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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.