustainable forms of economic development, environmental protection, and social equity. The authors identify four principal characteristics of expertise–ontological assumptions, epistemological approaches, power inequalities, and practical issues–and employ this framework to test the capability of traditional experts to deliver sustainable development. The authors then provide four alternatives to conventional forms of expertise: the outreach expert who communicates effectively to non-experts, the interdisciplinary expert who understands the overlaps of neighboring technical disciplines, the meta-expert who brokers the multiple claims of relevance between different forms of expertise, and the civic expert who engages in democratic discourse with non-experts and experts alike. All of these alternative forms are needed to manage the often-competing demands of sustainable development projects and they can be described collectively as an “ecosystem of expertise.”
The UK housing stock will play an important role in achieving the 2050 national carbon reductio... more The UK housing stock will play an important role in achieving the 2050 national carbon reduction targets. Upgrading the energy performance of the existing housing stock is a significant challenge because retrofit activities are shaped by a wide range of fragmented policies, programmes and actors. Existing approaches to housing retrofit focus on regulations, financial incentives and information provision, but it is argued these are insufficient to realize large-scale, deep changes in energy consumption. An agenda is proposed for systemic domestic retrofit to realize radical changes in the housing stock through community-based partnerships. These programmes are based on a social practices approach that promotes social innovation. Wide-ranging energy-efficiency upgrades can be achieved through the development and realization of customized solutions to local groups of houses through facilitated engagement between occupants, housing providers, community groups, local authorities and construction professionals. Community-based domestic retrofit programmes serve to reframe the governance of household energy performance and suggest alternative routes for realizing significant reductions in energy demand through changes in the socio-technical configuration of materials, competences and images of domestic energy practices.
When rain falls on the city, it creates urban runoff that cause flooding, erosion, and water poll... more When rain falls on the city, it creates urban runoff that cause flooding, erosion, and water pollution. Municipal engineers manage a complex network of technical and natural systems to treat and remove these temporary water flows from cities as quickly as possible. Urban runoff is frequently discussed in terms of technical expertise and environmental management, but it encompasses a multitude of such nontechnical issues as land use, quality of life, governance, aesthetics, and community identity, and is central to the larger debates on creating more sustainable and livable cities. In this book, Andrew Karvonen uses urban runoff as a lens to view the relationships among nature, technology, and society. Offering theoretical insights from urban environmental history, human geography, landscape and ecological planning, and science and technology studies as well as empirical evidence from case studies, Karvonen proposes a new relational politics of urban nature. After describing the evolution of urban runoff practices, Karvonen analyzes the urban runoff activities in Austin and Seattle--two cities known for their highly contested public debates over runoff issues and exemplary stormwater management practices. The Austin case study highlights the tensions among urban development, property rights, land use planning, and citizen activism; the Seattle case study explores the city’s long-standing reputation for being in harmony with nature. Drawing on these accounts, Karvonen suggests a new relational politics of urban nature that is situated, inclusive, and action-oriented to address the tensions among nature, technology, and society.
Malmö har sedan 1990-talet genomgått en stor förändring, från att i ett globalt perspektiv ha var... more Malmö har sedan 1990-talet genomgått en stor förändring, från att i ett globalt perspektiv ha varit en relativt okänd stad i södra Sverige, till att numeravara en förebild för hållbar stadsutveckling. Varvsindustrins kollaps i mittenav 1980-talet katalyserade gemensamma krafter och en vilja att transformera staden och ekonomin i en postindustriell riktning. En rad faktorer drevpå den snabba omvandlingen av staden, men två stadsutvecklingsinitiativkan sägas stå i centrum för utvecklingen. Västra Hamnen, den högprofilerade ombyggnationen av tidigare industrimark till en stadsdel med genomgående hållbarhetsprofil som initierades i samband med Bomässan 2001och som fortfarande vidareutvecklas med flera etapper, och EkostadenAugustenborg, en stadsdelsomvandling av ett befintligt bostadsområde från1940-talet som påbörjades i slutet av 1990-talet och som fortsätter än idag.De båda initiativen representerar två olika tillvägagångssätt, som leder tillolika konsekvenser och möjligheter.Syftet med detta kapitel är att jämföra och kontrastera Västra Hamnenoch Ekostaden Augustenborg som alternativa vägar till innovativ hållbarstadsutveckling. Vi presenterar två olika sätt att stadsutveckla, som kan sessom idealtyper, projekt respektive testbädd. Vi använder därefter dessa tvåidealtyper och exemplifierar med hjälp av Västra Hamnen och Augustenborg och diskuterar för- och nackdelar med de olika tillvägagångssätten.Kapitlet bygger på data som samlats in genom platsbesök i de båda områdena, intervjuer med kommunföreträdare och konsulter som varit involverade i de två stadsutvecklingsprojekten samt dokumentstudier
Book review : Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies edited by Ignacio... more Book review : Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies edited by Ignacio Farias and Thomas Bender
Uploads
Articles and Chapters by Andrew Karvonen
This chapter focuses on the use of ‘living laboratories’ to drive innovation in sustainable urban development. The types of spaces designated as living laboratories are highly variable, from a single plot of underdeveloped land to a degraded waterway, from a clogged transportation corridor to a completely new city. Further, a wide variety of organisations – notably universities, government bodies, and private companies – are using the term in an unapologetically boosterish manner to develop and market their own approaches to sustainability. Their enthusiasm is underpinned by two assumptions. First, living laboratories are real life experiments that promise to produce more useful knowledge and second, they are highly visible interventions with the purported ability to inspire rapid social and technical transformation. Taking a series of examples, we consider the epistemological and political implications of living laboratories, asking whether such experiments really do hold the potential seeds of change, as this literature suggests, or whether there are other motivations at work. The chapter concludes with a discussion of role of the living laboratories approach as a form of experimentation in relation to theories of transition and sustainable urban development.
This chapter focuses on the use of ‘living laboratories’ to drive innovation in sustainable urban development. The types of spaces designated as living laboratories are highly variable, from a single plot of underdeveloped land to a degraded waterway, from a clogged transportation corridor to a completely new city. Further, a wide variety of organisations – notably universities, government bodies, and private companies – are using the term in an unapologetically boosterish manner to develop and market their own approaches to sustainability. Their enthusiasm is underpinned by two assumptions. First, living laboratories are real life experiments that promise to produce more useful knowledge and second, they are highly visible interventions with the purported ability to inspire rapid social and technical transformation. Taking a series of examples, we consider the epistemological and political implications of living laboratories, asking whether such experiments really do hold the potential seeds of change, as this literature suggests, or whether there are other motivations at work. The chapter concludes with a discussion of role of the living laboratories approach as a form of experimentation in relation to theories of transition and sustainable urban development.
After describing the evolution of urban runoff practices, Karvonen analyzes the urban runoff activities in Austin and Seattle--two cities known for their highly contested public debates over runoff issues and exemplary stormwater management practices. The Austin case study highlights the tensions among urban development, property rights, land use planning, and citizen activism; the Seattle case study explores the city’s long-standing reputation for being in harmony with nature. Drawing on these accounts, Karvonen suggests a new relational politics of urban nature that is situated, inclusive, and action-oriented to address the tensions among nature, technology, and society.