The Hidden Protagonists of the Low-Carbon City: A Social Backcast Approach to Urban Climate Governance

How can we understand where contemporary urban politics are going in a warming world in order to find the best path forward? More specifically, why are cities struggling to slash carbon emissions despite widespread consensus that there are ample co-benefits to be had in doing so (Bulkeley 2011)? Increasing, social scientists interested in how thinking futures can influence the present are using the backcasting method first pioneered by Robinson (1982) and now discussed extensively in journals like Futures and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. To grapple with contemporary climate politics, I revise the policy-centric backcast and develop a social backcast approach. Since we know that the compact city low-carbon urbanists advocate requires radical changes to housing, transit, and land-use policy, I study not just urban climate policy entrepreneurs (the norm in urban climate studies), but also conflictual housing and transit movements that rarely (if ever) speak of climate change, but who advocate a similar transformation of the city (this group is much larger than the relatively small environmental justice community). Based on 18 months of fieldwork in New York and São Paulo, including over 100 semi-structured interviews with green policy entrepreneurs, housing movement activists, and state actors (both political appointees and career bureaucrats), I argue that prevailing accounts of urban climate governance have left out the most successful grassroots movement fighting, substantively, for a compact city; I explain why the policy-centric focus of urban climate policy entrepreneurs has blinded them to potential, poor people’s allies; I demonstrate that absent a rapprochement between middle-class environmental and lower-class social justice activists, eco-apartheid is the most likely outcome of contemporary green politics; and I point to emerging examples of collaboration in both cities that warrant much closer attention.