Abstract
This paper presents an analysis of contradictions in urban low carbon transitions as engines of change. Following Kojève's reading of contradiction in Hegel's oeuvre, I argue that contradiction is a constitutive feature of low carbon interventions. This is an alternative to conventional readings of contradiction as a provisional encounter of opposites in which one will eventually cancel out the other. I unpack the concept of contra diction in three ways: first, by displaying a Hegelian-inspired understanding of contradiction in relation to change, time, and desire; second, by explaining how inherent contradictions can also be read in relation to the excesses that characterize the deployment of methods of calculation in low carbon interventions; and third, by situating these contradictions within the overall dynamics of carbon governance and purposive attempts to bring about a low carbon transition. The paper explores the practical implications of this analysis in a case of low carbon interventions in social housing in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The case study shows that, if contradictions are at the heart of low carbon interventions, contradiction analysis may provide a direction towards broader reconfigurations of social and technological practices and generate a desire to change.
Highlights
In January 2014 a leaked climate change report written by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, the IPCC, made news by stating that failing to address climate change in the fifteen years would make the problem impossible to solve (The Guardian 2014)
Municipal initiatives to educate residents negate their life practices while residents negate municipal efforts to improve the living conditions in their homes. This is a contradiction that points towards the need to redefine the institutional relationship between the Fund and residents to move beyond a tenancy model that reproduces the spatial separation between the public responsibility for refurbishing the building and the private responsibility for the protection of the individual home as a consumer space. Why is it important to look at contradiction as a constitutive part of urban carbon interventions and as an engine to change? Contradiction is inscribed in knowledge systems dominated by ideal representations of concrete reality and by their relationship with base matter
The binary opposition which marks the contradiction emerges in relation to wider discursive dichotomies associated, for example, with the cultural representation of social agents and materialities
Summary
Kojève argued that contradictions in human history generated a desire for change that mediated utopian aspirations and concrete action. These examples show how contradiction unfolds in low carbon transitions associated with the dynamics of purposeful change, and embedded in heterogeneous assemblages of narratives and resources that make interventions possible.
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