ABSTRACT
This chapter uses three sites of urban sustainability in action to explore how actors on the ground in the Paris region are grappling with the ongoing challenges of producing low carbon transformation across the French capital. The focus shifts from the internal organizational struggles of mobilizing and maintaining energy-climate action within a local authority to the work of Parisian planners in producing urban energy knowledge with a view to ‘grounding’ objectives literally into the Parisian urban fabric, and finally to work going on around infrastructure with a variety of actors toiling to reconfigure pipes, production plants, and resource flows to extend and optimize the availability of low carbon affordable heat across the region. We argue that these constitute key sites at the frontline of low carbon transition practices. Far from the distant singular end state and linear pathway of long-term policy objectives, this perspective views sustainability/low carbon as an ongoing, provisional, and plurivocal process of actual and possible transformation, which values the kinds of contingent and incremental work practices and struggles that are evident in the sites studied.
