Neoliberal Urban Environmentalism and the Adaptive City: Towards a Critical Urban Theory and Climate Change

Abstract

This paper explores the potential contribution of critical urban theory to the intellectual and political debates surrounding climate change. While it is possible to identify an emerging strand of critical enquiry concerning the role of cities in facilitating climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, this paper argues that the full implications of critical urban theory to climate change studies have yet to be realised. In this paper, critical urban theory is understood as an approach (or set of approaches) to the city that recognises the contingent form of urban politics and policy, while asserting that, far from being an inevitable and politically neutral process, urbanisation is an expression of intersecting regimes of social power. This paper utilises critical urban theory as a basis for analysing emerging urban climate adaptation strategies. The analysis presented here asserts that contemporary adaptation policies are being framed by neoliberal practices of market-oriented governance, enhanced privatisation and urban environmental entrepreneurialism. This paper exposes some of the key contradictions that are inherent within neoliberalised urban climate change adaptation strategies and suggests how it might be possible to develop more progressive adaptation regimes.

Introduction: From the Carbonisation of the City to the Urbanisation of the Climate

In his recent book Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future, Matthew E. Kahn argues that “Climate change will affect the competitive landscape for cities, and people will be able to choose the winner by voting with their feet” (Kahn, 2010, p. 11).¹ Kahn’s vision frames issues of urbanisation and climate change in a seemingly novel, yet somehow troubling, way. Kahn’s sentiments are troublingly novel in at least two ways. First, is the connection he establishes between climate change and urban competitive advantage. Although the recent work of Hodson and Marvin (2009) has suggested that near-future threats to cities, such as climate change, be understood in relation to the competitive logics of urban ecological security, climate change tends to exist in the popular consciousness as a shared problem, not a basis for differentiated economic accumulation (Rifkin, 2009). Secondly, is the positive association Kahn makes between climate change and urban success. Rightly or wrongly, lay discourses of urban climate change tend to emphasise the costs that climatic shifts will bring to cities, not their associated socioeconomic upside. While seemingly novel and unusual, this paper claims that Kahn’s interpretation of the relationship between urban development and climate change actually reflects the climate change adaptation strategies of many urban authorities, national governments and international agencies. (I will discuss why Kahn’s urban vision of urban climate change adaptation is emblematic of actually existing urban climate change policies later in this paper.) This paper interprets the competitive drive and urban optimism encapsulated by Kahn as part of the established logic of neoliberal urban environmentalism (Bernstein, 2000, 2001; see also Anderson and Leal, 1991; Young, 2002). In broad terms, neoliberal urban environmentalism is best conceived of as a powerful international norm framework, which originated in environmental policy developments during the 1970s and explicitly linked ecological protection with economic growth, market mechanisms and a largely deregulated urban system.

This paper is dedicated to unpacking and critiquing the assumed wisdoms and practices associated with neoliberal urban environmentalism as they are applied to policies of climate change adaptation. The paper focuses on issues of urban climate adaptation for two main reasons. First, and following the emphasis that was placed on enhanced action on adaptation following the thirteenth Conference of the Parties in Bali in 2007, it is becoming clear that urban communities are, to a certain extent, locked-in to the effects of climate change (UNFCCC, 2011, Sect. II; see also McKibbin and Wilcoxen, 2004). Consequently, recent years have seen the metropolitan climate change agenda increasingly blending adaptation measures with mitigation policies (UNFCCC, 2011, sect. II). Secondly, this paper focuses on issues of urban adaptation precisely because the associations between these policy regimes and neoliberal urban environmentalism are often obscured or deliberately obfuscated. While climate change mitigation policies, and associated forms of carbon trading and ecological modernisation, bear the clear marks of neoliberalism, the market-based assumptions associated with adaption are often masked by a rhetoric of urban care, defence and protection.

This paper claims that a crucial step first to identifying these logics and then assessing their likely outcomes, is to consider the broad import of critical urban theory to the study of the so-called climatopolis (Kahn, 2010). An engagement with critical urban theory is important because although the carbonisation of urban policy (see Rice, 2010) and the urbanisation of climate change policy have been enacted, described and critically analysed, only limited attention has been given in this work to the nature of neoliberal urbanisation. This is not, of course, to say that there has not been valuable critical work on urban climate change, but rather that this work has not constituted a critical theory of the urban per se. This paper begins by charting the absence of critical urban theory from work exploring the interface between cities and climate change. Analysis then moves on to consider the nature of critical urban theory and its potential utility to climate change research. The following section charts the neoliberal orthodoxies that appear to be underpinning certain urban climate adaptation strategies. Finally, analysis considers what critical urban theory can tell us about the potential contradictions, injustices and limitations associated with contemporary, market-oriented urban adaptation policies.

Critical Urban Theory and Neoliberal Urban Environmentalism

Climate Change and the Critical Urban Lacuna

It was during the 1990s that the analytical dialogue between climate change and urban studies first began (see Harvey, 1993; Collier, 1997; Lambright et al., 1996). These pioneering analyses were, in part, a response to the emergence of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. They were also, and more importantly, an attempt to gain some analytical perspective on the pre-emptive commitments that were made by progressive urban authorities (such as Toronto City Council) to reducing greenhouse gas emissions over and above national commitments. To these ends, the emergence of what Dhakal and Betsill (2007) term the urban and regional carbon management research community has always been predicated upon two assumptions: the distinctive qualities of the climate change policy regimes that are emerging in cities; and, related to this, that climate change policies do not simply occur in urban space, but are partially transformed by urbanisation.

Despite initial appreciation of the difference that cities appeared to be making to the political economy of climate change, subsequent phases of research on the urban climate change frontier have been characterised by a peculiar loss of metropolitan perspective. The first, pioneering, phase of research served to legitimate the value and importance of the urban perspective to the study of climate change (see Bulkeley, 2000; Bulkeley and Betsill, 2003; DeAngelo and Harvey, 1998; Lambright et al. 1996). The significance of the urban was, in this context, predicated on four premises: the role of cities as intense clusters of energy use and greenhouse gas production; the jurisdictional power of urban authorities to influence and shape policy sectors with relevance to climate protection; the role of city authorities as points of translation and transformation for national and international climate change policy; and, the significant institutional memory that municipal authorities hold in the development and delivery of varied environmental policies (see here Bulkeley and Betsill, 2003; DeAngelo and Harvey, 1998). While this seminal work played a crucial role in establishing the grounds upon which an urban climate change research community could flourish, it tended to position cities as the ontological sites where climate protection policies found practical expression. Such research was thus successful in revealing the significant influence of cities, and varied confederations of urban authorities, in shaping and directing climate protection policies at all scales. It did not, however, develop a critical theoretical perspective on the relationship between urbanisation and climate change policies.

While it is, in many ways, unfair to be overcritical of such pioneering work, its failure to bring to bear theoretical perspectives on urbanisation to climate change studies continues to reverberate in related work today. The problem stems from how the city came to be understood within climate change research in the relative absence of urban theory. It is possible to identify three broad ways in which the ‘urban’ entered climate change research: as a general geographical expression of the socio-political and cultural contexts within which climate change policies and actions were being developed; as a territorial marker by which to label the uneven geographical responses to, and potential impacts of, climate change; and, as a proxy for the variously scaled sub-national, community and local level responses that are emerging to the threats of global warming. The mobilisation of an urban perspective in the first two cases tends to reduce the urban to a territorial device in and through which to identify, and potentially explain, the presence of spatial diversity in responses to climate change. In these instances, the use of urban places serves a similar purpose as would be achieved by the study of provincial locations, or indeed regional and national jurisdictions. Consequently, while these studies helped to spatialise climate change policy, they tell us very little about the dynamic interfaces that exist between urbanisation and climate change. In relation to the third set of approaches, related work has been successful in analysing the multiple scales of governance that operate in and around cities, but less effective in isolating the contemporary economic nature of the urbanisation process.

The first, pioneering, phase of research on cities and climate has been gradually supplemented by more overtly critical approaches. This emerging phase of work has sought to move beyond an analysis of the capacity of urban authorities to shape and implement climate protection policies, in order to assess the actual form and nature of such policy regimes. Actor network theory (Rutland and Aylett, 2008), framing and discourse analysis (Lindseth, 2004), social movement theory (Aylett, 2010a), governmentality (Aylett, 2010b; Slocum, 2004), state theory (Rice, 2010) and theories of governance and multilevel governance (Betsill and Bulkeley, 2007; Bulkeley and Kern, 2006) have consequently now become popular analytics within the field of urban climate change research. Undergirded by the insights of social theory, this body of urban scholarship has developed critical insights into the construction of the urban subjects associated metropolitan climate policy and has exposed the often-obscured socioeconomic assumptions of urban climate governance regimes. Analyses of the Cities for Climate Protection Campaign have, for example, described the ways in which urban climate policies tend to be transformed into a ‘neoliberal buffet of options’ in and through which a metropolitan denizen’s carbon conduct is regulated through a series of consumer-oriented discourses of cost-savings and economic efficiencies (Slocum, 2004, p. 772; see also Bulkeley, 2000; Lindseth, 2004; Rutland and Aylett, 2008). While effectively exposing the limits associated with market-oriented urban climate change policy and neoliberal climatic governmentalities, within these analyses the urban again tends to recede from view. The urban either becomes synonymous with a jurisdictional coalition of governmental and economic interests, or is synonymous with a localised node for the translation and operationalisation of emergent global networks of climatic governmentality.

This paper argues that the key to urbanising climate change research is to engage with the urban as a process of spatial organisation and differentiated development (see Brenner, 2004). Drawing on the work of Harvey, this paper consequently focuses less on the urban as a thing—namely, a spatial concentration of workplaces, homes and infrastructures, with associated political institutions—and more on the urbanisation process (Harvey, 1996, p. 418). On these terms, the city is understood as the spatial manifestation of the complex of economic and political processes (including, inter alia, property markets, global financial flows, coalitions of political interest, gentrification and labour migrations) that shape and condition the urban experience in different cities.

The first steps to interpreting the role of cities within the spatialisation of climate change policy have emerged as part of the more critical phase of analysis outlined earlier. Rice, for example, argues that studying the connections between carbon control and cities is a vital step in understanding the territorialisation of carbon (Rice, 2010, p. 930). According to Rice, the territorialising of carbon within cities operates on two levels. First, it relates to the attribution of territorial responsibility for a set of spatially bounded and quantified carbon-producing activities (p. 930). Secondly, it concerns the newly legitimated ability of urban authorities to reshape the geographies of urban life (including transport infrastructures, neighbourhood designs, regional plans and commercial developments) in response to the threats associated with near-future climate change (p. 932).

The work of While et al. (2010) extends the notion of a territorialised climate polity by connecting the current round of low carbon restructuring with the emergence of a new political space economy in and through which the accumulation of various forms of climate-related investment gets unevenly developed (see also While et al., 2004; While, 2007; Bulkeley et al., 2011). While echoing Rice’s reflections on how the emergence of an urban climate polity reflects the jurisdictional distribution of responsibility for climate mitigation and adaptation, While et al. reveal a broader set of spatial processes associated with the carbonisation of urban policy (Rice, 2010) (including, inter alia, carbon outsourcing and suburban free-riding). Importantly, however, While et al. not only illustrate that a spatial perspective facilitates the development of critical insights into the urban climate polity. They also suggest that the capacity of cities to respond to climate change, and the strategies that urban communities choose to adopt as part of this response, are connected to the past and future spatial form and functioning of the city. Drawing on Harvey’s concept of the spatial fix, While et al. (2004) chart the ways in which climate protection policies (and the principles of sustainable urban development more generally) are shaped (and compromised) by prevailing logics of urban development in ways that allow them to modify urbanisation, but not to challenge the economic pursuits of urban elites and coalitions. Through the concept of the sustainability fix, While et al. reveal two important insights into the eco-carbon restructuring of the urban space economy. First, they illustrate that the extent to which the carbonisation of urban policy can be achieved is pre-conditioned by the structured cohesion upon which the social economy of that place had first emerged (and in particular the specific modes of production, energy mix and spatial form of the city). Secondly, and following Molotch (1976), they argue that, regardless of the extent to which urban polities are climatised, urban carbon control must be synchronised within a seemingly perpetual imperative for urban growth.

Hodson and Marvin’s aforementioned urban ecological security agenda connects the urban spatial fix with a more sinister form of climate protection politics (2009, 2010). This agenda suggests that, in an age of escalating climatic uncertainty and resource constraints, we are seeing the rescaling of environmental security strategies from the national to the urban scale. Hodson and Marvin argue that increasingly powerful networks of world cities (such as the C40 partnership) are sharing socio-technical resources in order to enable them to “anticipate systematically and prepare strategically for a period of constraint” (Hodson and Marvin, 2009, p. 199; original emphasis). The metropolitanisation of ecological security envisaged here connects to issues of climate change to the extent that it involves cities sealing themselves off from the worst effects of climate change, while simultaneously positioning themselves to secure access to dwindling carbon-based energy resources. Crucially, Hodson and Marvin see the urban ecological security agenda to be primarily about the strategic reconfiguration of the spatial form and infrastructural fabric of the city. While Hodson and Marvin’s rather eschatological vision of an urban security end-game, involving ‘an archipelago of transcendent urbanism’, may be overstating the case, the new era of urban ecological entrepreneurialism they chart provides a key context within which to start to build critical urban theories of climate change (see also Hodson and Marvin, 2010). The work of Hodson and Marvin also moves the analysis of urban climate change away from the study of cities as merely sites of climate change policies and towards a concern with the processes of international interurban competition and development which are driving urbanisation.

Critical Urban Theories of Climate Change: Neoliberal Urban Environmentalism and its Contradictions

The work of Rice, While et al., and Hodson and Marvin provides a valuable starting-point from which to think about what a critical urban theory of climate change may involve. In this section, I want to build on this body of work in order to establish the key features/objectives of a more generalisable critical urban theory of climate change. A useful starting-point in this endeavour is provided by Brenner (2009) in his recent essay, ‘What is critical urban theory?’. Drawing on Lefebvre, (Herbert) Marcuse and Habermas, inter alia, Brenner states that

Critical urban theory rejects inherited disciplinary divisions of labour and statist, technocratic, market-driven and market-oriented forms of urban knowledge … Rather than affirming the current conditions of cities as the expression of transhistorical laws of social organization, rationality or economic efficiency, critical urban theory emphasizes the politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore malleable character of urban space (Brenner, 2009, p. 198).

While many may question the (neo-Marxian) political orientation of Brenner’s particular vision of critical urban theory, his definition helps to delimit a common set of purposes, which appear to differentiate critical urban scholars from their positivist counterparts. First and foremost, by recognising that critical urban studies is an interdisciplinary project, Brenner asserts that being an urbanologist does not just involve the study of cities as ontological locations, but requires analysing them as bundles of political and economic processes that transcend metropolitan space. While this process-based reading of the city is a well-established Marxist theme, Brenner’s positioning of the current urban condition within the governing orthodoxies and market logics of neoliberalism is crucial (see also Brenner and Theodore, 2002). While current work on urban climate change often positions cities within the meta context of neoliberal orthodoxy, neoliberalism itself tends to remain a relatively unproblematised and undifferentiated explanatory category. A second implication of Brenner’s definition is that critical urban theory is about revealing how urbanism could be different. Consequently, while neoliberalism may provide the differentiated context within which the current round of urbanisation is being forged, critical urban theory is devoted to illustrating how and why urbanisation could be different. According to Brenner, this dedication to urban contingency leads to critical urban theory’s commitment to abstraction and the study of contradiction. The “unapologetically abstract” form of critical urban theory derives from the need to think through alternate, optimal urban conditions (Brenner, 2009, p. 201). The desire to excavate and explore contradiction, on the other hand, is an enduring legacy of the urban Marxist tradition (see here Merrifield, 2002). As with the process of normative abstraction, the exploration of contradictions is an important part of the methodology of critical urban theory because it exposes weaknesses in the totalising practices associated with urban capitalism and illustrates both the need and potential for organising urban space economies in different ways (Brenner, 2009, pp. 199–200).

Brenner (2009, p. 201) asserts that critical urban theory’s commitment to abstraction and the study of contradictions facilitates “The search for emancipatory alternatives latent within the present” urban condition. This paper asserts that it is neoliberalism that now delimits the present urban condition and the conditions of possibility for the climatisation of urban policy. Brenner himself provides a useful insight into the impacts of neoliberalism on the imagination and enactment of different paths of urban development when he observes that

The nature of the structural constraints on emancipatory forms of social change, and the associated imagination of alternatives to capitalism, have been qualitatively transformed through the acceleration of integration, the intensified financialization of capital, the crisis of the post-war model of welfare state intervention, the still on-going neoliberalization of state forms and the deepening planetary ecological crisis (Brenner, 2009, p. 205).

What we are currently witnessing is thus an urban order that is being conditioned by the emerging ecological crisis of the global climate, and an urban climate polity that is being framed by a neoliberal system of market-oriented governance (Sassen, 2010).

If critical urban theory leads climate change research towards neoliberal urban studies, precautions must be taken to ensure that this does not become a simplifying marriage of epistemological convenience. Most obviously, caution must be taken to ensure that neoliberalism does not become a unifying final instance through which all of the problems associated with climate change and protection get explained (see Ong, 2006, 2007). The problematic conceptual overreach associated with neoliberalism is now well established (see Brenner et al., 2010; Peck, 2010). Conceptual genealogies and empirical studies alike reveal that neoliberalism is characterised by too much internal diversity to act as a master concept for either climate change or contemporary urbanisation (Peck, 2010). Furthermore, it appears that the diverse (and even hypocritical) forms taken by so-called neoliberal practices may reflect the “systematic production of geoinstitutional differentiation”, which is inherent to the experimental form and opportunistic nature of neoliberalism (Brenner et al., 2010, p. 184; Evans, 2011; Peck, 2007). In this context, it is helpful to think of neoliberalism as

a politically guided intensification of market rule and commodification … simultaneously intensifying the uneven development of regulatory forms across places, territories and scale (Brenner et al., 2010, p. 184).

Acknowledging the variegated nature of neoliberalisation (as opposed to neoliberalism in the singular) helps to draw attention to the periodic contradictions it encounters and how these challenges are partially resolved—namely, through a process of geographically dispersed trial and experimentation. According to Peck (2010, p. xviii), “the reinvention of neoliberal practices often occurs, in fact, at the limits of the process of neoliberalization”. It is the contention of this paper that the carbonisation of urban policy reflects not only a form of policy that is responding to a fundamental ecological limitation to neoliberal practice, but one that is still conditioned by the logics and strictures of evolving systems of neoliberalisation. To be more precise, it is argued later in this paper that urban climate change policy reflects a response to the limits of neoliberalism that is not a product merely of the overaccumulation of capital, but of the overaccumulation of carbon in the atmosphere. It is further claimed that, as with previous crises of neoliberalism, this is a problem whose solution is being pursued through the utilisation of new (ecological) circuits of capital accumulation and spatially differentiated development (see Bumpus and Liverman, 2008).

A second reason for caution relates to the dangers of depicting—even in a variegated form—neoliberalism as a kind of external force that is driving and conditioning urbanisation throughout the world. The problem with this type of perspective is that it tends to locate neoliberalism in Western international institutions (like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank), think tanks and market systems. From these centres, neoliberalism is seen to radiate out for replication and repetition in the cities of Africa, central and eastern Europe, South Asia, south-east Asia and Latin America. Paralleling this process, Roy identifies how critical urban theory can follow the purported spread of neoliberalism, and offer explanations of urbanisation throughout the world, which are predicated on the assumptions of a Western theoretical heartland (Roy, 2009). The challenge then becomes how to apply effectively a critical urban theory which is oriented towards a critique of the neoliberalisation of the urban climate agenda, while not neglecting the particular and varied forms of urbanisation that are being experienced throughout the world. Roy (2009, p. 822) suggests that theorising the 21st-century city will increasingly depend on an ability to locate urban theory within the particularities of diverse metropolitan contexts (perhaps allowing for the prominent role of insurgent citizenship in Latin American urbanism, or the glocalisation strategies of East Asian cities), while simultaneously ensuring the dis-location of urban theory. According to Roy (2009, p. 822), the dis-location of urban theory allows urban thought to “far exceed[s] its geographical origins” and speak to common themes that frame urbanisation around the world. In relation to a critical urban theory of climate change, Roy’s perspective is particularly pertinent. As is discussed in greater detail later, the informalised production of urban space, which is so common in rapidly urbanising areas of the global South, has important, if often ambiguous, relations with both climate change policy and systems of neoliberal responsibilisation (Roy, 2009, p. 826; Solnit, 2009). How such urban processes are analysed within a critical urban theory of climate change provides an important context within which to test the ability of such theories concurrently to locate and dis-locate the urban processes they encounter.

If, as this paper suggests, a key objective of a critical urban theory of climate change is the ability to connect metropolitan climate change policy to the varied practices of neoliberalisation, Bernstein’s notion of liberal environmentalism provides a useful empirical and conceptual starting-point for analysis. According to Bernstein, the liberal environmental norm complex emerged during the 1970s out of struggles between the UN, the OECD and the World Bank over the nature of the connections between environmental protection and international economic development. Due in large part to the increasing influence of the OECD within the United Nations Environmental Programme, liberal environmentalism emerged as a compromise between environmental policy and emerging neoliberal orthodoxies. Bernstein states that

liberal environmentalism supports liberalization in trade and finance as consistent with (even necessary for) global environmental protection. It promotes sustainable economic growth, free trade, privatization of the commons and the use of market-based or other economic mechanisms (for example, tradable pollution permits, cost benefit analysis) as the preferred means of environmental management (Bernstein, 2000, p. 474).

It is the contention of this paper that the normalised economic orthodoxies of liberal environmentalism continue to inform and shape urban climate change policy in the second decade of the 21st century. The normalisation of this agenda, as well as its inherent protean form, has undoubtedly contributed to it being routinely neglected as an object of analysis within work on urban climate change. The remainder of this paper analyses emerging urban climate adaptation policies in the context of what I term a neoliberal urban environmental norm complex. Neoliberal urban environmentalism is best conceived of as the urbanised expression, but also driver, of early 21st-century liberal environmentalisms.

A Critical Urban Theory of Enhanced Urban Adaptation

Having established the need for, and nature of, a critical urban theory of climate change, this section considers the utility of this approach to the study of urban climate change adaptation. This paper focuses on issues of urban adaptation for three reasons. First, because there has been a recent prioritisation of climate change adaptation within international and metropolitan-level policy communities (UNFCCC, 2011, sect. II; see also McKibbin and Wilcoxen, 2004). Secondly, relative to the study of urban climate change mitigation, adaptation is a relatively neglected aspect of urban policy (see Byrne et al., 2009; Newman et al., 2008). Thirdly, in keeping with mitigation policies (particularly those associated with cap and trade, personal carbon budgets and off-sets), climate adaptation strategies have been subject to neoliberalisation. Although this paper does, ultimately, suggest that critical urban theory (as defined earlier) can be applied to the study of both urban climate mitigation and adaptation, this section shows that care must be taken not to develop an undifferentiated account of these connected, but distinct, processes. Climate change mitigation and adaptation measures do, for example, present very different opportunities and obstacles to the marketisaton process (with adaptation measures often proving very difficult to commercialise in their early stages of development). Initially, it considers the emerging forms of urban adaptation policy. This section then develops a critical urban analysis of the contemporary adaptive city and reflects upon what such a perspective tells us about the nature of contemporary urban climate proofing.

Automatic Adaptability, Urban Reinvention and the Neoliberal Agenda

According to Adger et al., adaptation to climate change is best conceived of as

an adjustment in ecological, social or economic systems in response to the observed or expected changes in climatic stimuli and their effects and impacts in order to alleviate adverse impacts of change or take advantage of new opportunities (Adger et al., 2005, p. 78).

Two important dimensions of (urban) adaptation practice are highlighted in this definition. First, is the fact that adaptation policy can be either a response to the perceived threats posed by predicted climate change and/or the reaction of communities to the material manifestation of climate change (the United Nations uses the terms anticipatory and reactionary adaptation to describe this distinction, UNFCCC, 2007, p. 31; see also Smith et al. 1998; Tol et al. 1998). This point is not incidental, as it emphasises that we can look for adaptive policy responses to climate change both within the predictive realms of anticipatory urbanism (Hodson and Marvin, 2009) and the aftermath of climatic shocks to city-systems (see Solnit, 2009). The second point of note is that urban climatic adaptation can embody forms of metropolitan triage and defence, but also offer the basis for the more sanguine development of competitive urban advantage.

Adger et al. draw attention to another important distinction in the nature of climate change adaptation. They claim that

Adaptation can involve both building adaptive capacity thereby increasing the ability of individuals, groups, or organizations to adapt to changes, and implementing adaptation decisions (Adger et al., 2005, p. 78; see also Adger et al., 2006).

In this sense, it is possible to see urban climatic adaptation policy operating to reconstitute the responsive subjectivities of urban residents in order that they can help themselves (and others around them) more effectively, and in relation to the provision of new collective systems and infrastructure that enable a city to operate under changed climatic conditions.

It is not difficult to see the natural synergies that exist between urban adaptation policy and neoliberal development orthodoxies. As a “politically guided intensification of market rule and commodification” (Brenner et al., 2010, p. 184), neoliberalisation has consistently valorised adaptation (and Hayekian processes of spontaneity) as a necessary response mechanism to market signals and a driver of economic innovation and efficiency. Indeed, as Peck (2010, p. xi) observes, the protean nature of neoliberalism itself, is in part wedded to its constitution as an “adaptive form of regulatory practice”. Notwithstanding these synergies, there is no reason why urban climate adaptation has to take a neoliberal form. The following quote is taken from the Cancun Adaptation Framework (p. 4), which was adopted by the United Nations in 2010

enhanced action on adaptation should be undertaken in accordance with the convention, should follow a country-driven, gender-sensitive, participatory and fully transparent approach, taking into consideration vulnerable groups, communities and eco-systems, and should be based on and guided by the best available science and, as appropriate, traditional and indigenous knowledge.

This vision of a people-centred adaptation programme, which utilises indigenous know-how and historical practices to guide climate adaptation, has potentially little to do with market-oriented adaptation strategies. This does raise the question of precisely what neoliberal forms of adaptation policy would involve and whether these are actually the strategies that are being favoured by urban authorities.

A useful starting point in attempting to delimit what neoliberal forms of urban climate adaptation may involve is Kahn’s aforementioned manifesto for market-led urban climate policy, Climatopolis (see also Glaeser, 2009). In this book Kahn states that

we’ll be ‘saved’ by a multitude of self-interested people armed only with their wits and access to capitalist markets … a small cadre of forward-looking entrepreneurs will be ready to get rich selling the next generation of products that will help us to adapt (Kahn, 2010, pp. 7 and 13).

Kahn’s sanguine expectations reflect the adaptation equivalent of what Davis has described as “spontaneous decarbonization” (Davis, 2010, pp. 31–34). According to Davis, spontaneous decarbonisation is a neoliberal assumption that is built into most international climate change mitigation strategies. It essentially suggests that, provided the right market conditions exist, reductions in greenhouse gas production will emerge as part of the natural evolution of the international economy. What Kahn is essentially envisaging is a form of spontaneous climatic adaptation. All that is needed for this new era of automatic adaptation² to exist is a free market economy, which can generate the necessary incentives for the widespread accumulation of adaptive capital. The notion of automatic adaptation also indicates the broader economic structures associated with a neoliberal response to urban climate change. Ergo, for the right incentives to exist for self-initiating urban adaptation, interurban competition, preferably at a global scale, is essential. It is, after all, only in the context of such competition that clear forms of advantage can accrue to certain adaptation entrepreneurs, who can then marshal the flow of international investment into urban economies to ensure that these advantages are capitalised upon. Furthermore, this is an urban adaptation system that is based upon predominantly private not public financial investment. Kahn’s vision prioritises private investment because, unlike public funding, it is much more likely to cross national boundaries in search of the most (cost-) effective techniques for adaptation. Kahn argues that public funding is more likely to act to distort the adaptation of the market (particularly through its inflation-inducing potential), fail to pick up on market signals, while also potentially underwriting reinvestment in climatically hazardous zones through acts of disaster relief and climatic Keynesianism (Kahn, 2010, p. 28; see also Malanga, 2011).

Kahn launches a further invective against the (unspontaneous) public funding of urban adaptation measures when he observes that

The urban poor do not have the resources to protect themselves, and their nations’ federal and local governments are often unable and unwilling to devote the financial resources to protect them. Faced with this reality, their best coping strategy is to grow richer so that they can protect themselves (Kahn, 2010, pp. 79–80).

We will return to the issue of why urban public bodies may not be able to afford to protect people from the affects of climate change shortly, but for now Kahn’s reflection serves to illustrate the final variable in the neoliberalist adaptation agenda: the necessity of continued economic growth and wealth creation. While green entrepreneurs may lead the way in generating wealth from urban adaptation, it appears that it is beholden on everyone to grow richer in order to facilitate the forms of individualised climate adjustment we may need to make. Kahn is silent on the precise nature of this mass process of wealth production and whether it will ultimately contribute to an aggregate worsening of the climate change problem. Even ignoring this silence, it is difficult not to feel here that wealth production has more to do with the ability personally to insulate oneself from the impacts of climate change as opposed to facilitating new forms of collective adaptive innovation.

Care must obviously be taken in utilising Kahn’s account of automated neoliberal adaptation strategies. First, as a strong advocate of a neoclassical, Chicago School vision of neoliberal development,³ Kahn is an all too easy target for an urban theoretical critique of market-based climate proofing practices. If, as has been previously argued, neoliberalism is both a variegated and variegating set of economic and political practices, it would be misleading to think that exposing the contradictions within one, relatively purist, account of a neoliberal urban order can operate as a generalised critique of all related policy. The other reason for caution is that Kahn’s vision of the road away from climate change serfdom may not be reflected in the adaptation policies that are currently being developed in cities. The interesting thing, however, is that even a cursory glance at prominent urban climate change adaptation policies reveals the pivotal role that Kahnian parameters play in their construction and constitution. Hodson and Marvin’s (2009) analysis of the C40 cities’ programme of climate protection, for example, suggests that Kahn’s vision of urban liberal environmental is an undergirding principle of this major international partnership. In the 2011 Global report on C4D cities, Kahn’s sentiments are echoed in the description of the “marketing potential” of urban climate protection policies as a basis for informing the locational decisions of risk-averse businesses (KPMG, 2011, p. 28).

In order to understand more fully the neoliberal dimensions of urban climate adaptation policies, it is helpful to explore a more detailed case study. Let us take, as a prominent example, the contemporary work of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (now known as ICLEI). As an association of 1220 local government bodies who are dedicated to the pursuit of locally constituted forms of sustainable development, the ICLEI is by no means a bastion of neoliberal orthodoxy. The ICLEI also acts as the organisational hub of the Cities for Climate Protection Campaign.⁴ In their recent publication, Financing the resilient city (ICLEI, 2011a), the ICLEI set out their approach to delivering enhanced urban adaptation in cities. This report is premised on the ICLEI’s estimate that of the US$80–100 billion per year investment that is likely to have to flow into climate change adaptation schemes, approximately 80 per cent of this spending will be directed to urban areas. On these terms, the ICLEI claim that the key challenge to urban adaptation is one of finance. The ICLEI goes on to assert that

By focusing solely on risk reduction rather than on the broader, revenue-generating opportunities for investment, little incentive is created to attract private investment into adaptation and other risk reduction projects (ICLEI, 2011b, p. 3).

By connecting urban adaptation with “revenue-generating opportunities”, the ICLEI clearly envisages a shift from a form of eco-Keynesian, public realm of urban climate protection, to a marketplace of investor-friendly schemes and initiatives.

According to the ICLEI’s vision, the key to producing a favourable environment for adaptation investment is the reformulation of the urban planning process. Urban planning systems are crucial to the formation of a marketplace for urban adaptation measures primarily because such adaptation measures do not always carry clear profit margins. According to the ICLEI, urban planners must address the problems of land consolidation, complex historical tenure arrangements and liens in order to make it easier for private investment to flow into the brownfield sites that are likely to require adaptive redevelopment (ICLEI, 2011a, p. 33; see also World Bank, 2008).⁵ In addition to facilitating an appropriate spatial economy of scale for private-sector adaptation investment, the ICLEI claim that planning systems need to be flexible enough to allow for the “creative disaggregation” and “rebundling” of utilities (like sewerage networks, roads, energy supply grids), so that profits can be found in the adaptive retrofit of more vulnerable branches of metropolitan network (ICLEI, 2011a, p. 35). While the segmentation of urban infrastructure is nothing new (see Graham and Marvin, 2001, pp. 138–177; Curien, 1997), it appears that the need for climate change adaptation may well accelerate processes of spatial fragmentation within the city, as the uneven commercial potential of utility and infrastructure networks is worked out.

Beyond the planning system, the ICLEI also sees municipal authorities having a broader role in facilitating the marketisation of the adaptive city. At one level, this involvement involves setting tariff systems that can effectively price the risk mitigation services and asset performance associated with adaptation programmes. As many adaptation measures do not have an automatically tradable value, municipal authorities may need to raise rates and support the increase in property rents in investment areas. In the ICLEI programme, municipal authorities also have a role to play in the development of catastrophe bonds and insurance securities that can cover the liabilities of private-sector investment that is flowing into climatically risky areas (ICLEI, 2011a).

When considered in a holistic sense, the ICLEI urban adaptation programme not only embodies many of the core principles of neoliberal urban environmentalism, but also serves to illustrate how the reduction of climatic risk in the city is preceded by a state-sponsored risk reduction programme that is designed to protect the interests of international investment capital. Again, there is nothing new about the state supporting the provision of the types of collective consumption services (such as parks, schools and affordable housing) for which there is no immediate market incentive (see Castells, 1977; Merrifield, 2002, pp. 118–121). Contemporary urban adaptation strategies, however, appear to involve more than the public sector “prop[ping] up the profitability rates” (Merrifield, 2002, p. 118) of local commercial agents in the city (by provisioning the collective services they require to function). They embody the production of a form of adaptive commodity (whether in the form of flood defences, heat mitigation capacity or the provision of green infrastructure), which can subsidise economic production locally and be converted in a direct commercial profit at an international scale.

Critical Perspectives on the Adaptive City

Having outlined the logics and practices associated with a neoliberalised approach to urban climatic adaptation, it is important to establish precisely what critical urban theory can bring to its analysis. In considering this proposition, it is useful to divide the contribution of critical urban theory into two distinct categories: analyses of adaptation planning for future climatic change; and analyses of actual responses to climate change related, or proxy, events. In relation to both categories of analysis, critical urban theory operates at the intersection of the study of urban form and process, and ultimately seeks to reveal the forces which structure urban policy and expose the contradictions of urban development strategies.

Let us first turn to the analysis of adaptation planning for future climatic change events. As the previous section indicated, it appears that two of the key challenges facing urban authorities attempting to achieve effective forms of adaptation are raising the necessary funds to support related restructuring, and developing a planning system that it able to deal with the complex land use barriers that are likely to inhibit adaptation measures. It is interesting that such challenges appear to lead naturally to the kinds of neoliberal solutions to urban adaptation proposed by both Kahn and the ICLEI. Critical urban theory, however, immediately raises the possibility that already existing neoliberalism is actually the source of the financial and planning problems confronting adaptation regimes rather than the basis for their resolution.

A useful starting-point in testing this hypothesis is the Municipal Price Index (MPI). The MPI monitors the changing costs associated with the day-to-day operations of a city. To these ends, it is the urban equivalent of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which tracks the changing prices that households pay for goods (Ducet, 2007, p. 20). Crucially, the MPI is currently increasing at 2.5 times the rate of the CPI (Ducet, 2007, p. 20). According to Ducet, one of the reasons that the MPI is outpacing the CPI is because of the significant role of energy in any municipal budget and the fact that wholesale energy prices have been rapidly increasing. Yet the growth in the MPI is also connected to the emerging logics of neoliberal urban economies. At one level, the rising cost of running cities has increased as a product of the property-based sprawl and expansion of cities (see Molotch, 1976). The liberalisation of housing markets and mortgage systems has enabled the metropolitan property market to be greatly extended. The subsequent acceleration of urban growth regimes over the past 50 years has seen the costs of municipal road building and utility provision spiral. In another context, the emergence of just-in-time urbanism, classically associated with new forms of neoliberal flexibility in the delivery of goods and services to consumers, has also necessitated the building and maintenance of extended and costly infrastructure networks (see Ducet, 2007, pp. 25–27). Taken together, these changes in the secondary (property-based) and primary (goods and services) circuits of urban capitalism have embodied the spatial expression of the escalating market-based visions of a neoliberal society. In terms of urban climatic change policies, such long-term processes have placed great strain on municipal budgets and have made it impractical for urban governments to contemplate covering the costs of adaptation.

The irony of this situation is that, while the logics of liberalised urban development have accelerated climate change, the financial strictures associated with neoliberalism have also placed urban municipalities in situations which make protecting themselves from climatic changes increasingly difficult to fund. While it is not unusual for the crisis tendencies of neoliberalisation to provide the basis for the reinvention of neoliberalisms (see Peck, 2010), it is surely problematic to think that further rounds of neoliberalisation can address the neoliberal origins of the urban climate change problematic. On these terms, it appears that contemporary urban mitigation and adaptation policies are as much about the search for a tertiary circuit of ecological accumulation, into which the overaccumulation crises of existing circuits of capital can be temporarily displaced, as they are about addressing the dangers of climate change.

Further contradictions in the neoliberal adaptation agenda emerge when analysis turns to the likely socioeconomic impacts of related policies. If, as the ICLEI report suggests, urban climatic adaptation is likely to incur financial costs that will outstrip the capacity of municipal (and for that matter national public) funds, it appears that the threats of climate change could well lead to a new round of privatisation within the city. Due to the uncertain nature of the emergent markets and associated profit margins related to adaptation initiatives, it is likely that such acts of privatisation (linked to large programmes of civil engineering and defence, as well as smaller retro-fit initiatives) will not only expose municipal authorities to heightened private-sector competition, but also to the dangers of private-sector failure (particularly in relation to municipal authorities underwriting private-sector risk). Urban adaptation regimes will increasingly see public bodies not only devolving responsibility to private-sector agents for the delivery of collective services, but also witness them becoming increasingly connected to the formation of favourable conditions for the generation of an urban adaptation market. By underwriting private-sector investment in adaptation schemes through the issuing of bonds and securities, urban authorities could find themselves increasingly exposed to financial loss even in an era of enhanced privatisation.

Acts of enhanced privatisation are also likely to lead to other adverse socioeconomic consequences. The ‘creative disaggregation’ and ‘rebundling’ of utilities, and the acts of forensic-level privatistion this is likely to be associated with, will lead to the formation of increasingly fragmented urban service delivery systems whose co-ordination in times of climatic stress may become more difficult (see Comfort, 2006). In relation to property development and redevelopment, the pursuit of enhanced rates, rental and sale value in adaptation areas will undoubtedly lead to fairly aggressive forms of climatological gentrification. As Hodson and Marvin (2009) have already pointed out, it is likely that such processes of climatological gentrification will operate not only at the urban scale, with climate-proofed locales of the city becoming more desirable and costly locations in which to live, but also at an interurban scale, with climate secure cities (often in temperate, non-coastal locations) becoming increasingly unaffordable for low-income residents (see While et al., 2010).

In addition to exposing the contradictions, and potential injustices, associated with the neoliberal development of adaptation capacity in cities, critical urban theory can also contribute to analysing responses to climate change events. A well-documented case in point is provided by the impacts of Hurricane Katrina on urban policy and planning in New Orleans (see Peck, 2010, 2006; Comfort, 2006). While it is impossible to draw a direct line of scientific causation between Hurricane Katrina and anthropogenic climate change, it can clearly act as an example of what extreme weather events, which are predicted to become more frequent as global average temperatures rise, could do to major cities. Post-Katrina New Orleans also reveals what a neoliberal response to climatic disaster could involve. Hurricane Katrina provided an opportunity for what Peck (2010, p. 176) has described as the “neoliberal counterintelligensia” to colonise New Orleans as a tabula rasa for market-oriented governance and entrepreneurial zeal. A crucial dimension in this colonisation process was to associate the failure of New Orleans’s physical and organisational infrastructure with the flaws of ‘Cajun Keynesianism’ and the cultures of social dependency and poverty it had maintained (Peck, 2010, p. 165). The proposed solution to New Orleans’s climatic vulnerability became the formation of an entrepreneurial city, based upon the rolling back of environmental restrictions on economic activity, tax breaks, the introduction of a newly competitive landscape in the education system and new restrictions being imposed on public entitlement programmes (see Peck, 2010, pp. 158–165).

Peck (2010, p. 179) has described the neoliberal response to Hurricane Katrina as a “contracted-out urban structural adjustment”, but at heart it reflects the nostrum of spontaneous adaptation that runs deep within the urban climate change agenda. This is an orthodoxy that suggests the key to effective urban adaptation is the marshalling of urban environmental entrepreneurialism. All that is needed to unleash this creative climatic class, it would appear, is the removal of cultures of governmental dependency and disincentive. It is, of course, not difficult to see how these beliefs are exploiting the practices and discourses of informality that are associated with many rapidly growing cities in South America, south Asia and Africa. Informality, in this context, becomes associated with a form of intuitive adaptation, which is low cost and self-regulating. What such neoliberal visions neglect, however, is that rarely is climatic necessity the mother of instant adaptive invention and that spontaneous capacity is often prefigured by long-term patterns of relative social and economic advantage both between cities and people.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that a critical urban theory of climate change offers crucial insights into the nature and potential injustices associated with the carbonising metropolis. At the centre of this endeavour has been a desire to illustrate that the contribution of urban studies to climate change can be much more than simply offering a spatial perspective on climate change policy development. As with many other social science disciplines (including economics, politics, psychology, anthropology, geography and cultural studies), climate change has presented new challenges and opportunities for the urban studies community. This paper has claimed, however, that the climatisation of urban studies has been associated with a peculiar loss of the urban perspective within related research (this is somewhat akin to a psychological perspective on climate change that ignored the human mind). While the reasons for this lacuna are unclear (although one senses they may have something to do with the norms of analytical urgency and policy relevance that suffuse the climate change research community), it is clear that it has severely circumscribed what urban studies has so far been able to contribute to the climate change debate.

Critical urban theory emphasises the contingent form which urbanisation takes, while drawing attention to ways in which cities are shaped at the intersections of particular expressions of political and economic power. In relation to climate change, we have seen how critical urban theory reveals that the carbonisation of urban policy does not only occur in urban jurisdictions, but is actively shaped and conditioned by the evolving spatial logics of urbanisation. At one and the same time, however, critical urban theory also connects urban climate change policy to the processes of international market exchange, financial investment and competition associated with neoliberalism. This paper has illustrated the natural synergies that exist between neoliberalisation and adaptive climatic practice. The emerging emphasis that is being placed on automatic (or autonomous) adaptation is prioritising the construction of international markets in, and commodities for, climatic adaptation. In this way, the construction of a particular neoliberal vision of how urban adaptation occurs is itself necessitating the production of the neoliberal structures that are required for this vision to be realised. Critical urban theory helps to the reveal the contradictions associated with this process of neoliberal urban adaptation. However, the limitations associated with automatic climatic adaptation have already begun to be exposed in far less radical contexts. The UK government’s 2006 Stern review: the economics of climate change has, for example, suggested that the relatively long-term nature of the threats associated with climate change may make it very difficult to generate consumer demand for adaptive investment and commodities (Stern et al., 2006, p. 412).

A final contribution of critical urban theory is its commitment to envisaging alternative strategies for achieving effective and just forms of adaptation (see here Adger et al., 2006). A key part of this process is distinguishing between urban adaptation as a series of competitive assets and its potential role as a basis for socio-ecological redistribution and compensation. Given the clear limitations of, and contradictions associated with, the competitively oriented approach to adaption, it is clearly important to consider more progressive and collective approaches to climate proofing. Of course, many of these forms of compensatory adaptation strategies already exist at an international level. The work of the United National Global Environmental Facility’s Trust Fund, Special Climate Change Fund and Least Developed Countries Fund already redistributes investment from the global North into the adaptive capacities of developing communities (UNFCCC, 2007). At a more local level, Transition Culture initiatives, the Degrowth Movement and urban repair squads are beginning to construct and realise radical communitarian approaches to urban adaptation and care (Mason and Whitehead, 2012). Crucially, many of these local initiatives are founded upon open participation and voluntary association, which work against neoliberal accusations of climatic coercion and associated declines in personal freedom. It is important to note here that many of these initiatives (and ones like them) currently operate alongside more neoliberal adaptive capacities in a series of cities and urban spaces. It has, for example, become increasingly apparent that urban authorities, in the UK at least, are keen to amalgamate the insights of Transition Culture into more mainstream policy initiatives. In any given city, it thus is clear that the urban adaptation agenda reflects something of an amalgam of more-or-less progressive, more-or-less market-oriented governance. Notwithstanding the success of more progressive initiatives, however, it appears unlikely that they will be able to close the adaption capacity gap that the neoliberal assault on urban public funding has produced. This is a gap that even a tax-based system of enhanced public investment in (profitable and unprofitable) urban adaptation measures cannot close. This is precisely why the politics of urban adaptation needs to be constructed not as a struggle for short-term help and financial assistance (from any available source), but as a process that contests the very logics of neoliberal urbanisation (and its affects on collective resources and public funds, not to mention global climates). Climate change is reconfiguring urban politics and it is critical that neoliberal anticipatory elites are not able to exploit the urban future as a basis for controlling the metropolitan present.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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