This session will be streamed, recorded, and archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

Curated Track: 

Description:

Is the city good or bad for climate? You would think that we would know. Stories abound about the presumed environmental benefits of cities in newspaper op-eds, scholar and policymaker commentaries, and the IPCC reports. But, for critical urban theorists, the goodness and greenness of the city is not always so evident. We see how climate actions harm marginalized urban residents and reinscribe patterns of inequality. We see the extended social and environmental impacts of urbanization beyond the city. But critical urban theory so far seems unable to shift the emerging consensus about the state of the city at the possible end of the planet. In this talk I examine urban theory in a space and time of planetary boundaries and show that foundational ideas about cities have always been externalizing. Not only that urban metabolic processes produce externalities, but that the very conceptualizing of the urban is externalizing. This has led urban theorists and practitioners to neglect real and conceptual impacts of the urban. By bringing nature back in to notions of socionatural change, I situate the scales and levels of the urban with regard to the planet, and pose them in conversation and conflict with areas of urban climate change scholarship based on more econometric and biophysical change frameworks. This traversing of terrain and thought offers an invitation, theoretically, to reconsider the nature of the urban in light of the planet, and in more grounded terms, to reimagine an urban climate politics.



Kian Goh is an associate professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and an associate faculty director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. She researches the relationships between urban ecological design, spatial politics, and social mobilization in the context of climate change and global urbanization. Dr. Goh’s recent research investigated the spatial politics of urban climate change responses, with fieldwork sites in cities in North America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Her current research explores the implications of the global climate justice movement for more equitable and sustainable cities. As a professional architect, she cofounded design firm SUPER-INTERESTING! and has practiced with Weiss/Manfredi and MVRDV. Dr. Goh received a PhD in Urban and Environmental Planning from MIT, and a Master of Architecture from Yale University. She is the author of the book Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice, published by the MIT Press in 2021. She is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study for 2022-23.

Non-Presenting Participants