Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)
Session title: Contradictions of the Climate Friendly City: Critical Perspectives on Urban Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation
Organizers
Daniel Alanda Cohen, University of Pennsylvania
Joshua Long, Southwestern University
Jennifer L. Rice, University of Georgia
Session Description
As many cities begin implementing various climate change mitigation and adaptation plans, critical scholars are increasingly noting the unintended and negative consequences of addressing climate change through urban governance. For example, the accounting methods used to measure GHG emissions at the urban scale dramatically underestimate the effects of affluence, income, and consumption of the city’s most elite residents. This undermines the very point of the urgent imperative to slash urban GHG emissions. Similarly, climate resiliency efforts often do more to sustain urban economies and corporate interests, than to safeguard the actual residents who live in cities threatened by climate change. Furthermore, desires for prevailing modes of high-density urbanization, or sophisticated kinds of greening and resilience, largely cater to professional classes, producing new forms of urban displacement. Although cities were once hailed as potential sites of climate transformation or experimentation, new forms of disenfranchisement and inequality seem to be perpetuated by many urban efforts at climate change mitigation and adaptation, while actual low-carbon and pro-adaptation progress is questionable. These issues require new conceptual and theoretical frameworks to understand exactly what is at stake with urban interventions into climate change. This session (or set of sessions) seeks to provide a space for critical interventions and research on urban climate governance. We seek a broad range of theoretical and empirical studies from a variety of contexts, and we welcome participatory and/or activist-oriented modes of research as well.
Areas of research to be included in the session could include, but are not limited to:
· Social justice concerns, such as gentrification or food access, in the design or implementation of “climate friendly” policies.
· Inadequacies of current GHG accounting methods, “smart” growth/grids/technologies, technological interventions, or other technocratic forms of governing used in cities.
· Question of what resilience and resourcefulness look like for urban climate governance and adaptation, especially among the city’s most vulnerable residents.
· Issues of representation, participation, and democracy in urban climate policy-making.
· New theoretical or methodological interventions into current conceptualizations of urban climate governance.
· Detailed critical case studies of particular cities, policies, or urban advocacy groups working to address climate change.
Please send an abstract and contact information to Jennifer Rice (jlrice@uga.edu) by October 1st. We will notify regarding acceptance into the session by October 7th.