Cities and planetary repair: The problem with climate retrofitting

Abstract

In the 2010s, major US initiatives framed urban retrofitting as a decarbonization solution. These programs address an obtrusive legacy of industrial capitalism: its built environments shed energy and emissions when they fall into disrepair. Political ecology and economy have been slow to engage retrofitting, an absence that is conspicuous as these fields take on planetary repair as a conceptual provocation and turn in mainstream conservation. This paper explores US retrofitting as a distinctive material repair practice, one born as an energy poverty program amid the scarcity fears of the 1970s Energy Crisis but seeing a renaissance today as a program for green capitalist growth. I interrogate two economies of repair now emerging around retrofitting, energy market and cleantech aspirations to make energy efficiency a resource and articulated efforts to sell retrofits as new green value for real estate development and investment. Such urban revaluation efforts join an expanding array of green gentrification schemes today. Paradoxically, even as would-be green entrepreneurs are drawn to these seemingly intangible and “clean” forms of waste and value-in-waiting, retrofitting presents intransigent materialities. Its decarbonization ambitions demand not just profit-generating urban repair today but large-scale urban maintenance into the future. This need confronts longstanding efforts to render US cities and built environments flexible to recurrent creative destruction in service of ongoing economic growth. Such logics of de/revaluation and essential disposability permit concurrent US programs for gentrification and urban abandonment today. However, decarbonization requires a more substantial confrontation with capitalist ruination-as-usual.

Planet of fixers? Mapping the middle grounds of independent and do‐it‐yourself information and communication technology maintenance and repair

“…The image of a planet of fixers is not innocent. It may offer a charismatic image of certain moral “goods” and bolster broader hopes associating INDIY ICT M&R with notions of “planetary repair” (Knuth, ; The Restart Project, ). However, to the extent that such charisma trades on extant hopes and fears of viewers, among the risks run by the image of a planet of fixers is that it might also reinscribe geographical imaginaries of hierarchy and dominance of the Minority World (or “the West”) over the Majority World (“the rest”).…”

Pluralizing and problematizing carbon finance

“…For Andreucci et al (2017: 33), for example, accumulation by dispossession and rent-seeking include processes that create ‘pseudo-commodities…as socio-ecological assets that can be incorporated within private property regimes, such as carbon credits, patents on genetic material, ecosystem services, and so on’. Recent research into investment in natural capital and low-carbon technologies and infrastructures – some of which explicitly conceptualizes the extraction of financial value in these forms of carbon finance as ‘rent’, and some which does not – is also pointing to the important ways in which carbon is figured as an ‘asset’ (Kay, 2018; Knuth, 2018a, 2018b; Sullivan, 2018). This work recognizes the creation of assets that can generate future revenues as crucial to the extraction of financial value, not least because assets simultaneously act as collateral for the leverage of debt and creation of interest-bearing capital.…”

“…These include: markets that price and trade emissions rights (Callon, 2009; Knox-Hayes, 2016; McKenzie, 2009; Lovell, 2015) and ecosystem services (e.g. Asiyanbi, 2016; Corbera, 2012; Fletcher et al, 2016; Gupta et al, 2012); forms of investment in natural capital designed to generate value through conservation and carbon sequestration (Dempsey, 2015; Fairhead et al, 2012; Kay, 2018; Sullivan, 2018); and raising capital expressly for low-carbon investment in enterprises, projects and initiatives (Bracking, 2015; Christophers, 2016, 2018; Karpf and Mandel, 2018), especially to provide for the greening of urban infrastructures (Castree and Christophers, 2015; Knuth, 2018a) and the renewable and ‘clean tech’ energy sectors (Hall et al, 2017; Knuth, 2018b; McCarthy, 2015).…”

“…However, speculation on carbon is but one mode of financialized accumulation on nature (Bryant, 2018;Ouma et al, 2018). Recent research into investment in natural capital and low-carbon technologies and infrastructures -some of which explicitly conceptualizes the extraction of financial value in these forms of carbon finance as 'rent', and some which does not -is pointing to the important ways in which carbon is figured as an 'asset' that can generate future revenues, and thereby act as collateral for the leverage of debt and creation of interest-bearing capital (Kay, 2018;Knuth, 2018aKnuth, , 2018bSullivan, 2018). Our conceptual contribution explicitly connects this research with an emerging body of work in cultural economy that, via the categories of 'assetization' and 'capitalization', furthers critical analysis of economization processes that leverage debt for capital investment (Birch, 2017a(Birch, , 2017bMuniesa, 2017;Muniesa et al, 2017;Ouma, 2016Ouma, , 2018.…”

Day Zero and The Infrastructures of Climate Change: Water Governance, Inequality, and Infrastructural Politics in Cape Town's Water Crisis

“…This is a critical domain of scholarly inquiry that extends past quantitative engagements with water provisioning to instead highlight the intimate relationships between water governance, spatial inequality, increasing climatic and fiscal uncertainty, and infrastructural politics (Jepson et al ., 2017). We draw from contemporary literature on the material politics of climate change transitions and decarbonization experiments (see Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013; Cohen, 2016; Knuth, 2018) that highlight the degree to which climatic risk is deeply intertwined with financial and governmental risk. Cape Town's crisis is critical for understanding how climate change is reconfiguring existing governance dynamics at a planetary scale, and offers insights into what form urban climate change adaptation may take in the future.…”