Redeploying Urban Infrastructure by Jonathan Rutherford

Author:Jonathan Rutherford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030178871
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Conclusion

There has been significant debate over the proposed visions for Stockholm’s future ‘green’ development. This debate was captured by the question of whether the city was concretely aiming to be both or either ‘fossil fuel free’ by 2050 and/or ‘world class’ in 2030, and by the different means and resources which were attributed to working concretely and materially towards these objectives. In unpacking not just these discursive visions and ideals, but also the more contingent political processes and struggles through which energy–climate policy has been actually formulated, implemented and contested in Stockholm, this chapter has contributed to deepening the level of analysis of urban energy–climate policies. It has gone beyond a simple reaffirmation of both an ‘implementation gap’ between generic, ambitious policy discourse and actual policy action, and an emerging ecological modernization agenda in which energy–climate policy is seen as creating new opportunities for urban development and growth which could inevitably and automatically contribute to the creation of ‘a world-class city’ in the near future. The chapter has argued that a core focus on material politics and everyday struggles around urban energy and climate issues is a useful means of grasping how long-term orientations are materially translated here and now, in diverse ways by diverse urban actors, onto the local political stage.

I argue that urban energy–climate issues inherently articulate transition, politics and materiality in shifting configurations. Transition must be seen as a heterogeneous process replete with potential for controversy and contention because change inherently operates through a set of urban materialities, not just represented by instruments, objects and infrastructures per se, but more performed by the multiple arrangements, mobilizations and control of these things by particular interests and groups.

While this opens up the potential for a repoliticization of urban energy and climate issues, it also at the same time poses the practical question of how municipalities can conceive and implement durable energy and climate policies in a constantly shifting urban policy context. While energy, environmental issues and carbon management are sometimes portrayed as central now to the whole of urban policy, this must be nuanced by the still relatively limited resources actually attributed to green issues in many municipalities. This means that more often than not they need to be in symphony with other policies, needs and interests (as with the current ‘green growth’ agenda). When they conflict too much with more important priorities, they may be bypassed, reconfigured or even abandoned (as in the case of the financing of climate-neutral public transport from the congestion charge in Stockholm). These moments of the ‘unfixing’ of environmental–energy–climate priorities are important because they reveal the logic of reversibility which seems to dominate current policy in this field. Policy oriented towards embedding path dependencies in the form of large-scale physical infrastructures may be increasingly contested as it materializes a fixed, singular pathway of transition. More reflexive and adaptive policy is increasingly demanded, which might take into account more open notions of materiality and transition as explored in this chapter. The question that remains

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