Mobilities, politics, and the future: Critical geographies of green urbanism

Abstract

Urban studies, as an interdisciplinary field, is defined, to a great degree, by critical analyses at the nexus of economic development, urbanization, and urban life. For reasons that hardly need explanation or justification, environmental change and its governance are increasingly central to these analyses. Rosol et al. (2017: 1710) argue that the ‘‘new environmental governance regimes’’ that frame the politics of urban and environmental change are growth-oriented, neomanagerial, driven by narrow notions of ‘‘best practices,’’ socially and spatially selective, and postdemocratic. Echoing and extending While et al.’s (2004) argument, they suggest that appeals to greenness, sustainability, and resilience under hegemonic governance regimes tend to act in the service of economic development, whether by promising magical synergies between profit-making and environmentalism or by legitimizing and excusing business as usual. Yet, as While et al. (2004) and others have shown, studies of urban environmental governance are most effective when they explore the specific contexts and conditions, logics and antinomies of environmental governance in cities and urbanized regions. This involves attention to innovation (and claims about innovation) in urban development and urban governance. In turn, it involves a focus on politics and, in that regard, critical analyses of the contemporary condition must pay attention to how social movements identify opportunities to advocate for more just and truly sustainable futures. I will explore these themes by first discussing both urban governance and also innovation. I will then spend more time engaging with questions of policy mobilities, definitions of success and failure, and the character of (post-)politics. I will conclude by considering the question of contemporary interurban ‘‘referencescapes’’ and how these must be approached as intertwined spatialities and temporalities. After all, urban environmental governance and attempts to design a ‘‘green urbanism,’’ for want of a better term, are nothing if not about struggles over the past, the present, and the future of specific places and wider global contexts.