A Glossary for the Urban Climate

New climate action plans, advanced by city governments across the globe, respond to the problems produced by older city development plans using the same development approaches. The circulation of these standardized, scientific framings of climate change adaptation planning, such as measurements and thresholds, typically perpetuate existing socioeconomic inequalities by extending colonial readings of spacetimes. How might we rethink technocratic adaptive planning responses to climate change and imagine toward more just framings building from the knowledge and experience of those most vulnerable? In this session, we seek to extend and expand a conversation to theorize the urban climate from and with the emic (Geertz 1973, Harris 1976, Marcus and Fisher 1999) terms that researchers are encountering in urban environments around the world and particularly in Africa and Latin America. Rather than begin with a critique of climate planning processes, we invite papers for a Climate Glossary to provide a new grammar for reading and inhabiting time and space in cities. We are interested in papers that both retheorize climate disasters and also imagine the future-making projects taking place amidst differentiated populations exposed to the intensified disasters of climate change.