Lecture #2 | Gordon WALKER | "The overheating city: Unliveable killing machines or inclusive adaptation?"

This year has seen temperature records being broken to an extraordinary extent and pervasiveness, providing a clear indication, if yet another was needed, that the climate is in crisis. The experience of heatwave conditions around the world has been frighteningly intense and sometimes repeated and prolonged, with consequences that are typically all the more severe in city environments. In this talk I will consider the complexities involved in governing heat as a material, cultural and spatio-temporally differentiated phenomenon, the unequal vulnerabilities that physiologically and structurally put some populations far more at risk than others and the dilemmas of how to respond while simultaneously transitioning towards a post-carbon condition.  Whether the future is one of ‘cool inclusion’ adapting to heat extremes in ways that respond to inequality and vulnerability and resist embedded colonial legacies; or one in which keeping cool for some means intensified threats for others, is a crucial question for urban life around the world.

BIO

Gordon Walker is Professor at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK. He has a wide-ranging profile of research on the social and spatial dimensions of environment, energy, climate and sustainability issues. This includes work on environmental and energy justice; rhythmanalysis; social practice, sociotechnical transitions and energy demand; community innovation and renewable energy technologies; and vulnerability, inequality and governance in relation to heat, floods and technological risks. Recent books include the co-edited ‘Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice’, ‘Demanding Energy: Space, Time and Change’(Palgrave) and the single authored ‘Energy and Rhythm: Rhythmanalysis for a Low Carbon Future’ published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2021.

Organised by Brussels Centre for Urban Studies

Part of the 2022/23 StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series 'moving cities forward, leaving no one behind. toward fair & sustainable transitions'.

All lectures will be streamed on this channel.