Valentina Gulin Zrnić održala je pozvano izlaganje na prvoj konferenciji europskog projekta “Competing Urgencies: Translating Climate Neutrality in the European Union” (EU-URGE), organizator Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Culture and Arts, University of Warsaw, Varšava, 9.-10.5.2024.
The Contribution of Urban Anthropology to the Research into Climate Neutral Cities
In this lecture, I will single out some concepts, approaches and methods that arise from or are related to the field of urban anthropology, but also intertwined with other areas that are the focus of my research, such as the anthropology of space and place, and the anthropology of the future. I will present the approaches of social production and construction of space as an analytical grid for the research of spatializing culture (Low), which can be important in terms of research on the materialization of urgency and climate neutrality in public spaces. Another framework within which the topic of climate neutral cities could be further elaborated is urban ethics: ethics of possibilities, ethical projects, ethical imagination, which are based on the question of the urban “good life” and imagination of the relationship to oneself and others in cities (Appadurai, Moore, Ege etc). Finally, I will look back at the potential of urban comparison (contrastive approach, refiguration) (Färber, Knoblauch and Löw etc) and raise the issue about the value of cultural anthropological expertise in applicative and policy making domains.