Greenest cities? The (post-)politics of new urban environmental regimes

Abstract

Urban areas are increasingly recognized as strategic sites to address climate change and environmental issues. Specific urban projects are marketed as innovative solutions and best-practice examples, and so-called green cities, eco-cities and sustainable cities have emerged worldwide as leading paradigms in urban planning and policy discourse. The transformation of cities into eco-cities (Kenworthy, 2006;Roseland, 1997) is often based on big data and -widely varying -indicators that should proof the success of urban climate governance (Bulkeley, 2010). The European Commission with its 'Green Capital' program, Britain's 'Sustainable City Index', France's 'EcoCite´' scheme, the US-American's 'Greenest City' ranking developed by WalletHub's, the US and Canada 'Green City Index' sponsored by Siemens -these programs are all examples of public and private initiatives aimed at identifying and ranking the 'greenest' city or cities according to a competitive rationality. They are mostly quantitative approaches, based on 'hard' and 'scientific' indicators that allow cities to be compared according to their efforts in sustainable urban development. Using these indicators, cities worldwide have increasingly promoted sustainability initiatives in order to position themselves advantageously on the global scene (Chang and Sheppard, 2013;Cugurullo, 2013;Swyngedouw and Kaika, 2014;While et al., 2004).These urban ranking efforts tie into the fact that sustainability has become a metaconsensual policy term (Gill et al., 2012), resting upon broad support from diverse sectors of society. Promoted at first as a way of bringing forward an ecological urban agenda connected to social development, sustainability has lost much of its transformative potential. By now, even car manufacturing in Germany, oil pipelines in Alberta, Canada and nuclear power plants worldwide are being politically justified with reference to sustainability and climate change prevention. Despite controversial national positions regarding the processes, pace and extend of implementing environmental policies -a divergence that became very evident, for example, during the 2009 United Nations

Varieties of smart urbanism in the UK: Discursive logics, the state and local urban context

“…Discourses framing the smart city as a response to crisis run the risk of individualising risk and catalysing neoliberal or even authoritarian eco‐urban politics (Chang, ; Ho, ; Kong & Woods, ; Rosol et al., ). While Bristol's resilience strategy celebrates the city as a “leader in … smart city digital innovation” (Bristol City Council, , n.p.…”

The bones beneath the streets: drifting through London’s Quaternary

“…Critics argue that such projects are central to the post-political mode of environmentalism that has become prominent in the neoliberal 'age of ecology'. 56 They differ markedly from the processes and politics of the SI. Nonetheless, both share an aspiration towards new subject formations.…”

London’s King’s Cross redevelopment: a compact, resource efficient and ‘liveable’ global city model for an era of climate emergency?

“…The compact city idea, in common with other 'leading paradigms' of the policymaking arena (Rosol, Béal, andMössner 2017, 1710) has experienced a rate of transfer from one place to another, 'the speed and intensity [of which] seems historically unprecedented' (Tait and Jensen 2007, 107). This can constitute a problematic issue, as the focus on the institutionalization and replicability of the compact city as an ideal urban model 'decontextualizes forms, ideas and processes from the cultural conditions that give rise to it' (Moore 2013).…”

“…The current preference for abstraction and idealization, inherent in the compact city debate, might lead to a far too shallow understanding of the social, metabolistic, and political complexities of current urban challenges (Tunström and Bradley 2015). The compact city has been legitimized as an 'institutionalized concept' (Gorgolas 2018, 56) but the implementation of urban compaction principles at the local scale is still a challenging and unresolved issue, as 'it is unlikely that the potential benefits in a particular setting will be the same elsewhere in other places' (Rosol, Béal, andMössner 2017, 1713). In fact, exemplary projects or techniques are superficially transplanted into different contexts with a focus on 'reproducibility resulting from the standardization of practice' (Neuman 2005, 21), but with little evidence of actually improving urban environments (Mosse 2004).…”