Greening cosmopolitan urbanism? On the transnational mobility of low-carbon formats in Northern European and East Asian cities

TY - JOUR

T1 - Greening cosmopolitan urbanism? On the transnational mobility of low-carbon formats in Northern European and East Asian cities

AU - Blok, Anders

PY - 2012

Y1 - 2012

N2 - This paper engages key social theories of transnational mobilities in order to forge the concept of urban 'green' cosmopolitization, posited as a social scientific contribution to epochal conversations on climate change. Bringing Ulrich Beck's notion of 'cosmopolitization' to bear on recent work around 'urban policy mobilities', I analyze professional planning practices in large-scale world cities as privileged sites for contemporary imaginings and material implementations of low-carbon sociotechnical change. Focusing on the regions of Europe and Asia, I show how specific policies and technologies of urban greening circulate in intercity sustainability networks. These networks, I suggest, serve to organize processes of professional engagement with climate change around notions of innovation, learning, and 'best practice' policy transfer among urban professionals-thereby also excluding more 'radically' alternative futures. The paper then turns to explore how such green cosmopolitization works as a social force within specific urban localities, employing two ethnographic case studies into 'ambitious' low-carbon planning projects in Copenhagen and Kyoto, respectively. In particular, my analysis explores how place-based notions of 'culture' are mobilized in the urban visions of architects and engineers as resources for addressing global environmental risks. These spaces of urban green cosmopolitization, I conclude, emerge at the intersection of professional and vernacular ethico-political attachments, thereby reworking-in often contentious ways-how particular urban materials and spaces can be understood in reference to an emerging moral geography of shared climatic risks.

AB - This paper engages key social theories of transnational mobilities in order to forge the concept of urban 'green' cosmopolitization, posited as a social scientific contribution to epochal conversations on climate change. Bringing Ulrich Beck's notion of 'cosmopolitization' to bear on recent work around 'urban policy mobilities', I analyze professional planning practices in large-scale world cities as privileged sites for contemporary imaginings and material implementations of low-carbon sociotechnical change. Focusing on the regions of Europe and Asia, I show how specific policies and technologies of urban greening circulate in intercity sustainability networks. These networks, I suggest, serve to organize processes of professional engagement with climate change around notions of innovation, learning, and 'best practice' policy transfer among urban professionals-thereby also excluding more 'radically' alternative futures. The paper then turns to explore how such green cosmopolitization works as a social force within specific urban localities, employing two ethnographic case studies into 'ambitious' low-carbon planning projects in Copenhagen and Kyoto, respectively. In particular, my analysis explores how place-based notions of 'culture' are mobilized in the urban visions of architects and engineers as resources for addressing global environmental risks. These spaces of urban green cosmopolitization, I conclude, emerge at the intersection of professional and vernacular ethico-political attachments, thereby reworking-in often contentious ways-how particular urban materials and spaces can be understood in reference to an emerging moral geography of shared climatic risks.

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0308-518X

VL - 44

SP - 2327

EP - 2343

JO - Environment and Planning A

JF - Environment and Planning A

IS - 10

ER -