Assembling Urban Riskscapes: Climate Adaptation, Scales Of Change, and The Politics Of Expertise In Surat, India

The risks of climate change become tangible and urgent in cities – and accordingly, climate adaptation has risen on urban political agendas worldwide, including in vulnerable coastal cities of East and South Asia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and invoking debates on ‘assemblage urbanism’ (Farías, McFarlane), this paper analyses the contested politics of expertise by way of which Surat, in the Indian state of Gujarat, has been reshaped over the past few years into a regional model of climate change ‘resilience’, within local-global networks of urban design, planning, and power. Mediated through unequally structured transnational policy mobilities, the work of resilience-building is shown to revolve around local economic-political elites, who deploy consultancy knowledges to render particular urban riskscapes (in-)visible, in ways conducive to specific forms and scales of middle-class ‘development’ in the city. In turn, the paper shows how this local elite-driven climate politics is contested by two alternative socio-technical coalitions and assemblages: on the one hand, groups of globalized engineering professionals look to embed Surat as a ‘test-case’ of low-carbon transition in the global South; on the other, groups of city-based activists and critical professionals seek recognition and redress of more ‘proximate’ hazards (pollution, poverty, lack of infrastructure). In analyzing how competing urban riskscapes come to be assembled through heterogeneous knowledge practices, the paper highlights the different visions and commitments to ‘scales of change’ (Jiménez) thereby enabled and furthered. By thus allowing us to grasp the situated tools and knowledges through which ‘large-scale’ processes of socio-political change – development, low-carbon transition, justice – are shaped and contested around specific urban places and spaces, the paper suggests that assemblage urbanism contributes valuably to new critical explorations of technical politics and sustainability in the city.