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Neoliberal Urban Environmentalism and the Adaptive City: Towards a Critical Urban
Theory and Climate Change
Mark Whitehead
Urban Stud 2013 50: 1348
DOI: 10.1177/0042098013480965

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Urban Studies at 50
50(7) 1348–1367, May 2013
Special Issue Article

Neoliberal Urban Environmentalism and

the Adaptive City: Towards a Critical Urban
Theory and Climate Change
Mark Whitehead

[Paper first received, September 2011; in final form, August 2012]

Abstract
This paper explores the potential contribution of critical urban theory to the intel-
lectual and political debates surrounding climate change. While it is possible to iden-
tify an emerging strand of critical enquiry concerning the role of cities in facilitating
climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, this paper argues that the full
implications of critical urban theory to climate change studies have yet to be realised.
In this paper, critical urban theory is understood as an approach (or set of
approaches) to the city that recognises the contingent form of urban politics and
policy, while asserting that, far from being an inevitable and politically neutral pro-
cess, urbanisation is an expression of intersecting regimes of social power. This
paper utilises critical urban theory as a basis for analysing emerging urban climate
adaptation strategies. The analysis presented here asserts that contemporary adapta-
tion policies are being framed by neoliberal practices of market-oriented governance,
enhanced privatisation and urban environmental entrepreneurialism. This paper
exposes some of the key contradictions that are inherent within neoliberalised urban
climate change adaptation strategies and suggests how it might be possible to
develop more progressive adaptation regimes.

Introduction: From the

Carbonisation of the City to the
Urbanisation of the Climate
In his recent book Climatopolis: How Our
Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future,
Matthew E. Kahn argues that ‘‘Climate
change will affect the competitive landscape
for cities, and people will be able to choose
the winner by voting with their feet’’ (Kahn,
2010, p. 11).1 Kahn’s vision frames issues
of urbanisation and climate change in a

Mark Whitehead is in the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University,
Llandinam Building, Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DB, UK. Email: msw@aber.ac.uk.

0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online

Ó 2013 Urban Studies Journal Limited
DOI: 10.1177/0042098013480965
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 NEOLIBERAL URBAN ENVIRONMENTALISM
seemingly novel, yet somehow troubling,
way. Kahn’s sentiments are troublingly
novel in at least two ways. First, is the con-
nection he establishes between climate
change and urban competitive advantage.
Although the recent work of Hodson and
Marvin (2009) has suggested that near-
future threats to cities, such as climate
change, be understood in relation to the
competitive logics of urban ecological secu-
rity, climate change tends to exist in the
popular consciousness as a shared problem,
not a basis for differentiated economic
accumulation (Rifkin, 2009). Secondly, is
the positive association Kahn makes
between climate change and urban success.
Rightly or wrongly, lay discourses of urban
climate change tend to emphasise the costs
that climatic shifts will bring to cities, not
their associated socioeconomic upside.
While seemingly novel and unusual, this
paper claims that Kahn’s interpretation of
the relationship between urban develop-
ment and climate change actually reflects
the climate change adaptation strategies of
many urban authorities, national govern-
ments and international agencies. (I will
discuss why Kahn’s urban vision of urban
climate change adaptation is emblematic of
actually existing urban climate change poli-
cies later in this paper.) This paper inter-
prets the competitive drive and urban
optimism encapsulated by Kahn as part of
the established logic of neoliberal urban
environmentalism (Bernstein, 2000, 2001;
see also Anderson and Leal, 1991; Young,
2002). In broad terms, neoliberal urban
environmentalism is best conceived of as a
powerful international norm framework,
which originated in environmental policy
developments during the 1970s and expli-
citly linked ecological protection with eco-
nomic growth, market mechanisms and a
largely deregulated urban system.
This paper is dedicated to unpacking and
critiquing the assumed wisdoms and
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1349
practices associated with neoliberal urban
environmentalism as they are applied to pol-
icies of climate change adaptation. The paper
focuses on issues of urban climate adaptation
for two main reasons. First, and following
the emphasis that was placed on enhanced
action on adaptation following the thirteenth
Conference of the Parties in Bali in 2007, it is
becoming clear that urban communities are,
to a certain extent, locked-in to the effects of
climate change (UNFCCC, 2011, Sect. II; see
also McKibbin and Wilcoxen, 2004).
Consequently, recent years have seen the
metropolitan climate change agenda increas-
ingly blending adaptation measures with
mitigation policies (UNFCCC, 2011, sect.
II). Secondly, this paper focuses on issues of
urban adaptation precisely because the asso-
ciations between these policy regimes and
neoliberal urban environmentalism are often
obscured or deliberately obfuscated. While
climate change mitigation policies, and asso-
ciated forms of carbon trading and ecological
modernisation, bear the clear marks of neoli-
beralism, the market-based assumptions
associated with adaption are often masked
by a rhetoric of urban care, defence and
protection.
This paper claims that a crucial step first
to identifying these logics and then asses-
sing their likely outcomes, is to consider
the broad import of critical urban theory to
the study of the so-called climatopolis
(Kahn, 2010). An engagement with critical
urban theory is important because although
the carbonisation of urban policy (see Rice,
2010) and the urbanisation of climate
change policy have been enacted, described
and critically analysed, only limited atten-
tion has been given in this work to the
nature of neoliberal urbanisation. This is
not, of course, to say that there has not
been valuable critical work on urban cli-
mate change, but rather that this work has
not constituted a critical theory of the
urban per se. This paper begins by charting
1350 MARK WHITEHEAD
the absence of critical urban theory from
work exploring the interface between cities
and climate change. Analysis then moves
on to consider the nature of critical urban
theory and its potential utility to climate
change research. The following section
charts the neoliberal orthodoxies that
appear to be underpinning certain urban
climate adaptation strategies. Finally, analy-
sis considers what critical urban theory can
tell us about the potential contradictions,
injustices and limitations associated with
contemporary, market-oriented urban
adaptation policies.
Critical Urban Theory and
Neoliberal Urban
Environmentalism
Climate Change and the Critical Urban
Lacuna
It was during the 1990s that the analytical
dialogue between climate change and urban
studies first began (see Harvey, 1993;
Collier, 1997; Lambright et al., 1996). These
pioneering analyses were, in part, a response
to the emergence of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change.
They were also, and more importantly, an
attempt to gain some analytical perspective
on the pre-emptive commitments that were
made by progressive urban authorities (such
as Toronto City Council) to reducing green-
house gas emissions over and above national
commitments. To these ends, the emergence
of what Dhakal and Betsill (2007) term the
urban and regional carbon management
research community has always been predi-
cated upon two assumptions: the distinctive
qualities of the climate change policy
regimes that are emerging in cities; and,
related to this, that climate change policies
do not simply occur in urban space, but are
partially transformed by urbanisation.
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Despite initial appreciation of the differ-
ence that cities appeared to be making to
the political economy of climate change,
subsequent phases of research on the urban
climate change frontier have been charac-
terised by a peculiar loss of metropolitan
perspective. The first, pioneering, phase of
research served to legitimate the value and
importance of the urban perspective to the
study of climate change (see Bulkeley, 2000;
Bulkeley and Betsill, 2003; DeAngelo and
Harvey, 1998; Lambright et al. 1996). The
significance of the urban was, in this con-
text, predicated on four premises: the role
of cities as intense clusters of energy use and
greenhouse gas production; the jurisdic-
tional power of urban authorities to influ-
ence and shape policy sectors with relevance
to climate protection; the role of city
authorities as points of translation and
transformation for national and interna-
tional climate change policy; and, the signif-
icant institutional memory that municipal
authorities hold in the development and
delivery of varied environmental policies
(see here Bulkeley and Betsill, 2003;
DeAngelo and Harvey, 1998). While this
seminal work played a crucial role in estab-
lishing the grounds upon which an urban
climate change research community could
flourish, it tended to position cities as the
ontological sites where climate protection
policies found practical expression. Such
research was thus successful in revealing the
significant influence of cities, and varied
confederations of urban authorities, in
shaping and directing climate protection
policies at all scales. It did not, however,
develop a critical theoretical perspective on
the relationship between urbanisation and
climate change policies.
While it is, in many ways, unfair to be
overcritical of such pioneering work, its
failure to bring to bear theoretical perspec-
tives on urbanisation to climate change
studies continues to reverberate in related
 NEOLIBERAL URBAN ENVIRONMENTALISM
work today. The problem stems from how
the city came to be understood within cli-
mate change research in the relative absence
of urban theory. It is possible to identify
three broad ways in which the ‘urban’
entered climate change research: as a gen-
eral geographical expression of the socio-
political and cultural contexts within which
climate change policies and actions were
being developed; as a territorial marker by
which to label the uneven geographical
responses to, and potential impacts of, cli-
mate change; and, as a proxy for the var-
iously scaled sub-national, community and
local level responses that are emerging to
the threats of global warming. The mobili-
sation of an urban perspective in the first
two cases tends to reduce the urban to a
territorial device in and through which to
identify, and potentially explain, the pres-
ence of spatial diversity in responses to cli-
mate change. In these instances, the use of
urban places serves a similar purpose as
would be achieved by the study of provin-
cial locations, or indeed regional and
national jurisdictions. Consequently, while
these studies helped to spatialise climate
change policy, they tell us very little about
the dynamic interfaces that exist between
urbanisation and climate change. In rela-
tion to the third set of approaches, related
work has been successful in analysing the
multiple scales of governance that operate
in and around cities, but less effective in
isolating the contemporary economic
nature of the urbanisation process.
The first, pioneering, phase of research
on cities and climate has been gradually
supplemented by more overtly critical
approaches. This emerging phase of work
has sought to move beyond an analysis of
the capacity of urban authorities to shape
and implement climate protection policies,
in order to assess the actual form and
nature of such policy regimes. Actor net-
work theory (Rutland and Aylett, 2008),
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1351
framing and discourse analysis (Lindseth,
2004), social movement theory (Aylett,
2010a), governmentality (Aylett, 2010b;
Slocum, 2004), state theory (Rice, 2010)
and theories of governance and multilevel
governance (Betsill and Bulkeley, 2007;
Bulkeley and Kern, 2006) have conse-
quently now become popular analytics
within the field of urban climate change
research. Undergirded by the insights of
social theory, this body of urban scholar-
ship has developed critical insights into the
construction of the urban subjects associ-
ated metropolitan climate policy and has
exposed the often-obscured socioeconomic
assumptions of urban climate governance
regimes. Analyses of the Cities for Climate
Protection Campaign have, for example,
described the ways in which urban climate
policies tend to be transformed into a ‘neo-
liberal buffet of options’ in and through
which a metropolitan denizen’s carbon
conduct is regulated through a series of
consumer-oriented discourses of cost-
savings and economic efficiencies (Slocum,
2004, p. 772; see also Bulkeley, 2000;
Lindseth, 2004; Rutland and Aylett, 2008).
While effectively exposing the limits associ-
ated with market-oriented urban climate
change policy and neoliberal climatic gov-
ernmentalities, within these analyses the
urban again tends to recede from view. The
urban either becomes synonymous with a
jurisdictional coalition of governmental
and economic interests, or is synonymous
with a localised node for the translation
and operationalisation of emergent global
networks of climatic governmentality.
This paper argues that the key to urba-
nising climate change research is to engage
with the urban as a process of spatial orga-
nisation and differentiated development
(see Brenner, 2004). Drawing on the work
of Harvey, this paper consequently focuses
less on the urban as a thing—namely, a spa-
tial concentration of workplaces, homes
1352 MARK WHITEHEAD
and infrastructures, with associated politi-
cal institutions—and more on the urbani-
sation process (Harvey, 1996, p. 418). On
these terms, the city is understood as the
spatial manifestation of the complex of eco-
nomic and political processes (including,
inter alia, property markets, global financial
flows, coalitions of political interest, gentri-
fication and labour migrations) that shape
and condition the urban experience in dif-
ferent cities.
The first steps to interpreting the role of
cities within the spatialisation of climate
change policy have emerged as part of the
more critical phase of analysis outlined ear-
lier. Rice, for example, argues that studying
the connections between carbon control
and cities is a vital step in understanding
the territorialisation of carbon (Rice, 2010,
p. 930). According to Rice, the territorialis-
ing of carbon within cities operates on two
levels. First, it relates to the attribution of
territorial responsibility for a set of spatially
bounded and quantified carbon-producing
activities (p. 930). Secondly, it concerns the
newly legitimated ability of urban authori-
ties to reshape the geographies of urban life
(including transport infrastructures, neigh-
bourhood designs, regional plans and com-
mercial developments) in response to the
threats associated with near-future climate
change (p. 932).
The work of While et al. (2010) extends
the notion of a territorialised climate polity
by connecting the current round of low
carbon restructuring with the emergence of
a new political space economy in and
through which the accumulation of various
forms of climate-related investment gets
unevenly developed (see also While et al.,
2004; While, 2007; Bulkeley et al., 2011).
While echoing Rice’s reflections on how the
emergence of an urban climate polity
reflects the jurisdictional distribution of
responsibility for climate mitigation and
adaptation, While et al. reveal a broader set
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of spatial processes associated with the car-
bonisation of urban policy (Rice, 2010)
(including, inter alia, carbon outsourcing
and suburban free-riding). Importantly,
however, While et al. not only illustrate
that a spatial perspective facilitates the
development of critical insights into the
urban climate polity. They also suggest that
the capacity of cities to respond to climate
change, and the strategies that urban com-
munities choose to adopt as part of this
response, are connected to the past and
future spatial form and functioning of the
city. Drawing on Harvey’s concept of the
spatial fix, While et al. (2004) chart the
ways in which climate protection policies
(and the principles of sustainable urban
development more generally) are shaped
(and compromised) by prevailing logics of
urban development in ways that allow
them to modify urbanisation, but not to
challenge the economic pursuits of urban
elites and coalitions. Through the concept
of the sustainability fix, While et al. reveal
two important insights into the eco-carbon
restructuring of the urban space economy.
First, they illustrate that the extent to
which the carbonisation of urban policy
can be achieved is pre-conditioned by the
structured cohesion upon which the social
economy of that place had first emerged
(and in particular the specific modes of
production, energy mix and spatial form of
the city). Secondly, and following Molotch
(1976), they argue that, regardless of the
extent to which urban polities are clima-
tised, urban carbon control must be syn-
chronised within a seemingly perpetual
imperative for urban growth.
Hodson and Marvin’s aforementioned
urban ecological security agenda connects
the urban spatial fix with a more sinister
form of climate protection politics (2009,
2010). This agenda suggests that, in an age
of escalating climatic uncertainty and
resource constraints, we are seeing the
 NEOLIBERAL URBAN ENVIRONMENTALISM
rescaling of environmental security strate-
gies from the national to the urban scale.
Hodson and Marvin argue that increasingly
powerful networks of world cities (such as
the C40 partnership) are sharing socio-
technical resources in order to enable them
to ‘‘anticipate systematically and prepare
strategically for a period of constraint’’
(Hodson and Marvin, 2009, p. 199; original
emphasis). The metropolitanisation of eco-
logical security envisaged here connects to
issues of climate change to the extent that it
involves cities sealing themselves off from
the worst effects of climate change, while
simultaneously positioning themselves to
secure access to dwindling carbon-based
energy resources. Crucially, Hodson and
Marvin see the urban ecological security
agenda to be primarily about the strategic
reconfiguration of the spatial form and
infrastructural fabric of the city. While
Hodson and Marvin’s rather eschatological
vision of an urban security end-game,
involving ‘an archipelago of transcendent
urbanism’, may be overstating the case, the
new era of urban ecological entrepreneuri-
alism they chart provides a key context
within which to start to build critical urban
theories of climate change (see also Hodson
and Marvin, 2010). The work of Hodson
and Marvin also moves the analysis of
urban climate change away from the study
of cities as merely sites of climate change
policies and towards a concern with the
processes of international interurban com-
petition and development which are driv-
ing urbanisation.
Critical Urban Theories of Climate Change:
Neoliberal Urban Environmentalism and
its Contradictions
The work of Rice, While et al., and Hodson
and Marvin provides a valuable starting-
point from which to think about what a
critical urban theory of climate change may
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1353
involve. In this section, I want to build on
this body of work in order to establish the
key features/objectives of a more generalisa-
ble critical urban theory of climate change.
A useful starting-point in this endeavour is
provided by Brenner (2009) in his recent
essay, ‘What is critical urban theory?’.
Drawing on Lefebvre, (Herbert) Marcuse
and Habermas, inter alia, Brenner states
that
Critical urban theory rejects inherited disci-
plinary divisions of labour and statist, tech-
nocratic, market-driven and market-oriented
forms of urban knowledge . Rather than
affirming the current conditions of cities as
the expression of transhistorical laws of social
organization, rationality or economic effi-
ciency, critical urban theory emphasizes the
politically and ideologically mediated, socially
contested and therefore malleable character
of urban space (Brenner, 2009, p. 198).
While many may question the (neo-
Marxian) political orientation of Brenner’s
particular vision of critical urban theory, his
definition helps to delimit a common set of
purposes, which appear to differentiate criti-
cal urban scholars from their positivist
counterparts. First and foremost, by recog-
nising that critical urban studies is an inter-
disciplinary project, Brenner asserts that
being an urbanologist does not just involve
the study of cities as ontological locations,
but requires analysing them as bundles of
political and economic processes that trans-
cend metropolitan space. While this
process-based reading of the city is a well-
established Marxist theme, Brenner’s posi-
tioning of the current urban condition
within the governing orthodoxies and
market logics of neoliberalism is crucial (see
also Brenner and Theodore, 2002). While
current work on urban climate change often
positions cities within the meta context of
neoliberal orthodoxy, neoliberalism itself
1354 MARK WHITEHEAD
tends to remain a relatively unproblematised
and undifferentiated explanatory category.
A second implication of Brenner’s definition
is that critical urban theory is about reveal-
ing how urbanism could be different.
Consequently, while neoliberalism may pro-
vide the differentiated context within which
the current round of urbanisation is being
forged, critical urban theory is devoted to
illustrating how and why urbanisation could
be different. According to Brenner, this ded-
ication to urban contingency leads to critical
urban theory’s commitment to abstraction
and the study of contradiction. The ‘‘unapo-
logetically abstract’’ form of critical urban
theory derives from the need to think
through alternate, optimal urban conditions
(Brenner, 2009, p. 201). The desire to exca-
vate and explore contradiction, on the other
hand, is an enduring legacy of the urban
Marxist tradition (see here Merrifield,
2002). As with the process of normative
abstraction, the exploration of contradic-
tions is an important part of the methodol-
ogy of critical urban theory because it
exposes weaknesses in the totalising prac-
tices associated with urban capitalism and
illustrates both the need and potential for
organising urban space economies in differ-
ent ways (Brenner, 2009, pp. 199–200).
Brenner (2009, p. 201) asserts that critical
urban theory’s commitment to abstraction
and the study of contradictions facilitates
‘‘The search for emancipatory alternatives
latent within the present’’ urban condition.
This paper asserts that it is neoliberalism
that now delimits the present urban condi-
tion and the conditions of possibility for the
climatisation of urban policy. Brenner him-
self provides a useful insight into the impacts
of neoliberalism on the imagination and
enactment of different paths of urban devel-
opment when he observes that
The nature of the structural constraints on
emancipatory forms of social change, and
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the associated imagination of alternatives to
capitalism, have been qualitatively trans-
formed through the acceleration of integra-
tion, the intensified financialization of
capital, the crisis of the post-war model of
welfare state intervention, the still on-going
neoliberalization of state forms and the dee-
pening planetary ecological crisis (Brenner,
2009, p. 205).
What we are currently witnessing is thus
an urban order that is being conditioned
by the emerging ecological crisis of the
global climate, and an urban climate polity
that is being framed by a neoliberal system
of market-oriented governance (Sassen,
2010).
If critical urban theory leads climate
change research towards neoliberal urban
studies, precautions must be taken to
ensure that this does not become a simpli-
fying marriage of epistemological conveni-
ence. Most obviously, caution must be
taken to ensure that neoliberalism does
not become a unifying final instance
through which all of the problems associ-
ated with climate change and protection
get explained (see Ong, 2006, 2007). The
problematic conceptual overreach associ-
ated with neoliberalism is now well estab-
lished (see Brenner et al., 2010; Peck,
2010). Conceptual genealogies and empiri-
cal studies alike reveal that neoliberalism
is characterised by too much internal
diversity to act as a master concept for
either climate change or contemporary
urbanisation (Peck, 2010). Furthermore, it
appears that the diverse (and even hypo-
critical) forms taken by so-called neolib-
eral practices may reflect the ‘‘systematic
production of geoinstitutional differentia-
tion’’, which is inherent to the experimen-
tal form and opportunistic nature of
neoliberalism (Brenner et al., 2010, p. 184;
Evans, 2011; Peck, 2007). In this context,
it is helpful to think of neoliberalism as
 NEOLIBERAL URBAN ENVIRONMENTALISM
a politically guided intensification of market
rule and commodification . simultaneously
intensifying the uneven development of regu-
latory forms across places, territories and
scale (Brenner et al., 2010, p. 184).
Acknowledging the variegated nature of
neoliberalisation (as opposed to neoliberal-
ism in the singular) helps to draw attention
to the periodic contradictions it encounters
and how these challenges are partially
resolved—namely, through a process of
geographically dispersed trial and experi-
mentation. According to Peck (2010, p.
xviii), ‘‘the reinvention of neoliberal prac-
tices often occurs, in fact, at the limits of
the process of neoliberalization’’. It is the
contention of this paper that the carbonisa-
tion of urban policy reflects not only a
form of policy that is responding to a fun-
damental ecological limitation to neoliberal
practice, but one that is still conditioned by
the logics and strictures of evolving systems
of neoliberalisation. To be more precise, it
is argued later in this paper that urban cli-
mate change policy reflects a response to
the limits of neoliberalism that is not a
product merely of the overaccumulation of
capital, but of the overaccumulation of
carbon in the atmosphere. It is further
claimed that, as with previous crises of neo-
liberalism, this is a problem whose solution
is being pursued through the utilisation of
new (ecological) circuits of capital accumu-
lation and spatially differentiated develop-
ment (see Bumpus and Liverman, 2008).
A second reason for caution relates to
the dangers of depicting—even in a varie-
gated form—neoliberalism as a kind of
external force that is driving and condition-
ing urbanisation throughout the world.
The problem with this type of perspective
is that it tends to locate neoliberalism in
Western international institutions (like the
International Monetary Fund and World
Bank), think tanks and market systems.
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1355
From these centres, neoliberalism is seen to
radiate out for replication and repetition in
the cities of Africa, central and eastern
Europe, South Asia, south-east Asia and
Latin America. Paralleling this process, Roy
identifies how critical urban theory can
follow the purported spread of neoliberal-
ism, and offer explanations of urbanisation
throughout the world, which are predicated
on the assumptions of a Western theoreti-
cal heartland (Roy, 2009). The challenge
then becomes how to apply effectively a
critical urban theory which is oriented
towards a critique of the neoliberalisation
of the urban climate agenda, while not
neglecting the particular and varied forms
of urbanisation that are being experienced
throughout the world. Roy (2009, p. 822)
suggests that theorising the 21st-century
city will increasingly depend on an ability
to locate urban theory within the particula-
rities of diverse metropolitan contexts (per-
haps allowing for the prominent role of
insurgent citizenship in Latin American
urbanism, or the glocalisation strategies of
East Asian cities), while simultaneously
ensuring the dis-location of urban theory.
According to Roy (2009, p. 822), the dis-
location of urban theory allows urban
thought to ‘‘far exceed[s] its geographical
origins’’ and speak to common themes that
frame urbanisation around the world. In
relation to a critical urban theory of climate
change, Roy’s perspective is particularly
pertinent. As is discussed in greater detail
later, the informalised production of urban
space, which is so common in rapidly urba-
nising areas of the global South, has impor-
tant, if often ambiguous, relations with
both climate change policy and systems of
neoliberal responsibilisation (Roy, 2009, p.
826; Solnit, 2009). How such urban pro-
cesses are analysed within a critical urban
theory of climate change provides an
important context within which to test the
ability of such theories concurrently to
1356 MARK WHITEHEAD
locate and dis-locate the urban processes
they encounter.
If, as this paper suggests, a key objective
of a critical urban theory of climate change
is the ability to connect metropolitan cli-
mate change policy to the varied practices of
neoliberalisation, Bernstein’s notion of lib-
eral environmentalism provides a useful
empirical and conceptual starting-point for
analysis. According to Bernstein, the liberal
environmental norm complex emerged
during the 1970s out of struggles between
the UN, the OECD and the World Bank over
the nature of the connections between envi-
ronmental protection and international eco-
nomic development. Due in large part to the
increasing influence of the OECD within the
United Nations Environmental Programme,
liberal environmentalism emerged as a com-
promise between environmental policy and
emerging neoliberal orthodoxies. Bernstein
states that
liberal environmentalism supports liberaliza-
tion in trade and finance as consistent with
(even necessary for) global environmental
protection. It promotes sustainable economic
growth, free trade, privatization of the com-
mons and the use of market-based or other
economic mechanisms (for example, tradable
pollution permits, cost benefit analysis) as
the preferred means of environmental man-
agement (Bernstein, 2000, p. 474).
It is the contention of this paper that the
normalised economic orthodoxies of liberal
environmentalism continue to inform and
shape urban climate change policy in the
second decade of the 21st century. The nor-
malisation of this agenda, as well as its
inherent protean form, has undoubtedly
contributed to it being routinely neglected
as an object of analysis within work on
urban climate change. The remainder of
this paper analyses emerging urban climate
adaptation policies in the context of what I
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term a neoliberal urban environmental
norm complex. Neoliberal urban environ-
mentalism is best conceived of as the urba-
nised expression, but also driver, of early
21st-century liberal environmentalisms.
A Critical Urban Theory of
Enhanced Urban Adaptation
Having established the need for, and nature
of, a critical urban theory of climate
change, this section considers the utility of
this approach to the study of urban climate
change adaptation. This paper focuses on
issues of urban adaptation for three rea-
sons. First, because there has been a recent
prioritisation of climate change adaptation
within international and metropolitan-
level policy communities (UNFCCC, 2011,
sect. II; see also McKibbin and Wilcoxen,
2004). Secondly, relative to the study of
urban climate change mitigation, adapta-
tion is a relatively neglected aspect of urban
policy (see Byrne et al., 2009; Newman
et al., 2008). Thirdly, in keeping with miti-
gation policies (particularly those associ-
ated with cap and trade, personal carbon
budgets and off-sets), climate adaptation
strategies have been subject to neoliberali-
sation. Although this paper does, ulti-
mately, suggest that critical urban theory
(as defined earlier) can be applied to the
study of both urban climate mitigation and
adaptation, this section shows that care
must be taken not to develop an undiffer-
entiated account of these connected, but
distinct, processes. Climate change mitiga-
tion and adaptation measures do, for
example, present very different opportuni-
ties and obstacles to the marketisaton pro-
cess (with adaptation measures often
proving very difficult to commercialise in
their early stages of development). Initially,
it considers the emerging forms of urban
adaptation policy. This section then
 NEOLIBERAL URBAN ENVIRONMENTALISM
develops a critical urban analysis of the
contemporary adaptive city and reflects
upon what such a perspective tells us about
the nature of contemporary urban climate
proofing.
Automatic Adaptability, Urban
Reinvention and the Neoliberal Agenda
According to Adger et al., adaptation to cli-
mate change is best conceived of as
an adjustment in ecological, social or eco-
nomic systems in response to the observed
or expected changes in climatic stimuli and
their effects and impacts in order to alleviate
adverse impacts of change or take advantage
of new opportunities (Adger et al., 2005,
p. 78).
Two important dimensions of (urban)
adaptation practice are highlighted in this
definition. First, is the fact that adaptation
policy can be either a response to the per-
ceived threats posed by predicted climate
change and/or the reaction of communities
to the material manifestation of climate
change (the United Nations uses the terms
anticipatory and reactionary adaptation to
describe this distinction, UNFCCC, 2007,
p. 31; see also Smith et al. 1998; Tol et al.
1998). This point is not incidental, as it
emphasises that we can look for adaptive
policy responses to climate change both
within the predictive realms of anticipatory
urbanism (Hodson and Marvin, 2009) and
the aftermath of climatic shocks to city-
systems (see Solnit, 2009). The second
point of note is that urban climatic adapta-
tion can embody forms of metropolitan
triage and defence, but also offer the basis
for the more sanguine development of
competitive urban advantage.
Adger et al. draw attention to another
important distinction in the nature of cli-
mate change adaptation. They claim that
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1357
Adaptation can involve both building adap-
tive capacity thereby increasing the ability of
individuals, groups, or organizations to adapt
to changes, and implementing adaptation
decisions (Adger et al., 2005, p. 78; see also
Adger et al., 2006).
In this sense, it is possible to see urban cli-
matic adaptation policy operating to recon-
stitute the responsive subjectivities of urban
residents in order that they can help them-
selves (and others around them) more effec-
tively, and in relation to the provision of
new collective systems and infrastructure
that enable a city to operate under changed
climatic conditions.
It is not difficult to see the natural syner-
gies that exist between urban adaptation
policy and neoliberal development ortho-
doxies. As a ‘‘politically guided intensifica-
tion of market rule and commodification’’
(Brenner et al., 2010, p. 184), neoliberalisa-
tion has consistently valorised adaptation
(and Hayekian processes of spontaneity) as
a necessary response mechanism to market
signals and a driver of economic innova-
tion and efficiency. Indeed, as Peck (2010,
p. xi) observes, the protean nature of neoli-
beralism itself, is in part wedded to its con-
stitution as an ‘‘adaptive form of regulatory
practice’’. Notwithstanding these synergies,
there is no reason why urban climate adap-
tation has to take a neoliberal form. The
following quote is taken from the Cancun
Adaptation Framework (p. 4), which was
adopted by the United Nations in 2010
enhanced action on adaptation should be
undertaken in accordance with the conven-
tion, should follow a country-driven, gender-
sensitive, participatory and fully transparent
approach, taking into consideration vulnera-
ble groups, communities and eco-systems,
and should be based on and guided by the
best available science and, as appropriate,
traditional and indigenous knowledge.
1358 MARK WHITEHEAD
This vision of a people-centred adaptation
programme, which utilises indigenous
know-how and historical practices to guide
climate adaptation, has potentially little to
do with market-oriented adaptation strate-
gies. This does raise the question of precisely
what neoliberal forms of adaptation policy
would involve and whether these are actu-
ally the strategies that are being favoured by
urban authorities.
A useful starting point in attempting to
delimit what neoliberal forms of urban
climate adaptation may involve is Kahn’s
aforementioned manifesto for market-led
urban climate policy, Climatopolis (see
also Glaeser, 2009). In this book Kahn
states that
we’ll be ‘saved’ by a multitude of self-
interested people armed only with their wits
and access to capitalist markets . a small
cadre of forward-looking entrepreneurs will
be ready to get rich selling the next genera-
tion of products that will help us to adapt
(Kahn, 2010, pp. 7 and 13).
Kahn’s sanguine expectations reflect the
adaptation equivalent of what Davis has
described as ‘‘spontaneous decarbonization’’
(Davis, 2010, pp. 31–34). According to
Davis, spontaneous decarbonisation is a
neoliberal assumption that is built into most
international climate change mitigation
strategies. It essentially suggests that, pro-
vided the right market conditions exist,
reductions in greenhouse gas production
will emerge as part of the natural evolution
of the international economy. What Kahn is
essentially envisaging is a form of sponta-
neous climatic adaptation. All that is needed
for this new era of automatic adaptation2 to
exist is a free market economy, which can
generate the necessary incentives for the
widespread accumulation of adaptive capi-
tal. The notion of automatic adaptation also
indicates the broader economic structures
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associated with a neoliberal response to
urban climate change. Ergo, for the right
incentives to exist for self-initiating urban
adaptation, interurban competition, prefer-
ably at a global scale, is essential. It is, after
all, only in the context of such competition
that clear forms of advantage can accrue to
certain adaptation entrepreneurs, who can
then marshal the flow of international
investment into urban economies to ensure
that these advantages are capitalised upon.
Furthermore, this is an urban adaptation
system that is based upon predominantly
private not public financial investment.
Kahn’s vision prioritises private investment
because, unlike public funding, it is much
more likely to cross national boundaries in
search of the most (cost-) effective tech-
niques for adaptation. Kahn argues that
public funding is more likely to act to distort
the adaptation of the market (particularly
through its inflation-inducing potential),
fail to pick up on market signals, while also
potentially underwriting reinvestment in cli-
matically hazardous zones through acts of
disaster relief and climatic Keynesianism
(Kahn, 2010, p. 28; see also Malanga, 2011).
Kahn launches a further invective against
the (unspontaneous) public funding of
urban adaptation measures when he
observes that
The urban poor do not have the resources to
protect themselves, and their nations’ federal
and local governments are often unable and
unwilling to devote the financial resources to
protect them. Faced with this reality, their
best coping strategy is to grow richer so that
they can protect themselves (Kahn, 2010, pp.
79–80).
We will return to the issue of why urban
public bodies may not be able to afford to
protect people from the affects of climate
change shortly, but for now Kahn’s reflec-
tion serves to illustrate the final variable in
 NEOLIBERAL URBAN ENVIRONMENTALISM
the neoliberalist adaptation agenda: the
necessity of continued economic growth
and wealth creation. While green entrepre-
neurs may lead the way in generating wealth
from urban adaptation, it appears that it is
beholden on everyone to grow richer in
order to facilitate the forms of individua-
lised climate adjustment we may need to
make. Kahn is silent on the precise nature of
this mass process of wealth production and
whether it will ultimately contribute to an
aggregate worsening of the climate change
problem. Even ignoring this silence, it is dif-
ficult not to feel here that wealth production
has more to do with the ability personally to
insulate oneself from the impacts of climate
change as opposed to facilitating new forms
of collective adaptive innovation.
Care must obviously be taken in utilising
Kahn’s account of automated neoliberal
adaptation strategies. First, as a strong advo-
cate of a neoclassical, Chicago School vision
of neoliberal development,3 Kahn is an all
too easy target for an urban theoretical cri-
tique of market-based climate proofing
practices. If, as has been previously argued,
neoliberalism is both a variegated and varie-
gating set of economic and political prac-
tices, it would be misleading to think that
exposing the contradictions within one, rel-
atively purist, account of a neoliberal urban
order can operate as a generalised critique of
all related policy. The other reason for cau-
tion is that Kahn’s vision of the road away
from climate change serfdom may not be
reflected in the adaptation policies that are
currently being developed in cities. The
interesting thing, however, is that even a
cursory glance at prominent urban climate
change adaptation policies reveals the pivo-
tal role that Kahnian parameters play in
their construction and constitution. Hodson
and Marvin’s (2009) analysis of the C40
cities’ programme of climate protection, for
example, suggests that Kahn’s vision of
urban liberal environmental is an
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1359
undergirding principle of this major inter-
national partnership. In the 2011 Global
report on C4D cities, Kahn’s sentiments are
echoed in the description of the ‘‘marketing
potential’’ of urban climate protection poli-
cies as a basis for informing the locational
decisions of risk-averse businesses (KPMG,
2011, p. 28).
In order to understand more fully the
neoliberal dimensions of urban climate
adaptation policies, it is helpful to explore
a more detailed case study. Let us take, as a
prominent example, the contemporary
work of the International Council for Local
Environmental Initiatives (now known as
ICLEI). As an association of 1220 local gov-
ernment bodies who are dedicated to the
pursuit of locally constituted forms of sus-
tainable development, the ICLEI is by no
means a bastion of neoliberal orthodoxy.
The ICLEI also acts as the organisational
hub of the Cities for Climate Protection
Campaign.4 In their recent publication,
Financing the resilient city (ICLEI, 2011a),
the ICLEI set out their approach to deliver-
ing enhanced urban adaptation in cities.
This report is premised on the ICLEI’s esti-
mate that of the US$80–100 billion per year
investment that is likely to have to flow
into climate change adaptation schemes,
approximately 80 per cent of this spending
will be directed to urban areas. On these
terms, the ICLEI claim that the key chal-
lenge to urban adaptation is one of finance.
The ICLEI goes on to assert that
By focusing solely on risk reduction rather
than on the broader, revenue-generating
opportunities for investment, little incentive
is created to attract private investment into
adaptation and other risk reduction projects
(ICLEI, 2011b, p. 3).
By connecting urban adaptation with ‘‘rev-
enue-generating opportunities’’, the ICLEI
clearly envisages a shift from a form of
1360 MARK WHITEHEAD
eco-Keynesian, public realm of urban cli-
mate protection, to a marketplace of
investor-friendly schemes and initiatives.
According to the ICLEI’s vision, the key
to producing a favourable environment for
adaptation investment is the reformulation
of the urban planning process. Urban plan-
ning systems are crucial to the formation of
a marketplace for urban adaptation mea-
sures primarily because such adaptation
measures do not always carry clear profit
margins. According to the ICLEI, urban
planners must address the problems of land
consolidation, complex historical tenure
arrangements and liens in order to make it
easier for private investment to flow into
the brownfield sites that are likely to require
adaptive redevelopment (ICLEI, 2011a, p.
33; see also World Bank, 2008).5 In addition
to facilitating an appropriate spatial econ-
omy of scale for private-sector adaptation
investment, the ICLEI claim that planning
systems need to be flexible enough to allow
for the ‘‘creative disaggregation’’ and
‘‘rebundling’’ of utilities (like sewerage net-
works, roads, energy supply grids), so that
profits can be found in the adaptive retrofit
of more vulnerable branches of metropoli-
tan network (ICLEI, 2011a, p. 35). While
the segmentation of urban infrastructure is
nothing new (see Graham and Marvin,
2001, pp. 138–177; Curien, 1997), it appears
that the need for climate change adaptation
may well accelerate processes of spatial frag-
mentation within the city, as the uneven
commercial potential of utility and infra-
structure networks is worked out.
Beyond the planning system, the ICLEI
also sees municipal authorities having a
broader role in facilitating the marketisation
of the adaptive city. At one level, this invol-
vement involves setting tariff systems that
can effectively price the risk mitigation ser-
vices and asset performance associated with
adaptation programmes. As many adapta-
tion measures do not have an automatically
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tradable value, municipal authorities may
need to raise rates and support the increase
in property rents in investment areas. In the
ICLEI programme, municipal authorities
also have a role to play in the development
of catastrophe bonds and insurance securi-
ties that can cover the liabilities of private-
sector investment that is flowing into clima-
tically risky areas (ICLEI, 2011a).
When considered in a holistic sense, the
ICLEI urban adaptation programme not
only embodies many of the core principles
of neoliberal urban environmentalism, but
also serves to illustrate how the reduction of
climatic risk in the city is preceded by a
state-sponsored risk reduction programme
that is designed to protect the interests of
international investment capital. Again, there
is nothing new about the state supporting
the provision of the types of collective con-
sumption services (such as parks, schools
and affordable housing) for which there is
no immediate market incentive (see Castells,
1977; Merrifield, 2002, pp. 118–121).
Contemporary urban adaptation strategies,
however, appear to involve more than the
public sector ‘‘prop[ping] up the profitability
rates’’ (Merrifield, 2002, p. 118) of local
commercial agents in the city (by provision-
ing the collective services they require to
function). They embody the production of a
form of adaptive commodity (whether in the
form of flood defences, heat mitigation
capacity or the provision of green infrastruc-
ture), which can subsidise economic produc-
tion locally and be converted in a direct
commercial profit at an international scale.
Critical Perspectives on the Adaptive City
Having outlined the logics and practices
associated with a neoliberalised approach
to urban climatic adaptation, it is impor-
tant to establish precisely what critical
urban theory can bring to its analysis.
In considering this proposition, it is useful
 NEOLIBERAL URBAN ENVIRONMENTALISM
to divide the contribution of critical urban
theory into two distinct categories: analyses
of adaptation planning for future climatic
change; and analyses of actual responses to
climate change related, or proxy, events. In
relation to both categories of analysis, criti-
cal urban theory operates at the intersection
of the study of urban form and process,
and ultimately seeks to reveal the forces
which structure urban policy and expose
the contradictions of urban development
strategies.
Let us first turn to the analysis of adapta-
tion planning for future climatic change
events. As the previous section indicated, it
appears that two of the key challenges facing
urban authorities attempting to achieve
effective forms of adaptation are raising the
necessary funds to support related restruc-
turing, and developing a planning system
that it able to deal with the complex land use
barriers that are likely to inhibit adaptation
measures. It is interesting that such chal-
lenges appear to lead naturally to the kinds
of neoliberal solutions to urban adaptation
proposed by both Kahn and the ICLEI.
Critical urban theory, however, immediately
raises the possibility that already existing
neoliberalism is actually the source of the
financial and planning problems confront-
ing adaptation regimes rather than the basis
for their resolution.
A useful starting-point in testing this
hypothesis is the Municipal Price Index
(MPI). The MPI monitors the changing
costs associated with the day-to-day opera-
tions of a city. To these ends, it is the urban
equivalent of the Consumer Price Index
(CPI), which tracks the changing prices that
households pay for goods (Ducet, 2007, p.
20). Crucially, the MPI is currently increas-
ing at 2.5 times the rate of the CPI (Ducet,
2007, p. 20). According to Ducet, one of the
reasons that the MPI is outpacing the CPI is
because of the significant role of energy in
any municipal budget and the fact that
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1361
wholesale energy prices have been rapidly
increasing. Yet the growth in the MPI is also
connected to the emerging logics of neolib-
eral urban economies. At one level, the
rising cost of running cities has increased as
a product of the property-based sprawl and
expansion of cities (see Molotch, 1976). The
liberalisation of housing markets and mort-
gage systems has enabled the metropolitan
property market to be greatly extended. The
subsequent acceleration of urban growth
regimes over the past 50 years has seen the
costs of municipal road building and utility
provision spiral. In another context, the
emergence of just-in-time urbanism, classi-
cally associated with new forms of neoliberal
flexibility in the delivery of goods and ser-
vices to consumers, has also necessitated the
building and maintenance of extended and
costly infrastructure networks (see Ducet,
2007, pp. 25–27). Taken together, these
changes in the secondary (property-based)
and primary (goods and services) circuits of
urban capitalism have embodied the spatial
expression of the escalating market-based
visions of a neoliberal society. In terms of
urban climatic change policies, such long-
term processes have placed great strain on
municipal budgets and have made it imprac-
tical for urban governments to contemplate
covering the costs of adaptation.
The irony of this situation is that, while
the logics of liberalised urban development
have accelerated climate change, the finan-
cial strictures associated with neoliberalism
have also placed urban municipalities in
situations which make protecting them-
selves from climatic changes increasingly
difficult to fund. While it is not unusual for
the crisis tendencies of neoliberalisation to
provide the basis for the reinvention of neo-
liberalisms (see Peck, 2010), it is surely pro-
blematic to think that further rounds of
neoliberalisation can address the neoliberal
origins of the urban climate change proble-
matic. On these terms, it appears that
1362 MARK WHITEHEAD
contemporary urban mitigation and adap-
tation policies are as much about the search
for a tertiary circuit of ecological accumula-
tion, into which the overaccumulation
crises of existing circuits of capital can be
temporarily displaced, as they are about
addressing the dangers of climate change.
Further contradictions in the neoliberal
adaptation agenda emerge when analysis
turns to the likely socioeconomic impacts of
related policies. If, as the ICLEI report sug-
gests, urban climatic adaptation is likely to
incur financial costs that will outstrip the
capacity of municipal (and for that matter
national public) funds, it appears that the
threats of climate change could well lead to a
new round of privatisation within the city.
Due to the uncertain nature of the emergent
markets and associated profit margins
related to adaptation initiatives, it is likely
that such acts of privatisation (linked to
large programmes of civil engineering and
defence, as well as smaller retro-fit initia-
tives) will not only expose municipal
authorities to heightened private-sector
competition, but also to the dangers of
private-sector failure (particularly in rela-
tion to municipal authorities underwriting
private-sector risk). Urban adaptation
regimes will increasingly see public bodies
not only devolving responsibility to private-
sector agents for the delivery of collective
services, but also witness them becoming
increasingly connected to the formation of
favourable conditions for the generation of
an urban adaptation market. By underwrit-
ing private-sector investment in adaptation
schemes through the issuing of bonds and
securities, urban authorities could find
themselves increasingly exposed to financial
loss even in an era of enhanced privatisation.
Acts of enhanced privatisation are also
likely to lead to other adverse socioeconomic
consequences. The ‘creative disaggregation’
and ‘rebundling’ of utilities, and the acts of
forensic-level privatistion this is likely to be
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associated with, will lead to the formation of
increasingly fragmented urban service deliv-
ery systems whose co-ordination in times of
climatic stress may become more difficult
(see Comfort, 2006). In relation to property
development and redevelopment, the pur-
suit of enhanced rates, rental and sale value
in adaptation areas will undoubtedly lead to
fairly aggressive forms of climatological gen-
trification. As Hodson and Marvin (2009)
have already pointed out, it is likely that
such processes of climatological gentrifica-
tion will operate not only at the urban scale,
with climate-proofed locales of the city
becoming more desirable and costly loca-
tions in which to live, but also at an interur-
ban scale, with climate secure cities (often in
temperate, non-coastal locations) becoming
increasingly unaffordable for low-income
residents (see While et al., 2010).
In addition to exposing the contradic-
tions, and potential injustices, associated
with the neoliberal development of adapta-
tion capacity in cities, critical urban theory
can also contribute to analysing responses to
climate change events. A well-documented
case in point is provided by the impacts of
Hurricane Katrina on urban policy and
planning in New Orleans (see Peck, 2010,
2006; Comfort, 2006). While it is impossible
to draw a direct line of scientific causation
between Hurricane Katrina and anthropo-
genic climate change, it can clearly act as an
example of what extreme weather events,
which are predicted to become more fre-
quent as global average temperatures rise,
could do to major cities. Post-Katrina New
Orleans also reveals what a neoliberal
response to climatic disaster could involve.
Hurricane Katrina provided an opportunity
for what Peck (2010, p. 176) has described
as the ‘‘neoliberal counterintelligensia’’ to
colonise New Orleans as a tabula rasa for
market-oriented governance and entrepre-
neurial zeal. A crucial dimension in this
colonisation process was to associate the
 NEOLIBERAL URBAN ENVIRONMENTALISM
failure of New Orleans’s physical and orga-
nisational infrastructure with the flaws of
‘Cajun Keynesianism’ and the cultures of
social dependency and poverty it had main-
tained (Peck, 2010, p. 165). The proposed
solution to New Orleans’s climatic vulner-
ability became the formation of an entrepre-
neurial city, based upon the rolling back of
environmental restrictions on economic
activity, tax breaks, the introduction of a
newly competitive landscape in the educa-
tion system and new restrictions being
imposed on public entitlement programmes
(see Peck, 2010, pp. 158–165).
Peck (2010, p. 179) has described the neo-
liberal response to Hurricane Katrina as a
‘‘contracted-out urban structural adjust-
ment’’, but at heart it reflects the nostrum of
spontaneous adaptation that runs deep
within the urban climate change agenda.
This is an orthodoxy that suggests the key to
effective urban adaptation is the marshalling
of urban environmental entrepreneurialism.
All that is needed to unleash this creative cli-
matic class, it would appear, is the removal
of cultures of governmental dependency and
disincentive. It is, of course, not difficult to
see how these beliefs are exploiting the prac-
tices and discourses of informality that are
associated with many rapidly growing cities
in South America, south Asia and Africa.
Informality, in this context, becomes associ-
ated with a form of intuitive adaptation,
which is low cost and self-regulating. What
such neoliberal visions neglect, however, is
that rarely is climatic necessity the mother of
instant adaptive invention and that sponta-
neous capacity is often prefigured by long-
term patterns of relative social and economic
advantage both between cities and people.
Conclusion
This paper has argued that a critical urban
theory of climate change offers crucial
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1363
insights into the nature and potential injus-
tices associated with the carbonising metro-
polis. At the centre of this endeavour has
been a desire to illustrate that the contribu-
tion of urban studies to climate change can
be much more than simply offering a spatial
perspective on climate change policy devel-
opment. As with many other social science
disciplines (including economics, politics,
psychology, anthropology, geography and
cultural studies), climate change has pre-
sented new challenges and opportunities for
the urban studies community. This paper
has claimed, however, that the climatisation
of urban studies has been associated with a
peculiar loss of the urban perspective within
related research (this is somewhat akin to a
psychological perspective on climate change
that ignored the human mind). While the
reasons for this lacuna are unclear (although
one senses they may have something to do
with the norms of analytical urgency and
policy relevance that suffuse the climate
change research community), it is clear that
it has severely circumscribed what urban
studies has so far been able to contribute to
the climate change debate.
Critical urban theory emphasises the
contingent form which urbanisation takes,
while drawing attention to ways in which
cities are shaped at the intersections of par-
ticular expressions of political and eco-
nomic power. In relation to climate change,
we have seen how critical urban theory
reveals that the carbonisation of urban
policy does not only occur in urban juris-
dictions, but is actively shaped and condi-
tioned by the evolving spatial logics of
urbanisation. At one and the same time,
however, critical urban theory also connects
urban climate change policy to the pro-
cesses of international market exchange,
financial investment and competition asso-
ciated with neoliberalism. This paper has
illustrated the natural synergies that exist
between neoliberalisation and adaptive
1364 MARK WHITEHEAD
climatic practice. The emerging emphasis
that is being placed on automatic (or
autonomous) adaptation is prioritising the
construction of international markets in,
and commodities for, climatic adaptation.
In this way, the construction of a particular
neoliberal vision of how urban adaptation
occurs is itself necessitating the production
of the neoliberal structures that are required
for this vision to be realised. Critical urban
theory helps to the reveal the contradictions
associated with this process of neoliberal
urban adaptation. However, the limitations
associated with automatic climatic adapta-
tion have already begun to be exposed in
far less radical contexts. The UK govern-
ment’s 2006 Stern review: the economics of
climate change has, for example, suggested
that the relatively long-term nature of the
threats associated with climate change may
make it very difficult to generate consumer
demand for adaptive investment and com-
modities (Stern et al., 2006, p. 412).
A final contribution of critical urban
theory is its commitment to envisaging
alternative strategies for achieving effective
and just forms of adaptation (see here
Adger et al., 2006). A key part of this pro-
cess is distinguishing between urban adap-
tation as a series of competitive assets and
its potential role as a basis for socio-
ecological redistribution and compensa-
tion. Given the clear limitations of, and
contradictions associated with, the compe-
titively oriented approach to adaption, it is
clearly important to consider more pro-
gressive and collective approaches to cli-
mate proofing. Of course, many of these
forms of compensatory adaptation strate-
gies already exist at an international level.
The work of the United National Global
Environmental Facility’s Trust Fund,
Special Climate Change Fund and Least
Developed Countries Fund already redistri-
butes investment from the global North
into the adaptive capacities of developing
Downloaded from usj.sagepub.com at PONTIF UNIV CATOLICA CAMPINAS on June 4, 2013
communities (UNFCCC, 2007). At a more
local level, Transition Culture initiatives,
the Degrowth Movement and urban repair
squads are beginning to construct and rea-
lise radical communitarian approaches to
urban adaptation and care (Mason and
Whitehead, 2012). Crucially, many of these
local initiatives are founded upon open
participation and voluntary association,
which work against neoliberal accusations
of climatic coercion and associated declines
in personal freedom. It is important to note
here that many of these initiatives (and
ones like them) currently operate alongside
more neoliberal adaptive capacities in a
series of cities and urban spaces. It has, for
example, become increasingly apparent that
urban authorities, in the UK at least, are
keen to amalgamate the insights of
Transition Culture into more mainstream
policy initiatives. In any given city, it thus
is clear that the urban adaptation agenda
reflects something of an amalgam of more-
or-less progressive, more-or-less market-
oriented governance. Notwithstanding the
success of more progressive initiatives,
however, it appears unlikely that they will
be able to close the adaption capacity gap
that the neoliberal assault on urban public
funding has produced. This is a gap that
even a tax-based system of enhanced public
investment in (profitable and unprofitable)
urban adaptation measures cannot close.
This is precisely why the politics of urban
adaptation needs to be constructed not as a
struggle for short-term help and financial
assistance (from any available source), but
as a process that contests the very logics of
neoliberal urbanisation (and its affects on
collective resources and public funds, not
to mention global climates). Climate
change is reconfiguring urban politics and
it is critical that neoliberal anticipatory
elites are not able to exploit the urban
future as a basis for controlling the metro-
politan present.
 NEOLIBERAL URBAN ENVIRONMENTALISM
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any
funding agency in the public, commercial or not-
for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. Matthew Kahn is a professor at the
University of California, Los Angeles. He
specialises in environmental and urban eco-
nomics and has previously developed his
free-market economic approaches to urban
environmental policy-making in Green
Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment
(Kahn, 2006).
2. The Stern Review uses the term autonomous
adaptation (Stern et al., 2006).
3. Kahn was a student of Gary Becker, who was
himself a student of Milton Friedman.
4. The analysis presented here on ICLEI-spon-
sored urban adaptation programmes is based
upon a careful reading of key, contemporary
strategies produced by the ICLEI. While the
entire content of these strategies was consid-
ered, I focused in particular on those sec-
tions of the reports that outlined proposed
project financing strategies. While it is clear
that not all elements of ICLEI adaptation
policy can be easily categorised as neoliberal,
analysis showed that its emphasis on market-
based systems of financing and privatisation
were in keeping with a neoliberal adaptation
agenda.
5. In their commentary on urban adaptation
policy in Europe and central Asia, the World
Bank note that complex ownership struc-
tures and systems of property law have pre-
vented larger banking sector investment in
urban adaptation (World Bank, 2008, p. 7).
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