ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that understanding the urban politics of climate change requires examining the ways in which the socio-technical and socio-ecological configurations that make up the city are being reordered and aligned with new forms of climate change governmentality. It problematizes the geography of low carbon transitions by situating it, explicitly, within the urban contexts in which socio-technical relations of both production and consumption become materialized. Government reports such as the United Kingdom Low Carbon Transition Plan use the idea of transition to suggest that a rapid systemic change, along a well-marked pathway, can be brought about with minimal impact on quality of life and economic markets. The chapter examines how the dynamics of urban metabolisms configure distinct urban regimes and mediate power relations between different agents requires that people revisit the ways in which experiments have been conceived as providing the basis for system transformation.
