Performing Publics: Changing Landscapes of Urban Real Property for Decarbonization

Keywords: decarbonization, housing, performativity, infrastructure, property, climate justice
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper considers the urban land question regarding what constitutes the state’s estate in a changing climate. In 2019, New York City set a regulatory mandate for carbon emissions reductions produced by large buildings and spurring the rush to retrofit nearly 50,000 buildings before the law’s 2024 deadline. These regulations are supported by a bevy of state, municipal, and civic capacity-building programs and financing mechanisms. Contrary to decades of urban studies research investigating the neoliberal privatization of public infrastructures (Peck 2012; Bakker 2009), I argue that municipal governments are using their jurisdictional power over urban real property to transform heretofore “private” housing infrastructures into energy-efficient climate mitigation infrastructures in the public interest. These transformations are not simply the product of regulatory switches, but rather the enactment of new publics that are “performed” through digital energy use measurements, green financing mechanisms, capacity building programs, and decision-making protocols. Using performance theory (Butler 2010; Weber 2016), I join a chorus of feminist economic geographers who have long troubled simplistic divisions between public and private property (Federici 2004; Gibson-Graham 2006) to examine how the decarbonization of housing infrastructures is produced by transformations in state and civic discourses, capacities, and labor. The re-fashioning of private residential multi-family buildings as energy-efficient infrastructures in the public interest may reproduce existing inequities of infrastructural responsibility and risk or usher in new politics and pathways towards social housing justice.