Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
DGES Founders Seminar Presents Dr. Sarah Knuth
March 10, 2015 at 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM
| Location: | Loeb A220 Loeb Building |
| Cost: | Free |
| Audience: | null |
| Key Contact: | Natalia Fierro Marquez |
| Contact Email: | natalia.fierromarquez@carleton.ca |
| Contact Phone: | 613-520-2600 x 2560 |
The Department of Geography and Environmental Studies Presents:
Dr. Sarah Knuth, Visiting Assistant Professor at Oberlin College
on
Seeing Green: Speculative Urbanism in the Green Economy
Abstract:
As cities face global environmental change and other 21st century transformations, scholars must ask how neoliberal era urban restructuring has, and has not, equipped them for the epochal challenges of achieving sustainability and resilience. The research presented here examines San Francisco’s green building and retrofitting efforts after the 2008 financial collapse as a window into how neoliberal developments continue to shape the character and priorities of early 21st century greening. During the Great Recession, San Francisco joined many other cities, the US government, and other powerful national economies in articulating ambitious visions of “green” economic recovery, an ecological modernist vision for the production of technologically advanced manufacturing jobs in renewable energy, energy efficient materials, and other environmental industries. The actual experience of green development has been far more mixed. The talk argues that today’s green economic “success stories” like San Francisco’s green building boom since 2008 demonstrate the ongoing influence of neoliberal processes, and how green urbanism is rearticulating them: inter-urban competition; the ongoing financialization of real estate development and the local state; the deepening, yet highly uneven, globalization of real estate development; and, critically, the creation and financialization of markets for novel kinds of “natural capital.” Even as new urban financial experimentation and speculative real estate development promise badly needed resources for climate change mitigation needs like the rebuilding of energy-intensive urban landscapes, this mode of city-(re)building threatens to make greening increasingly exclusionary and volatile.