A powerful argument for not approaching climate change in a hurry, but with a slow politics of urgency.
It’s understandable that we tend to present climate change as something urgently requiring action. Every day we fail to act, the potential for catastrophe grows. But is that framing itself a problem? When we hurry, we make more mistakes. We overlook things. We get tunnel vision.
In Haste, a group of distinguished contributors makes the case for a slow politics of urgency. Rather than rushing and speeding up, he argues, the sustainable future is better served by our challenging of the dominant framings through which we understand time and change in society. While recognizing the need for certain types of urgency in climate politics, Haste directs attention to the different and alternative temporalities at play in climate and sustainability politics. Divided into short and accessible chapters, written by both established and emerging scholars from different disciplines, Haste tackles a major problem in contemporary climate change research and offers creative perspectives on pathways out of the climate emergency.
It’s understandable that we tend to present climate change as something urgently requiring action. Every day we fail to act, the potential for catastrophe grows. But is that framing itself a problem? When we hurry, we make more mistakes. We overlook things. We get tunnel vision.
In Haste, a group of distinguished contributors makes the case for a slow politics of urgency. Rather than rushing and speeding up, he argues, the sustainable future is better served by our challenging of the dominant framings through which we understand time and change in society. While recognizing the need for certain types of urgency in climate politics, Haste directs attention to the different and alternative temporalities at play in climate and sustainability politics. Divided into short and accessible chapters, written by both established and emerging scholars from different disciplines, Haste tackles a major problem in contemporary climate change research and offers creative perspectives on pathways out of the climate emergency.
264 pages | 32 color plates | 6.14 x 9.21 | © 2023
Geography: Social and Political Geography
Political Science: Urban Politics
Table of Contents
List of figuresList of tables List of contributors Acknowledgements 1 Why the haste? Introduction to the slow politics of climate urgency Håvard Haarstad, Jakob Grandin, Kristin Kjærås and Eleanor Johnson Part I: Climate apocalypse and radical utopias 2 ’The apocalypse is disappointing’: traversing the ecological fantasy Erik Swyngedouw 3 From architectures of capital to architectures of care: the arts of dreaming otherwise in the Oslo Architecture Triennale Cecilie Sachs Olsen 4 Extinction Rebellion and the future city Emma Arnold 5 The urgency of hope and responses to contemporary crises Marikken Wullf-Wathne and Kristin Kjærås Part II: Learning the politics of urgency 6 Negation, imagination and organisation: rethinking sustainability transitions as a question of popular education Keri Facer 7 ‘Right here, right now’: Immediacy, space and publicness in the politics of climate crisis Eugene McCann 8 Carefully transforming our institutions: how they change, how they listen Scott Bremer and Eleanor Johnson 9 Experimenting ecological civilization on the ground: the green transformation of a resource-based city in China Ping Huang and Xiaohui Hu Part III: Countering alienation under rapid change10 The good, the bad and the beautiful? The role of aesthetics in low-carbon consumption Jesse Schrage 11 Sustainability from the ground: urban gardening with children as means to environmental change Sofia Cele 12 Refashioning the supercyclical city Eleanor Johnson 13 Environmental injustices unfold in urban sustainability projects in Istanbul Mahir Yazar 14 Inclusive sustainability: gaming as a tool for participation in urgent planning Tarje I. Wanvik and Håvard H. Bjørnstad Part IV: Contesting the speed of urban change 15 Small measures, large change: the promise and peril of incremental urbanisation Andrew Karvonen and Jonas Bylund 16 Make way for efficiency: sustainable mobility and the politics of speed Jakob Grandin 17 The geography of the ’world greenest cities’: a class-based critique Ståle Holgersen 18 Climate imaginaries for urgent urban transformations Håvard Haarstad Part V: Temporalities of infrastructural change 19 Periphery everywhere AbdouMaliq Simone 20 Reimagining urban innovation Matthew Cook 21 Promises and contradictions of digital sustainability in the post-pandemic city Chiara Certomà 22 People’s Republic of Energy: rethinking the possible in energy futures Hannah Knox, Jonathan Atkinson and Britt Jurgensen 23 Solar spectacles: why Lisbon’s solar projects matter for energy transformation Siddharth Sareen Index