Governing Like a Resilient City: Preparing a city for climate change through laboratories and adjacent spaces of governance

This dissertation is based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2019 in Vejle, Denmark, in a historical context where large parts of the city since 2010 have been classified by the Danish Coastal Authority (Ministry of Environment) as flood risk zones. The dissertation brings into ethnographic view how officials and urban residents in Vejle make situated responses to combatting climate change and floods. The dissertation has three primary aims and contributions. Firstly, it conducts an ethnographic study of the implications of what Vejle Municipality’s deployment of a resilience strategy to cope with climate change and increased flooding risks materializes into practice. Second, the dissertation discusses the connection between resilience and the emic configuration of urban planning projects as laboratories. Thirdly, I explore what spaces of ethnographic research and social relations are enabled by interventionist engagements in laboratory configurations in cities.
I argue that resilience in Vejle engenders the production of a local climate of change. This argument points to how adaptation to climate change becomes a political agenda through which the municipality creates urban development and growth. I demonstrate that resilience incorporates a continuation of a growth imperative through anthropogenesis advancements of public-private partnerships that underpinned neoliberal capitalism. However, my ethnographic material shows that resilience and the laboratorization of the city also represent a different orientation for officials in their efforts to create novel spaces of negotiation, creativity, art, and involvement of citizens, researchers, and politicians.
I argue that constructing challenges and urban environments as laboratories allows officials to tackle problems and explore possible actions through multiple initiatives and socio-material configurations that I analyze as adjacent governance spaces. As this dissertation’s main theoretical contribution, I take adjacent governance spaces to be forms of knowledge production that relate to the same overall governance challenge—in this case, how to adapt the city to climate change—but which raise different problems, social relationships, and possible actions.
The dissertation's third contribution is to discuss anthropological knowledge production using interventionist engagements in urban laboratory configurations. I demonstrate how I, with my research director Maja Hojer Bruun and in collaboration with officials, designed and performed an ethnographic urban living lab centered around a test of a digital flood management app with citizens. We used the ethnographic urban living lab to investigate urban residents’ understandings and practices of combatting floods in local communities. Based on this interventionist collaboration with officials and flood-affected urban residents, I demonstrate and argue that ethnographers can contribute to shaping those social relations and adjacent spaces rendered from laboratory configurations in cities to explore what it means to govern and live in a climate-changing world.