Sammendrag
In 2022, Castán Broto warned that green investments in urban infrastructures, while releasing considerable public spending for urban climate mitigation and adaptation measures, risk to reproduce what twenty years before was called ‘splintering urbanism’ (Graham and Marvin 2001): the move away from modern infrastructural ideals in which infrastructure was designed to provide general services to the whole population. Analysing Green Deal initiatives, Castán Broto found a lack of 'infrastructural vision', which reinforces existing uneven and unjust distributions of infrastructural connections and their effects along the lines of socio-economic divisions. Besides, the revealed privatisation and financialization of infrastructure systems have exacerbated social and geographical inequalities in access and quality to basic infrastructures.
In our contribution, based on a qualitative case study, we analyse a case of contemporary urban climate mitigation through infrastructure development, which helps us to understand how and why well-intentioned scientific and municipal interventions indeed contribute to the splintering effects described by Castán Broto.
The case is Oslo's Furuset neighbourhood, which is one of nine pilot areas of the Research Centre on Zero Emission Neighbourhoods in Smart Cities (FME ZEN) and a testbed for new innovative energy solutions, combined with urban design. These climate mitigation interventions enjoy national and municipal support and meet a neighbourhood which has for many years been object of municipal and national concern for its high crime rates and and low socio-economic status. ZEN's main pilot activity is the installation of an innovative micro-grid for heat distribution, combined with a seasonal heat storage facility. Due to lack of compatible technology/infrastructure in existing buildings connecting to the new grid will require high investment costs. Thus, only new buildings will be connected to the new sub-grid. While the effects of this infrastructural innovation on the local population can not yet be studied empirically (the construction activities have just begun), it seems clear that the new technology introduces a splintering effect on the accessibility to sustainable and high quality infrastructure, where neighbouring buildings will be connected to different infrastructures with different environmental impacts.
Parallel with these ongoing initiatives, Furuset's local residents and their representatives focus more on social sustainability, which historically has been the main focus of municipal policies, for example in the large-scale area-based programme “Grorudalssatsingen”, aiming at providing better living conditions for inhabitants in these housing estates from the 1960’s and 70’s. After six years of work with the planning and design of the pilot, the fact that their neighbourhood is a pilot for one of the major public investments in urban climate mitigation research is completely unknown to the local residents.
In this paper, we analyse the genesis of this disconnect between the local sustainability agenda and the research based climate mitigation interventions, and discuss scenarios for possible effects of the splintering of the infrastructure and their determinants.
Castán Broto, Vanesa. 2022. “Splintering Urbanism and Climate Breakdown.” Journal of Urban Technology 29 (1): 87–93.
Graham, Steve and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge.
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