Making low-carbon places

Abstract

How are low-carbon places made/to be made? This question, which is tightly bound up with the politics and practical challenges of rapidly achieving ambitious climate change mitigation targets, is one that confronts scholars, policymakers, and practitioners alike. Taking this central focus as a common point of departure, the five articles in this special issue ofNorsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography explore the fertility of placing emphasis on a combination of three key terms: making, low carbon, and places. Our editorial introduction provides a conceptual anchoring for each of these terms, reflects on how the phenomena (making as a processual ontological phenomenon, low carbon as a sociotechnical flow phenomenon, and places as a situated stock-cum-flow phenomenon co-produced by infrastructures and practices) entangle and evolve together, and provides an overview of the contributions in this special issue. The editorial concludes with reflections on making low-carbon places for future research. We emphasise the importance of relational analyses of change processes, place-specific approaches to the study of sociotechnical transitions, and the recognition of how low-carbon place-making implicates the intertwined nature of power relations, individual agency, and path dependencies in built environments. In a time when rapid climate change mitigation ambitions have led governments at multiple levels – from the global and national to the urban, neighbourhood, and community – to embrace time-bound targets for carbon neutrality and climate neutrality, the question of how low-carbon places are made/to be made gains salience. This question has long interested human geographers with a broader focus on place-making predominantly at lower spatial scales, but importantly also translocal and nested spatial scales, and increasingly over the past decade (i.e. since the early 2010s) also transition scholars who have mobilised various conceptual lenses on how to enable low-carbon development at multiple levels. It is timely and important to unite this focus across thematic and interdisciplinary scholarship, in light of the many efforts underway to make low-carbon places for sustainability transitions. In the following three subsections, we open up lines of enquiry in extant scholarship on making, low carbon, and places. Thereafter, we briefly consider how these terms and phenomena come together from the vantage points of several competencies as interdisciplinary environmental social scientists within the editorial team in energy transitions, human geography, and political ecology, and we are mindful that the span of individual interests and expertise overlaps several of these fields. This conceptual and scholarly grounding equips us to offer an overview of the five articles in this collection, with a view to highlighting their implications to advance understanding of making low-carbon places. Finally, we conclude this introduction by highlighting the priorities for future engaged research on this theme. With the flow of argument established, we next present our theoretical underpinning.