an article by Earl T. Harper (The University of Bristol, UK) published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Volume 44 Issue 1 (January 2020)
Abstract
Anxieties over the potential impacts of climate change, often framed in apocalyptic language, are having a profound, but little studied effect on the contemporary Western urbanscape.
This article examines the ways in which current theorisations of ‘ecological gentrification’ express only half the process, describing how green space is used for social control, but not how ecology is used as a justification regime for such projects. As urbanites seek out housing and living practices that have a lower environmental impact, urban planners have responded by providing large‐scale regeneration of the urbanscape.
With the demand for this housing increasing, questions of inequality, displacement and dispossession arise.
I ask whether apocalyptic anxiety is being enrolled in the justification regimes of these projects to make them hard to resist at the planning and implementation stages.
The article shows that, in capitalising on collective anxiety surrounding an apocalyptic future, these projects depoliticise subjects by using the empty signifier, ‘Sustainability’, leading them into an immuno‐political relationship to the urbanscape. This leaves subjects feeling protected from both responsibility for, and the impacts of, climate change.
Ultimately, this has the consequence of gentrification coupled with potentially worsening consumptive practices, rebound effects and the depoliticisation of the environmentally conscious urbanite.
Full text (PDF 17pp)
Labels:
ecological_gentrification, apocalypse, climate_change, immunopolitics, post-politics, psychoanalysis, fantasy, London, community, immunity,
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