De Tymowski, Laure (2024) WHOSE CLIMATE-PROOF CITY? A river-led, catchment-based critical assessment of climate justice in South Dublin. PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.

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Abstract

The expansion of urban green and climate policy of the last decades in many regions of the world has been increasingly called out for dramatically reinforcing existing urban inequities. Many urban justice scholars have documented how these inequities are produced through non-inclusive procedural and epistemic governance: a tight control over who makes decisions and who produces knowledge in urban green and climate development results in further unjust urban environmental arrangements. Building on these findings, the present PhD research project assesses how climate inequities unfold in South Dublin: it asks whose environmental concerns and knowledges count in the making of the climate-proof city. Taking as a starting point one South Dublin river, the river Poddle, it critically assesses four climate change adaptation and mitigation projects to be implemented in its catchment and involving a wide range of public and private stakeholders: a planned flood alleviation scheme, an Amazon data centre powered district heating scheme, two inner-city redensification initiatives and, finally, a combined river greening and sustainable food production project. Grounded in a qualitative, inductive methodology approach and drawing on main feminist epistemologies assumptions, the collection and assessment of data pertaining to the four climate projects are conducted through three research methods: walking with the river Poddle, semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis. Findings are consistent with the existing literature on the neoliberalization of urban environmental governance: all four climate projects are found to be heavily private actor, private market driven and as such leading to intensified social and environmental inequities. The privatization of climate governance is largely facilitated by state and local government tight control over decision-making and knowledge production processes. In contrast, the present research project outlines ways to locate and challenge the produced inequities through fairer human and more-than-human spatial-epistemic arrangements.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Keywords:	river-led; catchment-based; critical assessment; climate justice; South Dublin;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography
Item ID:	19039
Depositing User:	IR eTheses
Date Deposited:	15 Oct 2024 10:56
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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