Improvisation and Survival: The City and the Anthropocene Flashcards
Explain the idea of ‘slow violence’ in environmental disasters.
“By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”
Transforms our understanding of the temporality of violence: brutal and episodic or slow, incremental and accretive?
The violence of environmental change: climate change, thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, etc. pose new challenge for how we come to understand and manage disaster. (environmental change is intense as well as incremental)
Why are cities an area of focus in the face of environmental disasters?
“Cities […] are at the forefront of the coming climate chaos, their natural vulnerabilities heightened by social injustice. Cities are the defining social and ecological phenomena of the twenty-first century […] they are peculiarly vulnerable to climate chaos” (Dawson, 2017).
“The city is where capitalism’s contradictions play out […] This means that the movement for climate justice […] will necessarily grow through solidarities forged in urban terrain. To suggest this is to challenge the notion that the city is the antithesis of ’nature’” (Dawson, 2017)
Capitalism is inherently contradictory – “creative destruction” (Harvey) – destruction often targets particular communities and ecologies.
Argument there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ disasters, socio-spatial inequalities always have an implication.
How does the North/South divide play into experiences/approaches to the Anthropocene?
Climate change is a highly uneven process, some cities (especially in Global North) seen as more resilient.
Questions around ‘Who is worth saving?’ arise, based on a sense of a surplus urban population - link to biopolitics.
Indigenous communities = often disproportionately affected by global urban/environmental change.
Many indigenous communities have already experienced catastrophe and disaster (through colonialism) - this affects understanding their of the Anthropocene/CC).
Sense of possibility and need to think across the N/S divide?
What does it mean to think volumetrically?
“The politics and geographies of bad or lethal air in cities remains remarkably peripheral to the huge growth of political-ecological work on the social and technological productions of nature in urban environments” (Graham 2015)
Looking at the horizontal AND vertical axes of space to expose further differences and inequalities. Differential exposure to urban pollution and differential capacity to insulate from urban pollution (e.g. those on top floor of skyscraper have cleaner air, no litter surrounding them than those at ground level).
