Cambio climático, ciudades inteligentes y la promesa de una energía "abierta"

Abstract:

"Climate is an entirely mediated phenomenon, at least according to some (Edwards, 2011). In this tradition of thought weather qua climate is only knowable through distributed networks of expertise involving advanced information modelling technologies. If the object of climate change is informationally constituted, then so too is the response. In this paper I explore some of the implications of climate treated as a mediated object by turning my attention to the “data practices” of people who are experimenting with ways of knowing and engaging the problem of climate change, specifically as this pertains to cities. Drawing on research that I am currently conducting in Manchester, UK, I look at the way in which techniques of monitoring, data collection, aggregation and data visualisation emerge and are presentable as a 'logical response' to the global climate problem. ‘Opening up’ data on energy use and CO2 emissions through techniques like smart meters, building monitors and smart grids is understood by participants to be a key means of ‘changing behaviours’ and altering relationships between people and their practices. At the same time I suggest that data gathering and analysis techniques which aim to track CO2 emissions have the unforeseen effect of making visible previously invisible infrastructures of energy use. These data practices are pursued under the promise that they make possible a reduction in CO2 emissions but they simultaneously have the effect of revealing the potential of a whole new set of relationships between the energy 'consumer', energy companies, cities and the state. In contrast to those who have tended to see environmental politics as a space for the recovery of an anti-capitalist logic, this paper explores how the distributed assemblages of contemporary climate politics might be usefully understood as a new kind of 'frontier' (Tsing, 2005). In contrast to a deterministic endpoint associated with the frontier that might see a history of exploitation fated to repeat itself, I suggest this new frontier is opening up a realm of unknowability in which we are provoked to engage with questions such as the the kind of responsibility entailed or made possible by the new (virtual) grounds it opens up." By Hannah Knox