Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the interplay between ecological and infrastructural ways of relating to the environment in the context of urban responses to climate change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the interplay between ecological and infrastructural relational imaginaries as they are playing out in urban responses to climate change in the UK. Rather than opposing a modern 'infrastructural' imaginary, with traditional 'ecological' understandings of humans and their environments, this paper aims to collapse this opposition by understanding the systemic promise of both contemporary infrastructural and ecological understandings. In the paper I describe how the problem of anthropogenic climate change as it is understood in a UK local government setting has begun to co-articulate what might otherwise be understood as two very different forms of systems analysis. On the one hand, scientific data on anthropogenic climate change, its causes, and potential solutions, appear to be undoing or disrupting a logic of modernist planning, shifting infrastructure planning from a focus on how to engineer closed systems, to the issue of how to manage emergent and distributed forms of change. This sensibility towards relations of emergence has in turn begun to open the way for ecological approaches -captured in ideas like permaculture, re-wilding and the Bolivian concept of 'Buen Vivir' - to be operationalized as experimental concepts for rethinking and reimagining what the future of urban planning should look like. Rather than considering then, how infrastructure projects disrupt or undermine traditional, ecological knowledge, this paper focuses on how traditional or embodied forms of environmental relating are being brought to bear on practices of modern urban development, and with what effects.