Urban Green Assemblages

An ANT View on Sustainable City Building Projects

Abstract

In this article, I sketch an STS-theoretical approach to world-wide growing concerns with urban climate risks and sustainable urbanism more generally in terms of what I call ‘urban green assemblages’. This approach draws inspiration from recent attempts to bring actor-network theory (ANT) closer to urban studies, infusing urban political economies with STS sensibility towards the contingencies of eco-socio-technical design and transformation processes. ANT, I argue, off ers a new ontology for the city, allowing the study of those concrete and plural sites at which urban sustainability is known, practiced, scaled, negotiated and contested, in heterogeneous and dynamic assemblages of humans and non-humans. I explore the analytical potentials of this ANT urban ontology through a case study of how architects, engineers, and urban planners currently perform Nordhavn, one of Europe’s large scale sustainable city building projects, as a site of multiple matters of public-political concern with urban natures.