World port cities as cosmopolitan risk community: Mapping urban climate policy experiments in Europe and East Asia

Blok, Anders; Tschötschel, Robin

doi:10.1177/0263774x15614673

Cited by 17 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Such waterfront riskscapes, I assume, embody those differentiations of interrelated urban outcomes of which Robinson speaks, in that they arise in the encounter of variously scaled and interconnected processes. These include the way international agencies such as the OECD, alongside environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Greenpeace, nowadays frame such coastal urban sites as 'at risk' spaces, stemming from a transnational risk imaginary of sea-level rises, storm surges and so on (Blok and Tschötschel 2015). 3 Significantly, in this respect, the four specific cities under study here have all joined the so-called Connecting Delta Cities alliance, a subsidiary branch of the C40 intercity climate network, oriented to sharing knowledge and building capacities for climate adaptation.…”

Section: From Methodology To Methods: New Units and Practices Of Resementioning

confidence: 99%

Climate riskscapes in world port cities: situating urban‐cosmopolitan risk communities via Ulrich Beck's comparative tactics

Blok

2019

Global Networks

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Building on empirical research into translocal connections among world port cities in addressing shared challenges of climate risk mitigation and adaptation, in this article I review two widespread tendencies in urban studies -methodological city-ism and methodological globalism respectively -as a springboard for articulating a methodologically cosmopolitan alternative. This alternative, I argue, involves epistemological issues of how to interrogate 'the urban' as assemblages that constitutively draw together the near and the faraway, as well as more practical issues of mobile, multisited, and comparative urban research methods. Empirically, I compare the ways in which urban actors stage global climate risks on the waterfronts of four world cities -Hong Kong, Rotterdam, Yokohama and Copenhagen -to argue that such a comparative tactic of variable 'riskscapes' helps situate Ulrich Beck's notion of urban cosmopolitan risk communities more thoroughly into urban studies. In such ways, I suggest, Beck's methodological cosmopolitanism is germane to studying ongoing and far ranging transformation in world political geography, in which transurban networks, communities, and governance arrangements come to complement nation-state centred institutions. Such conclusions must be tempered, however, by the deployment of Beck's equally strong impetus towards comparative attention to the varieties of second modernity; and doing so, I conclude, aligns well with ongoing transformations in urban studies itself.

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Section: From Methodology To Methods: New Units and Practices Of Resementioning

confidence: 99%

Climate riskscapes in world port cities: situating urban‐cosmopolitan risk communities via Ulrich Beck's comparative tactics

Blok

2019

Global Networks

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“…To transcend this much critiqued core feature of methodological nationalism, Beck and his co-authors suggest experimenting with alternative spaces, structures and processes as 'research units' (Beck and Sznaider 2006: 15), such as the transnational regimes of politics, transnational spaces and risk communities (Beck and Grande 2010). Examples of units of analysis are world port cities (to study risk communities) or regulatory problems (to study transnational policy regimes) (Beck et al 2013;Blok and Tschötschel 2016). Such transnational research units transcend the national container model because they redirect the analytical focus to phenomena that cross nation-state boundaries.…”

Section: From Spaces To Fields Of Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing a transversal method: developing an ethics of care in a collaborative research project

et al. 2019

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Beck and Sznaider call on 'methodological cosmopolitanism' to transcend methodological nationalism and account for an increasingly cosmopolitanized reality. We take up their challenge by drawing on our experiences of conducting a collaborative ethnography of methodological changes in the production of population statistics within and between European national and international statistical institutes. Drawing on debates in science and technology studies, we depart from some conceptual presuppositions of methodological cosmopolitanism to define a 'transversal method'. Referring to this method as performative and ontopolitical, we reflect on how it requires collaboration and, in our ethnography, gave rise to three practical challenges -(1) going beyond the individual project; (2) using each other's field notes; (3) and working against the national order of things. To meet these challenges, we reflect on how this method required us to practise three modes of care -thinking with others, tinkering with field notes, and dissenting within.

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“…In terms of rethinking political geographies, our main tool for establishing a new space of inter-urban connections has been conceptually to cast major 'world port cities'-including, for instance, Hong Kong, Yokohama, Singapore, Rotterdam, Copenhagen and Hamburg -as an emerging cosmopolitan community of climate risks (Blok & Tschötschel 2015). These world port cities, we document empirically, are increasingly positioned within transnational urban alliances as sharing both the risks (of sea-level rise etc.)…”

Section: Low-carbon Innovation In East Asia (And Europe): Two Brief Imentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing methodological cosmopolitanism in a mobile world

Tyfield

Blok

2016

Mobilities

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A decade of mobilities research has responded to the key question of how a 'world on the move' can and should be studied, including in terms of futures thereby brought into view and possibly shaped into being. What happens, however, if we shift our focus from the 'world on the move' to the 'world on the move', with all the cosmopolitical diversity this highlights? This paper explores this question regarding the parallel research programme of methodological cosmopolitanism, inspired and instigated by the work of Ulrich Beck. We examine how mobilities research and methodological cosmopolitanism illuminate, support and contrast with each other as paradigms of social science for the 21 st century. We argue for two major changes in this regard: moving from 'methods' as tools for objective knowledgegathering to partial but directed and knowledge-enabling dialogical interventions; and from 'data' as given 'facts' to the construction of new, promising boundary-crossing connections. These reorientations resonate strongly also with methodological directions from mobilities research, but in complementary ways. In particular, both relate to a shift of methodological imperatives, specifically regarding dynamic, interactive and power-attentive forms of social knowledge-making or phronesis, a situated practical wisdom. We illustrate these points in brief with insights from our own methodologically cosmopolitan research on key contemporary cosmopolitized issues, undertaken as part of Beck's 'cosmopolitan climate change' (CosmoClimate) project.

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World port cities as cosmopolitan risk community: Mapping urban climate policy experiments in Europe and East Asia

Cited by 17 publications

References 30 publications

Climate riskscapes in world port cities: situating urban‐cosmopolitan risk communities via Ulrich Beck's comparative tactics

Climate riskscapes in world port cities: situating urban‐cosmopolitan risk communities via Ulrich Beck's comparative tactics

Doing a transversal method: developing an ethics of care in a collaborative research project

Doing methodological cosmopolitanism in a mobile world

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