Suchergebnisse

People's experiences of a polluted space are intimately linked with their relative concerns for quality of life and livelihoods. Thus quality of environment and security of employment are two closely related issues in social conflicts over environmental pollution. Rather than being implicated in a trade-off relationship, environmental quality and job provision are both part of the life of community residents. Bringing together the literature on the political ecology of environmental conflicts and the social constructionist literature on public perceptions of environmental risks, this article argues that the working class and disadvantaged sections of society are often confronted with alliances between the industry, institutions and other stakeholders which may serve to legitimate a particular configuration of things in which the appropriation of some resources by the industry is regarded as legitimate. However, these arrangements are unstable: they are subjectto constant renegotiation between the social groups implicated. Thus, how the emergence of concerns about the local environment relates to preoccupations about the state of the local economy is related to a process whereby these relationships are constructed and re-negotiated. These questions are analyzed using a case study of environmental pollution from coal-energy production in the city of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The case shows that both concerns for the environment and unemployment are articulated simultaneously in the context of industrial pollution, together with the redefinition of the socio-economic landscapes of post-industrial Tuzla.

Environmental justice movements often contest environmental knowledge by engaging in scientific debates, which implies accepting the predominance of scientific discourses over alternative forms of knowledge. Using Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence, this paper warns that the engagement with hegemonic forms of knowledge production may reproduce, rather than challenge, existing social and environmental inequalities. The argument is developed with reference to a case study of coal ash pollution in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The case study shows that the construction of knowledge in a scientific project led to the exclusion of local definitions of the situation and the dismissal of their observations of environmental pollution. The case suggests that the capacity of different actors to put forward their interpretation of an environmental issue depends on the forms of symbolic violence that emerge within hegemonic discourses of the environment. © 2012 The Author. Antipode© 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Climate change governance is increasingly being conducted through urban climate change experiments, purposive interventions that seek to reconfigure urban sociotechnical systems to achieve low-carbon and resilient cities. In examining how experiments take effect, we suggest that we need to understand not only how they are made and assembled, but also how they are maintained within specific urban contexts. Drawing on literatures from urban political ecology and the specific debate on urban repair and maintenance, this article examines maintenance in two case studies of climate change experiments in housing in Bangalore (India) and Monterrey (Mexico). We find that maintenance is a crucial process through which not only urban obduracy is preserved, but also the novel and innovative character of the experiment is asserted and reproduced. The process of 'maintaining' experiments is a precarious one, which requires a continuous external input in terms of remaking the experiment materially and discursively. This process causes further reconfigurations beyond the experiment, changing the patterns of responsibility attribution and acceptability that configure the urban fabric. © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited.