Confronting the urban climate emergency

Abstract

Nothing will shape urban life in this century more than carbon—efforts to abolish it, and the consequences of its pollution. Critical urban studies must put the climate emergency at the very core of the discipline. This paper suggests four methodological injunctions to this end: (1) a field-wide development of carbon literacy along the lines of how all critical urbanists understand capital and inequalities; (2) research that links technical low-carbon urban projects to urban spaces’ core political conflicts; (3) both a recuperation of historical cases of democratizing, massive built environment intervention, and an engagement with the cutting-edge technologies of green urbanism, each in service of producing egalitarian visions of climate-friendly urban spaces; finally, (4) I argue that critical urbanists must join the fight, forging new alliances within and beyond universities to prevent eco-apartheid, and articulate a no-carbon, radically democratic alternative.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.