What is 'Cosmic' about Urban Climate Politics?

Anders Blok

doi:10.23987/sts.84500

Abstract

While Bruno Latour's criticism of Ulrich Beck's cosmopolitanism helped set the stage 15 years ago for the highly productive research approach of cosmopolitics, including as concerns urban ecological politics, a nagging doubt remains that more blood was spilled than necessary in the exchange. In this short discussion piece, I re-stage the Latour-Beck debate as part of on-going inquiries into the more-than-human politics of climate adaptation in Copenhagen, exploring what exact senses of 'cosmos' might be helpful in making sense of this increasingly common-place situation. At issue, I suggest, is the question of what it means to say that ‘natures’, in the plural, are put at stake in such settings. Far from any synthesis, in turn, I conclude that scholars in STS and beyond might do well to extend a shared hesitation towards both sides of the debate - cosmopolitics, cosmopolitanism - and thus take the opportunity to share unresolved conceptual tensions in the service of posing better problems.

Highlights

In any specific situation of urban ecological politics, I wonder, how readily can we tell just how many ‘natures’, in the plural, are put at stake in collective disputes, what they are and where they come from? How do we know, when practices and settlements pertain or not to one, common cosmos?. In this short discussion piece, I briefly sketch the key conceptual stakes of the Latour-Beck exchange and relate this to my empirical interest in urban ecological politics in times of worldwide climate crises, a domain I consider important for STS inquiry (Blok, 2013)
Despite popular meta-narratives of an Anthropocene era, just how the planetary of climate change comes to matter in any specific situation of ecological dispute, urban or otherwise, cannot be conceptually foreclosed through some notion of the common cosmos
In Latourian multi-naturalism, as noted, the common ground of cosmopolitics is conceptualized as the always-provisional end-point of a politics of multiple urban worlds, understood in ontological terms of heterogenous human-nonhuman assemblages

Summary

Introduction

In this short discussion piece, I briefly sketch the key conceptual stakes of the Latour-Beck exchange and relate this to my empirical interest in urban ecological politics in times of worldwide climate crises, a domain I consider important for STS inquiry (Blok, 2013). I do so with a view to raising a few questions about the precise sense in which this politics is ‘cosmic’, yet perhaps in ways not fully captured by neither Latour nor Beck.1 My conceptual re-staging is fed by a limited, even parochial piece of quasi-ethnographic work into recent more-than-human politics in my native city of Copenhagen, focused on civic attempts to accommodate a climate-perturbed future of more and heavier rains.

Results

Conclusion