Suchergebnisse

In this article, we focus on the mutually interrelated processes of constructing urban retrofit and the city-region as a scale for action. Urban retrofitting – the systematic reconfiguration of sociotechnologies of energy in the existing built environment and infrastructure – is critical to the achievement of ambitious carbon reduction targets. To realise the ecological and economic benefits of retrofit cities are continually searching for a 'fix' that allows them to upscale retrofit from a largely ad hoc and piecemeal activity of repair and maintenance into strategic and systemic retrofit programmes that transform existing cities. This article is primarily concerned with understanding the politics and purpose of such experimentation and analyses efforts to integrate retrofit and governing in Greater Manchester. To do this, the article draws on a programme of interviews with national, city-regional, local authority and neighbourhood scale actors, documentary analysis and observations. We address on who is constructing retrofit responses in Greater Manchester and also why they are being constructed: Is it to transform the city-region and, if so, in what ways? And ask, in what ways are governance frameworks mediating and interpreting wider sets of global pressures at city-regional scale and which of these – economic, ecological, governing, social justice, etc. – pressures are more and less prioritised? We set out dominant city-regional responses (ON), alternative responses (IN) and assess the possibilities for integrated responses (WITH).

This paper develops a theoretical and conceptual understanding of the role of space and politics in governing relationships between cities, critical energy, water, waste and transportation infrastructures and resource flows. It presents a view of cities as dynamic, experimental social spaces underpinned by infrastructural unevenness with variable provision of and access to resource flows. An emerging set of new pressures to the ways in which cities, infrastructure and resource flows are organised under conditions of neo-liberal urbanism is reviewed. The paper then reflects theoretically and conceptually on the ways in which these pressures can be appropriated in terms of the re-organisation of city, networked infrastructure and resource flows as predicated on tensions between transformative reconfiguration and obduracy from historically produced social and institutional coalitions.

Earth scientists now argue that the current geological era should be re-named the anthropocene to better reflect the impact of humans in reshaping planetary ecology. Urbanism encompasses the social, economic and political processes most closely linked to the rapid transformation of habitats, destruction of ecologies, over use of materials and resources, and the production of pollutants and carbon emissions that threaten planetary terracide. Consequently, the key concern for 21st-century global urbanism is to critically understand the wider societal and material implications of strategic responses to the pressures of climate change, resource constraint and their interrelationships with the global economic crisis. Eco-cities, eco-towns, eco city-states, floating cities and the like represent particular, and increasingly pre-eminent, forms of response. These types of response appear to promote the construction of ecologically secure premium enclaves that by-pass existing infrastructure and build internalised ecological resource flows that attempt to guarantee strategic protection and further economic reproduction. If this is so this raises difficult issues as to what is left for those outside of these privileged enclaves. The search for more equitable and just forms of response requires understanding what types of alternatives to such bounded and divisible ecological security zones could be developed that contribute towards the building of more inclusive collective planetary security. In this respect, the aim of this paper is to ask: what styles of urbanism do these transformations contribute to the production of, what are the consequences of these emerging styles and what alternatives to them are being constructed?

Making a low carbon economic future for the UK has been declared a key priority by both the previous Labour government and also the current coalition government. Yet there is a large gap between the symbolic representations of a low carbon future and their material manifestations in low carbon technologies and infrastructure in particular places. This paper addresses this gap through focusing on the organisation of urban low carbon transition activity. There is often significant capacity to act in reconfiguring urban energy systems that remains latent due to a missing organisational context for its co-ordination according to a mutually defined rationale or vision. This paper develops a conceptual framework to demonstrate and understand different modes of urban energy intermediation. Examples are used of intermediary organisation in London and Manchester to understand the strengths and partiality of each mode of intermediation and the necessity to integrate these different aspects of urban intermediary governance.

Focusing on material and social forms of infrastructure, this edited collection draws on rich empirical details from cities across the global North and South. The book asks the reader to think through the different ways in which infrastructure comes to be present in cities and its co-constitutive relationships with urban inhabitants and wider processes of urbanisation. Considering the climate emergency, economic transformation, public health crises, and racialized inequality, the book argues that paying attention to infrastructures' past, present and future allows us to understand and respond to the current urban condition.