Urban experiments and climate change: securing zero carbon development in Bangalore

Harriet Bulkeley and Vanesa Castán Broto

Contemporary Social Science, 2014, vol. 9, issue 4, 393-414

Abstract: Climate change is an increasingly important issue on urban policy and research agendas. As this agenda gathers pace, this paper argues for an approach that recognises the critical role of climate change experiments in meditating the response to climate change in the city. Drawing on a case study of a green housing development in the outskirts of Bangalore in India--Towards Zero Carbon Development (T-Zed)--the paper follows the emergence of an experiment in the simultaneous processes of making, maintaining and living low carbon alongside and in between existing infrastructure regimes. It is argued that this experiment has created space for social and technical innovation, reworking notions of urban development in Bangalore. At the same time, it has reconfigured existing urban infrastructure networks through new discourses and practices of urban ecological security, enabling the emergence of a new rhetoric of low carbon living within the city that effectively marries green forms of consumption with urban development. While the experiment serves as a means for modifying urbanism in Bangalore, its results are ambivalent in the context of ongoing inequalities within the city and beyond.

Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1080/21582041.2012.692483

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