Urban Climate Risk Communities: East Asian World Cities as Cosmopolitan Spaces of Collective Action?

Abstract

Ulrich Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology affords a much-needed rethinking of the transnational politics of climate change, not least in pointing to an emerging inter-urban geography of world cities as a potential new source of community, change and solidarity. This short essay, written in honour of Beck’s forward-looking agenda for a post-Euro-centric social science, outlines the contours of such an urban-cosmopolitan ‘realpolitik’ of climate risks, as this is presently unfolding across East Asian world cities. Much more than a theory-building endeavour, the essay suggests, Beck’s sociology provides a standing invitation for further transnational dialogue and collaborative empirical work, in East Asia and beyond, on what are, arguably, the defining challenges for the 21st century world of global risks.

Keywords

climate risk communities cosmopolitan sociology trans-local climate politics urban East Asia world port cities

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Beck

(2010) Climate for change, or how to create a green modernity? Theory, Culture & Society 27(2–3): 254–266.

Beck

(2015) Emancipatory catastrophism: What does it mean to climate change and risk society? Current Sociology 63(1): 75–88.

Beck

(2016) The Metamorphosis of the World, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Beck

Grande

(2010) Varieties of second modernity: The cosmopolitan turn in social and political theory and research. The British Journal of Sociology 61(3): 409–443.

Beck

Sznaider

(2006) Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: A research agenda. The British Journal of Sociology 57(1): 1–23.

Beck

Blok

Tyfield

Zhang

(2013) Cosmopolitan communities of climate risk: Conceptual and empirical suggestions for a new research agenda. Global Networks 13(1): 1–21.

Blok

(2012) Greening cosmopolitan urbanism? On the transnational mobility of low-carbon formats in Northern European and East Asian cities. Environment and Planning A 44(10): 2327–2343.

Blok

(2015) Towards cosmopolitan middle-range theorizing: A metamorphosis in the practice of social theory? Current Sociology 63(1): 110–114.

Blok A and Tschötschel R (2016) World port cities as cosmopolitan risk community: Mapping urban climate policy experiments in Europe and East Asia. Environment and Planning C 34(4): 717–736.

10.

Broto

Bulkeley

(2013) A survey of urban climate change experiments in 100 cities. Global Environmental Change 23(1): 92–102.

11.

Bulkeley

(2013) Cities and Climate Change, London: Routledge.

12.

Chen

K-H

(2010) Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, Durham: Duke University Press.

13.

Gilroy

(1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

14.

Lee

Van de Meene

(2012) Who teaches and who learns? Policy learning through the C40 cities climate network. Policy Sciences 45(3): 199–220.

15.

Ong

(2011) Introduction: Worlding cities, or the art of being global. In: Roy

Ong

(eds) Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

16.

Sassen S (2009) Cities are at the center of our environmental future. Sapiens 2(3). Available at: https://sapiens.revues.org/948 (accessed June 2015).