Making Climates through the City

Abstract

The politics of the urban environment is core to the politics of urban climate change and the unevenly distributed, varied types of agencies involved. Paradoxically, however, fine-grained, actual existing urban environmental, notably climatic, conditions are given relatively scant attention in most climate change discussions. Amplified by messages about the Anthropocene and the long-distant effects urbanization is having on the planet, there is a growing interest in cities as a physical, generative force. But for the most part, this physical role is understood as mediated by the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that cities produce directly and indirectly. As Bulkeley (2013: 229) puts it: Climate change is not simply happening to cities, as a suite of environmental processes and events that cities need to endure and overcome. Rather, climate change is actively being produced through the urban condition.