Guest Editorial

Governing the resilient city Addressing risks caused by global climate change, Mike Davis (2010) recently declared the city to be “its own solution”. While for Davis this meant investing in the city’s social infrastructure as a way to reduce vulnerability to climate change and erase its uneven geographies, it is the scale of his proposed solutions that now stands out. In the face of climate change, and the failure of international efforts to curb carbon emissions, the city is now viewed as the most pressing and promising site for anticipating and addressing uncertain futures. To the extent that we inhabit a ‘planetary urbanism’, in which the city is the site of metabolic exchanges that are global in reach and extent, the future of humanity is increasingly understood in terms of the city’s social organization and physical design. Today Davis’s scalar arguments are something of a truism, as cities across the world experiment with new infrastructures and technologies designed to respond to a world of new threats that are simultaneously social, political, and environmental. In some cases these are merely thought experiments, such as the 2010 ‘Rising Currents’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, one among countless efforts to imagine and design the ‘resilient’ city (see Braun, this issue). In other cases these experiments are real-time responses to concrete events, as occurred during Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, events which placed in stark relief the differential vulnerability of cities, neighborhoods, and specific populations to unexpected adversity. At still other sites, such as the Grand Paris initiative launched by the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, urban planners, philosophers, climate scientists, and architects are working together to design and implement concrete changes to urban form. In this ‘post-Kyoto’ Paris a cavalcade of green roofs, urban forests, techno-economic research clusters, and airports would be connected into a decentralized, seamless, and wellpoliced metropolitan fabric, stitched together by a high-speed automated super-métro whose construction is to begin later in 2014. (1) Perhaps more important than any one design, event, or plan has been the pervasive imagining of cities as integrated socioecological networks, intimately tied to global systems in a recursive process in which cities are understood as at once transformative agents and vulnerable subjects, a relationship played out in different ways across local and international divisions of labor, from New York City to Bombay. Running through each design, plan, or experiment is not just the same presupposition— that cities are integrated and extended socioecological networks—but also the same problem: how to govern this totality. Through what modes of arranging and ordering urban life might resilience be achieved? What is this life that is imagined, and how is it to be constructed? How does one field events, such that urban life can carry on in a particular form? The papers in this theme issue all circle around a shared recognition that the question of the ‘resilient’, ‘sustainable’, or ‘ecological’ city is also, and significantly, a question of government. (2) But the perspectives and critical tools they bring to the question vary. Might it be that in the context of the Anthropocene—with its strange spatiotemporalities and novel sociotechnical and ecological risks—what government is, and how it works, is undergoing a marked transformation? Or do new practices and techniques merely represent the extension and deepening of existing modes of administering life? A common thesis is that while in the past,