The city of the future

Abstract

In the face of the complexity of the interconnected processes involved in the relationships between cities and climate change this report researches the carbon-neutral city through a Bacchi-inspired governmentality lens, where the focus lies on how the physical structure and the technological choices are shaped and made in and through discursive problem representations. The field of carbon-neutral strategies lies in an intersection of physical and technological realities and an administration of social relations. Particular visions of the future are a momentary equilibrium of cultural, historical, and physical relations. Specific socio-technical choices are made as a result of underlying rationales, assumptions and conceptual premises in the strategies shape frame and the understood realm of possibilities for the imagined carbon neutral cities. It is this relation which I seek to scrutinise how the representation of the problem as global, together with premises of ‘future technology’, ‘compensation’ and the ‘limitless growing city’ lays the building block for the visualised futures and thus also for the inherently omitted and silenced elements. I conclude that the choiced trajectories of the Nordic cities towards practical initiatives for a carbon-neutral city are formed within the conjunction of historical, social and geographical situations and the conceptual world constructed by the international and national governed frame.