Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic collapse have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, and governments towards infrastructure as a site of value production and potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and crisis. This paper will interrogate the different forms of futurity and life that are currently emerging from this complex contemporary relationship between technology and design by engaging with two contemporary case studies of greenfield: 'smart' and 'green' developments in South Korea and Masdar in Abu Dhabi. In doing so, the paper will ask how these contemporary practices in ubiquitous computing and green technology are shaping large scale infrastructures and our imaginaries of the future of urban life.
This article examines the discourses and practices of climate change adaptation in the Arabian Peninsula. It suggests that climate change adaptation projects in the region are often attempts at reframing water-related challenges that are already present, regardless of the effects of climate change. For instance, the groundwater sources in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will be destroyed not necessarily due to the predicted impacts of climate change but because they will soon be completely consumed. In response, the governments in the Arabian Peninsula, especially the UAE, advance a view that I call the “infinity of water,” by relying on technological solutions, particularly desalination. The nonconventional synthetic quality of water, where more can be generated through desalination whenever necessary, allows the actors in the area to envision and embrace its infinity, regardless of existing and impending water scarcity. This article shows how water ceases to be a “natural” entity, but rather emerges as an assemblage of complex technical procedures, social relations, and historical trajectories.
In this article, I focus on carbon capture and storage (CCS), a controversial climate change mitigation technology that operates by collecting carbon dioxide from point sources and depositing it in underground locations, such as depleting oil reservoirs. Specifically, I investigate the ways in which certain CCS professionals imagine and demand a reconceptualization of carbon dioxide: not as waste or as dangerous material that should be taxed and exchanged in carbon markets, but as a neutral gas that can be bought and sold as a commodity, and perhaps used as a drilling additive for the oil and gas industry. CCS professionals suggest that carbon dioxide has multiple legal, political, and chemical meanings and existences across different points on a CCS network, and they acknowledge how this condition makes it difficult to produce the molecule as a commodity characterized by exchange and commensurability. In studying the commodification of carbon dioxide, I show how these professionals do not intend to create “sameness” across the market, but instead wish to commodify the molecule through “linking” various versions of carbon dioxide together. By tracking carbon dioxide as it moves within a CCS network, I explore the moral logics of CCS technologies, which obscure how energy‐intensive models of life triggered climate change in the first place.
Discussions of energy in sub-Saharan Africa tend to focus on leapfrogging, theorizing how some non-Western countries might be able to avoid carbon-intensive fuels, such as coal and oil, and directly start using renewable energy infrastructure, mainly solar. While theories of leapfrogging have been attractive, there has been limited research on how exactly renewable energy resources are adopted in sub-Saharan Africa, especially at times of unreliable access. Drawing on fieldwork with energy professionals in Accra and Tema, Ghana, this article analyzes the transformations in energy infrastructure in Ghana during the period following its 2012–16 electricity crisis, known as dumsor. It argues that an increasing volume of rooftop solar panels installed by affiuent individuals and institutions in the aftermath of the crisis has led to declining participation in the electricity grid, and thereby higher electricity rates for everyone else with no choice but to remain on the grid. In response to such growing inequality, decision-makers searched for innovative business models, appealing to green loans as ways of expanding this class of solar consumers. As a result, while a select few have managed to leapfrog to renewables, others continue to endure the grid, struggling with unsteady electricity provision and increasing tariffs.
With an aim for ‘zero-carbon’ output, the Masdar City project aims to create a new mode of urbanization in a region otherwise massively contributing to carbon-rich environmental disaster. Involving an investment estimated at US$16b, ambitions include breakthroughs in solar energy, pollution-free driverless vehicles, and self-sufficient cooling technologies. Numbers of goals have had to be adjusted, including abandonment of the internal transit scheme. One can interpret the project as too much tied into a scenario of technical breakthrough without attending to social, economic or political transformations that might have made innovation more viable.
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