Publication date: 19 January 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800083288
Number of illustrations: 32
Haste
The slow politics of climate urgency
Håvard Haarstad (Editor), Jakob Grandin (Editor), Kristin Kjærås (Editor), Eleanor Johnson (Editor)
What does it mean politically to construct climate change as a matter of urgency? We are certainly running out of time to stop climate change. But perhaps this particular understanding of urgency could be at the heart of the problem. When in haste, we make more mistakes, we overlook things, we get tunnel vision. Here we make the case for a ‘slow politics of urgency’. Rather than rushing and speeding up, the sustainable future is arguably better served by us challenging the dominant framings through which we understand time and change in society. Transformation to meet the climate challenge requires multiple temporalities of change, speeding up certain types of change processes but also slowing things down.
While recognizing the need for certain types of urgency in climate politics, Haste directs attention to the different and alternative temporalities at play in climate and sustainability politics. It addresses several key issues on climate urgency: How do we accommodate concerns that are undermined by the politics of urgency, such as participation and justice? How do we act upon the urgency of the climate challenge without reproducing the problems that speeding up of social processes has brought? What do the slow politics of urgency look like in practice? Divided into 23 short and accessible chapters, written by both established and emerging scholars from different disciplines, Haste tackles a major problem in contemporary climate change research and offers creative perspectives on pathways out of the climate emergency.
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Why the haste? Introduction to the slow politics of climate urgency
Håvard Haarstad, Jakob Grandin, Kristin Kjærås and Eleanor Johnson
Part I: Climate apocalypse and radical utopias
2 ‘The apocalypse is disappointing’: traversing the ecological fantasy
Erik Swyngedouw
3 From architectures of capital to architectures of care: the arts of dreaming otherwise in the Oslo Architecture Triennale
Cecilie Sachs Olsen
4 Extinction Rebellion and the future city
Emma Arnold
5 The urgency of hope and responses to contemporary crises
Marikken Wullf-Wathne and Kristin Kjærås
Part II: Learning the politics of urgency
6 Negation, imagination and organisation: rethinking sustainability transitions as a question of popular education
Keri Facer
7 ‘Right here, right now’: Immediacy, space and publicness in the politics of climate crisis
Eugene McCann
8 Carefully transforming our institutions: how they change, how they listen
Scott Bremer and Eleanor Johnson
9 Experimenting ecological civilization on the ground: the green transformation of a resource-based city in China Ping Huang and Xiaohui Hu
Part III: Countering alienation under rapid change
10 The good, the bad and the beautiful? The role of aesthetics in low-carbon consumption
Jesse Schrage
11 Sustainability from the ground: urban gardening with children as means to environmental change
Sofia Cele
12 Refashioning the supercyclical city
Eleanor Johnson
13 Environmental injustices unfold in urban sustainability projects in Istanbul
Mahir Yazar
14 Inclusive sustainability: gaming as a tool for participation in urgent planning
Tarje I. Wanvik and Håvard H. Bjørnstad
Part IV: Contesting the speed of urban change
15 Small measures, large change: the promise and peril of incremental urbanisation
Andrew Karvonen and Jonas Bylund
16 Make way for efficiency: sustainable mobility and the politics of speed Jakob Grandin
17 The geography of the ‘world greenest cities’: a class-based critique Ståle Holgersen
18 Climate imaginaries for urgent urban transformations
Håvard Haarstad
Part V: Temporalities of infrastructural change
19 Periphery everywhere
AbdouMaliq Simone
20 Reimagining urban innovation
Matthew Cook
21 Promises and contradictions of digital sustainability in the post-pandemic city
Chiara Certomà
22 People’s Republic of Energy: rethinking the possible in energy futures
Hannah Knox, Jonathan Atkinson and Britt Jurgensen
23 Solar spectacles: why Lisbon’s solar projects matter for energy transformation
Siddharth Sareen
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800083288
Number of illustrations: 32
Publication date: 19 January 2023
PDF ISBN: 9781800083288
EPUB ISBN: 9781800083318
Hardback ISBN: 9781800083301
Paperback ISBN: 9781800083295
Håvard Haarstad (Editor)
Håvard Haarstad is Professor at the Department of Geography, and Director for the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation (CET) at the University of Bergen.
Jakob Grandin (Editor)
Jakob Grandin is a PhD researcher at CET, University of Bergen, and convenor of the UiB Collaboratory advancing interdisciplinary and student-driven education.
Kristin Kjærås (Editor)
Kristin Kjærås has completed a PhD thesis (2021) on compact city politics in Oslo. She is currently special advisor for the Oslo’s City Council Committee for Urban Development City.
Eleanor Johnson (Editor)
Eleanor Johnson is a researcher for the Sustainability Lab at the University of Oslo, developing communication strategy and doing sustainability research.
Related titles
Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development in Maputo, Mozambique
Vanesa Castán Broto, Jonathan Ensor, Emily Boyd, Charlotte Allen, Carlos Seventine, Domingos Augusto Macucule, Christiana Figueres, UNFCCC Executive Secretary,
01 November 2015
Sign up to our newsletter
Don't miss out!
Subscribe to the UCL Press newsletter for the latest open access books,
journal CfPs, news and views from our authors and much more!