This final round-table conference was hosted at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice in the historic room Mario Baratto designed by architect Carlo Scarpa.
This workshop was convened by Vanesa Castan Broto, Olivier COUTARD (LATTS, CNRS) and Stefano Soriani (Ca' Foscari University of Venice) and gathered 30 scholars to discuss 18 papers on planet boundaries through an urban and infrastructural lens. The workshop sought to reopen the academic conversation on urban environmental issues and how they are examined through an infrastructural perspective that engages with both the question of planetary boundaries and the uncertainty and discomfort caused by living in critical zones.
The discussions led to the submission of a Special Issue, currently in production for Territory, Politics, Governance.
Introduction
The politics of material limits
Planetary Boundaries through a Venetian lens
Programme and ethos of the symposium
Session 1: Infrastructural perspectives on crossing planet boundaries
Sensing the risk of exceeding planetary boundaries in Parisian and Milanese art from the long nineteenth century
Cities Bounded and Boundless. Entanglements of Urban Metabolism and Planetary Boundaries
Session 2: Social innovation, environmental change and urban justice
Urban Infrastructures as Contact Zones: Innovation in Interstices
Material Inequalities in Critical Urban Zones: Rethinking Innovation Regimes for Social and Environmental Justice
Session 3: Grassroots mobilization for inhabiting planet boundaries
Inequalities, justice issues and planetary boundaries in the greater Paris area
“A FORAS TERNA”: Grassroots Resistance to Energy Extractivism in Sardinia
Planetary boundaries from port cities: logistical frictions, social mobilization and the search for alternative futures
Session 4: Changing infrastructural practices to inhabit planet boundaries
Nairobi’s water infrastructural tinkering for planet-bounded change
The multiple pathways of energy de-escalation : perspectives from energy infrastructures converters
Session 5: Ambivalence in infrastructural responses to water scarcity
Water infrastructures and the adaptation challenge: towards a new infrastructural fix and the creation of new zombie infrastructures?
From home to planet. Navigating water scarcity in the Frankfurt region’s climate-changed technopolitical landscape
Rethinking hydropower in Valtellina valley
Session 6: Ambivalence in infrastructural efforts to stay within planet boundaries
Competing infrastructures of urban (un)sustainability
Heat Thresholds and their Ambivalent Infrastructures
“Eventually we will all have to move to the highway”. The Failed Errantry of Contemporary Infrastructure
Session 7: Articulating past, present and future visions through infrastructures
Urban climate transitions work on time. Infrastructuring the past, the present, and the future
Biogeochemical policies to respect planetary boundaries: lessons learned from roads not taken by technological development in France during the 20th century
Unborn Infrastructures: The Bounds and Boundlessness of Past Metabolic Visions for Berlin
