Contribution short abstract

Can buildings become climate actors? Drawing on ethnographic engagement with circular pioneers in the construction sector in Vienna and beyond, this paper explores how circular construction can help rethink the urban scale of climate mitigation.

Contribution long abstract

Circular economy has emerged as a key concept in sustainable development and has recently been applied at the urban scale. In 2023, the European Union launched the Circular Cities Declaration Report, signed by numerous member states, to promote a resource-efficient and socially responsible urban society. My contribution examines how “circular” appears to be the new “sustainable” in urban policy-making, drawing on my research in the construction sector.

In doing so, I expand the notion of the urban to include its hinterlands and propose working with the idea of planetary urbanization, which situates the urban within broader networks of resource and knowledge exchange. An anthropological perspective on resource reuse and recycling reveals how circulating objects are entangled in webs of knowledge and relationships that operate across scales, from the local to the global. Based on ethnographic engagement with the everyday work of circular pioneers in Vienna and beyond, my analysis further develops scalar thinking by incorporating buildings as central entities. Through careful design, construction, and maintenance of housing spaces, energy consumption is reduced not only during construction but also in cooling and heating interiors, thereby mitigating climate change. Through buildings, circular pioneers influence urban dynamics without taking the city itself as the starting point for their interventions.

Contribution short abstract

In this contribution, I discuss the potential of what I call "climate infrastructures" to enroll subjects into climate activism through mediating how micro-climates respond to macro-level climate change.

Contribution long abstract

States and citizens worldwide are experimenting with how to adapt urban environments to climate change. These experiments increasingly involve nature-based or “green” infrastructures incorporating natural entities and dynamics into environmental management. As such infrastructural sediments, soils, and plants proliferate, however, they not only transform localities. Those infrastructures also constitute socio-political experiments where new ideas and ideals, practices, publics, institutions, and even citizens may be posited and prototyped in dialogue with changing material conditions.

In this contribution, I discuss the politics of what I call urban “climate infrastructures.” By “climate infrastructure,” I mean objects and systems—mostly but not exclusively green—that adjust how micro-climates respond to macro-level climate change. Building on reflections from preliminary fieldwork in Japan and the United States, I argue that climate infrastructures represent shifts in how micro-climates are governed, relying on and catalyzing new climate publics and coalitions with diverse citizenship as well as environmental agendas. However, participating in those publics need not require explicit concern for the climate. By translating between global and local, they offer potential to enroll subjects not only through concern for climate but also through the “small harms” (chiisana higai) it co-creates, such as local flooding. This makes such infrastructures critical sites for examining the politics of how city-scales recalibrate climate activism and action.

Contribution short abstract

Seeing cities through an ecological perspective has many challenges. Often it demands not spatial, but temporal recalibrations. I propose to take these temporal scales seriously: how do you create and maintain urban ecological sustainability, especially when long-term perspectives are under threat?

Contribution long abstract

Seeing cities through an ecological perspective has many challenges. In the city of Bremerhaven, one of Germany's poorest cities, activists and city officials alike aspire to create and - crucially - maintain a future shaped by what they understand as urban ecological sustainability. With that aim in mind, they want to transform Bremerhaven into a different city, one that is in many ways contributing to saving the world's climate, but one that is at the same time also regaining and recreating its own future. People entitle this future city as a "Klima-Stadt", a climate city. The KlimaStadt office and the "Jugendklimarat", the Youth Climate Council, are just two of the many actors that take on this challenge. Their everyday demands, however, are less of a global or spatial nature. Rather, what constitutes their biggest problem is maintaining their efforts through time and against the many political, economic and social challenges they face. Furthermore, there is a lot of work in understanding "time" and "city" in relation to one another. Infrastructures, social relations, markets and political rhythms imply and effect different temporal scales. How do you create and maintain urban ecological sustainability, however, when, for example, long-term perspectives are under threat, local infrastructures too obstinate and social forms too transient to coordinate? I propose to take managing different temporal scales in the context of a transition to sustainability seriously, in oder to reconfigure not just epistemic issues with climate change, but issues with urban time more generally.

Contribution short abstract

This contribution problematizes transitions to sustainable urban mobility dominated by electrification. At the global scale, this goal seem unproblematic, yet, it recalibrates relations between urban inhabitants in many troubling ways. Justice is introduced as a concept rescaling new mobility.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution proposes to re-think sustainable urban mobility transitions through the concept of justice to complicate their scalar politics. The global discourse of new urban mobility has been dominated by the vision of electrification - of cars and micromobile devises. However, when zooming into the actual practices of new electric mobility at urban scale and examining them through the lens of justice (distributions, procedural, epistemic), the scalar effects of these transition processes become troubling in many ways. This contribution argues for the benefits of ethnographic approaches to urban transition processes which help to understand how they re-calibtrate relations between urban inhabitants, who becomes part of the globally endorsed new urban mobilities, and who is left behind. Additionally, it is argued in favor of collaborative transition experiments as a way to enhance social learning about new mobiltiy practices among a wide range of actors, including urban planners and local communities, and as a way to re-examine different scalar effects of the transition process.