Building urban climate resilience in an unequal world? Towards a comparative sociology of world city eco-housing assemblages

With the importance of cities rising on climate governance agendas worldwide, promising new studies are emerging on the political, economic, and socio-technological factors shaping urban sustainability experiments and low-carbon transitions in world cities. So far, however, sociology remains marginal to these conversations. This paper suggests that an adequate sociology of urban climate resilience will need to address three core theoretical issues. First, we need to position urban resilience transitions within a changing moral geography of how climate change rewrites global socio-ecological inequalities. Second, to understand the impact of this moral geography of carbon within particular cities, sociology will have to adopt a city-based comparative methodology; not least in comparing cities across global North-South divides. Third, to understand how urban climate resilience activities work on the ground, sociology should embrace insights from urban studies on the importance of professional knowledges, material practices, and place-making assemblages in shaping trajectories of urban change. To elaborate the theoretical claims, this paper draws on on-going multi-sited ethnographic work on municipal climate planning projects in the built environment sectors of three world cities, positioned very differently in the moral geography of carbon: Copenhagen (Denmark), Kyoto (Japan) and Surat (India). In each of the three cities, I show, eco-housing is shaped through specific social, ecological and technological relations, materializing a contested set of professional knowledges that intermingle ‘global’ climatic risks into dense layers of localized matters of urban concern. Asking how climate change is (literally) brought ‘home’ in each city, I compare the power-laden ecologies of actors, sites, materials and knowledges that shape the climate resilience housing practices of each city. Overall, I stress how eco-housing makes for important sites of urban political ecology, allowing us to map how climatic concerns manifest themselves in cities and trans-locally, across a widening set of global socio-ecological inequalities.