Hillary Angelo, Ihnji Jon, and Billy Fleming on Emergent Environments of Urbanization

Struggles to reshape cities are inextricably intermeshed with the making and remaking of socio-environmental relations both within and beyond centers of human settlement. This panel explores such struggles in relation to environmental justice, energy transitions, democracy, and spatial politics. By exploring the conflictual dynamics of urban environmental transformation in several contemporary sites and territories, we explore questions of conceptualization as well as transformative practice in a world of intensifying socio-environmental turbulence. Bubble Clash: Seagulls, Waste, and the Challenges of Environmental Justice in a Multicultural Suburb Ihnji Jon, Cardiff University Public Lands and the Energy Transition: Urbanization, Energy Democracy, and Spatial Politics Hillary Angelo, UC Santa Cruz Building Just, Post-Carbon Futures Billy Fleming, University of Pennsylvania Introductions and Moderation by Neil Brenner -- This event was part of the inaugural CEGU conference, Environmental Emergencies, Emergent Environments: Critical Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities, held April 20–21, 2023 at The University of Chicago. About the Conference: The climate crisis unfolds through a series of environmental emergencies at once abrupt and long-churning. These emergencies are deeply interwoven and yet, at the same time, engender unique and emergent environments of disaster, struggle, and social reinvention. How might we understand the roots of these transformations while attending to the particular environments where emergency erupts? How, in other words, might we think environmental emergencies and emergent environments together? CEGU’s inaugural conference brings together scholars from across the social sciences and humanities—including agrarian studies, digital humanities, ecology, environmental history, geography, literature, planning, and urban sociology—to dialogue and debate about these issues, their historical genealogies, and future implications. The conference opens with the inaugural Calvin and Freda Redekop Lectures in Environment and Society and will feature panels on agrarian environments, spatial media, urbanization, and waste with leading scholars in conversation with CEGU faculty. -- cegu.uchicago.edu