Climate urbanism and the subaltern

The urban subaltern carries a disproportionate burden of a heating planet. Cities such as Dhaka, Lagos, Jakarta, and many smaller urban centres in the South suffer from the endogenous effects of poor planning, with large proportions of the population living in geographically vulnerable parts of cities. Slum settlements are vulnerable to regular flooding, landslides, heat island effects and their impacts on overcrowded and poorly built housing.

In this session, we aim to look beyond the dichotomy of formal and informal to explore the configurations of climate urbanism and the subaltern. Much literature on the subaltern takes the rural poor as its reference point. The slum is the backdrop to what Roy describes as 'subaltern urbanism', not as a forgotten or remnant ontology, but as an alternative, which is central to the 'currents of world history' (Roy, 2011:227). This is a politics of public ambivalence but recognising that the subaltern has the political power and citizenship to remain in place, in endless temporariness. The subaltern's achievement is to hold the attention of the urban elite sufficiently to recognise (however grudgingly) a meagre right to the city. We will focus on the urban subaltern's differing circumstances, looking beyond characterisations of the urban poor as disenfranchised, ahistorical economic actors. We will explore the more complex process of citizenship, politics and resistance in the production of urban social space, and resilience to climate change and disasters.