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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines proposals for an Energy Transition Zone in Aberdeen and activists’ responses to it as contrasting but interrelated experiments situated at the energy transition’s periphery. We explore a propositional politics that exceeds efforts at spatial, legal, and temporal enclosure.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the transformation of Aberdeen, the self-declared oil capital of Europe, against the backdrop of an unfolding energy transition and a global climate crisis. Specifically, we examine the ambivalent responses to plans for an Energy Transition Zone (ETZ) situated adjacent to Aberdeen’s South Harbour expansion, the St. Fittick’s Park nature reserve, and the working-class neighbourhood of Torry. Backed by major Scottish and UK government funding and by what activists describe as a web of local corporate and political influence, the ETZ invokes future imaginaries of ‘green recovery’ and ‘just transition’, undergirded by expert forecasts and innovative low-carbon technologies. By contrast, its opponents – including Friends of St. Fittick’s Park, arts practitioners, and their allies – highlight how the ETZ will damage the wellbeing of the area’s human and non-human locals. They write letters and Facebook posts, organise events, use smartphone videos, songs, and greeting cards, and elicit stories and photos from residents and sympathisers to document and archive the park’s daily life and ecology. Their activities are inflected by personal biographies, experiences of environmental injustice, and debates over whether to campaign for community asset transfer or to resist the ETZ altogether. We take the ETZ and activists’ actions as contrasting but interrelated sets of experiments situated at the energy transition’s periphery. While the ETZ is proposed as testbed for novel techno-material and commercial opportunities, the activists’ responses query this effort at spatial, legal, and temporal enclosure (Jaramillo and Carmona 2022) with a propositional politics that exceed its bounds.