Short Abstract

We suggest to centre-stage city scale in how climate change is addressed ethnographically. Round table will aim at teasing out the “scale making” and “scale bending” aspects of climate change becoming an object of urban planning and policy making or activist and artistic action focusing on cities.

Long Abstract

We suggest to look at cities as a scale (Herod 2011; Ribeiro 2023) for climate change policy and action, having in mind that climate change is currently among the most polarised issues. Unlike with the global scale, scaling climate issues to city level requires recalibrations and adjustments of our ways of grasping both climate change and cities. Following the insights from Knox (2020) book, we suggest to centre-stage city in ethnographic inquiries into how “thinking like a climate” can be imagined and studied anthropologically. We suggest to explore how city scale unhinges political, policy-making and planning practices and to focus on recalcitrant, counter-intuitive and unobvious ways in which city-scale recalibrates climate activism and artistic action.

Problematising city-scale can be unexpected in the view of the proliferation of global mobile policies (Rosol 2017) that frame urban scale as central not only for climate change root causes and the consequences for inhabitants, but also for the potential prevention of its negative effects. The programmes advanced by EU "Mission on Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030" or a global C40+ network place cities at the centre of climate mitigation and adaptation efforts and project them as fore-runners of climate action.

Yet, we see anthropology's task in exploring the emergent translations (Haraway 2003) of these mobile policies, and propose to discuss:

-What "scalar fixes" result from these translations?

-What is their dynamics?

-What do they omit?

-Who do they leave behind?

-How do activists, artists and NGOs "scale jump" between global and urban level of climate action?

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