Paper Short Abstract:

We focus on a climate neutrality project in Warsaw that makes a selected district model for energy transformations. We ask if the project overwrites some of the district’s characteristics and actors, and how; we ask if ethnographic unwriting can be means to more equitable urban energy transitions.

Paper Abstract:

Unlike many other aspects of municipal governance, climate neutrality policies often involve disaggregating global issues first and then casting them onto local economic, social and material realities through the categorizations and measurements that can sit uneasily with the way cities function and municipalities manage them (Knox 2020). The translations of the global goal of CO2 reduction to city policies is a process of writing over the familiar scripts.

In our presentation we focus on Mission 100 initiated by the EU in 2022, within which the municipal administration pledged that Warsaw will become a climate neutral city by 2030. As one of the means to achieve this goal, it selected a city district and made it a basis for modeling energy transformations that would be replicable for other cities and towns.

In our presentation we look at this district ethnographically, treating it as material, socio-cultural and institutional reality. We are interested in the relationships between Mission 100 project and the urban district it is projected upon. Specifically we ask which characteristics of the district have come to be featured in the project, how and why; which local actors get involved in the project; how the temporalities and “everyday ecologies” (Dal Gobbo 2020) of the district compare to those of the project. We inquire if the project overwrites or erases some of the district’s characteristics and actors. Our aim is to see if an exercise of ethnographic unwriting may be among the means to make energy transitions in cities more equitable.