Send message to Contributor

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.