Climate transparency and the affective politics of adaptation in Miami

Abstract

ABSTRACT How might feelings toward the future shape how urban climate adaptation happens? I explore this question through the exemplary case of Miami, Florida. Notably, “data-driven, transparent decision-making” on climate change features as a key norm and practice across the city's adaptation efforts — a stark contrast to its longstanding, highly opaque styles of governance. Drawing on theories of affect, anticipatory government, and technopolitics, I argue that the transparency-oriented techniques of Miami adaptation efforts are intended to: (1) generate positive orientations toward the city’s climate-changed future, (2) secure attachments to the city, and (3) preempt unplanned adaptation: sudden, mass property devaluations that will crater the city’s economy and Miami’s ability to weather coming storms. But the positive, economy-securing affective responses that officials seek to engineer are provisional, and have prompted significant pushback and counter demonstrations of climate transparency among activists, residents, and expert publics. In tracing these developments, the paper advances knowledge on (1) the centrality of governing feeling when governing urban climate futures and (2) an emergent, affective sphere of urban climate politics whose features and fissures will become increasingly important in cities around the world.