Resumen de Maintaining Climate Change Experiments: Urban Political Ecology and the EverydayReconfiguration of Urban Infrastructure

Vanesa Castán Broto, Harriet Bulkeley

• Climate change governance is increasingly being conducted through urbanclimate change experiments, purposive interventions that seek to reconfigure urbansociotechnical systems to achieve low-carbon and resilient cities. In examining howexperiments take effect, we suggest that we need to understand not only how they are madeand assembled, but also how they are maintained within specific urban contexts. Drawingon literatures from urban political ecology and the specific debate on urban repair andmaintenance, this article examines maintenance in two case studies of climate changeexperiments in housing in Bangalore (India) and Monterrey (Mexico). We find thatmaintenance is a crucial process through which not only urban obduracy is preserved, butalso the novel and innovative character of the experiment is asserted and reproduced. Theprocess of ‘maintaining’ experiments is a precarious one, which requires a continuousexternal input in terms of remaking the experiment materially and discursively. Thisprocess causes further reconfigurations beyond the experiment, changing the patterns ofresponsibility attribution and acceptability that configure the urban fabric.