Reframing Urban Sustainability: Politics and Contestation through DIY Infrastructuring in Global Cities

Location :  J210, 13 rue de l'Université, 75007 Paris (Sciences Po) or online, via Zoom (the link will be send after your registration)

Sustainability has become a dominant ideology and framework for material action in global cities. As cities around the world invest in green urban infrastructures as both a climate and urban competitiveness strategy, research has shown that these initiatives can displace and dispossess working class and racialized communities. Further, the technocratic and managerial precepts of sustainability mean that it can function as an anti-politics machine, some scholars argue. In this talk, I will complicate this narrative by showing how the very amorphous quality of sustainability and transition discourse makes it a potent vehicle for politics, despite its apolitical and technocratic framing. 

Combining lenses of social reproduction, urban political ecology, and intersectionality, this paper examines how urban sustainability infrastructuring, i.e. the creation of infrastructures to solve environmental problems and provide environmental services, functions as a “terrain” or “contact zone” bringing together the state, business, middle class environmentalists, and sections of the urban poor. Drawing on a long-term, ethnographic study of “zero-waste” transitions in Bengaluru, India (recently published as Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability, MIT Press 2024), I show that infrastructures become the site of political contestation where diverse actors adopt, contest, and modify neoliberal sustainability’s emphasis on market-based solutions, behavior change, and the aesthetic conflation of “clean” with “green”. Emergent forms of “communal sustainability” and “DIY infrastructuring” challenge dominant narratives of eco-modernization that posit teleological accounts of change, instead illustrating the transformative potential of collective action projects that cross lines of class, caste, race, and geography. Yet, commodifying and co-opting forces can assimilate or divert territorial experiments into hegemonic agendas, revealing both the promises and limits of local action.

Recycling Class is available open-access via MIT Press's D2O program here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5710/Recycling-ClassThe-Contradictions-of-Inclusion-in. The talk will discuss Chapters 2 and 4 of the book.

Speaker : 

• Manisha Anantharaman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Center de Sociologie des Organisations (CNRS), Sciences Po. Her interdisciplinary research explores inequality and injustice in ecological transitions through ethnographic and participatory methods. She has published two books connecting environmental justice, sustainability, and development: “Recycling Class: The contradictions of inclusion in urban sustainability” (MIT Press, 2024) and a co-edited volume “The Circular Economy and the Global South” (Routledge, UK, 2019). Her current research projects include a Belmont Forum/US National Science Foundation funded project studying Digitalization and Sustainable Consumption and a collaborative project on Pro-Poor Circular Economies.  Her research outputs have been published in Urban Studies, Journal of Cleaner Production, and the Journal of Consumer Culture. Beyond research, Manisha is an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs Chatham House’s Environment and Society Center, through which she serves as an expert consultant on topics related to sustainable consumption, circular economy and informal work. 

Discussant : 

• Joost de Moor, Assistant Professor, Centre d’études européennes et de politique comparée