Observatory on Urban Futures

Kian Goh (Urban Planning, UCLA)

“(Un)Field Notes for a Global Climate Crisis”

What do we do when we have learned to learn in grounded ways in a context where knowledge might be found in the flows and in the multiplicities? This talk probes the problems of fieldwork in a time of globalized climate impacts, and information and capital flows, and globally networked institutions of governance and action. Climate change is understood, on the one hand, to be a global problem, understood through standardized planetary measures, and, on the other, a problem with disparate causes and impacts on the ground. But the problem of climate change challenges core ideas about knowledge. Sheila Jasanoff, notably, states that climate change “tends to separate the epistemic from the normative, divorcing is from ought." Much productive knowledge has come not only from planetary climate science but also from critical investigations involving grounded, embodied, place-based experiences. This is especially important for the field of planning, with its normative outlook. What, then, of critical knowledge beyond the grounded and place-based, particularly for planning thought and practice? I explore both the epistemological as well as the pragmatic problems of taking on this research, especially when the methods and knowledge frameworks we’ve been trained in are insufficient or not possible. Revisiting my own research fieldwork in sites in Rotterdam, Jakarta, New York, and the Inland Empire, I inquire into what is understood through such grounded, participatory experiences, and what is conceptualized in the in-between or beyond. I discuss the issues of grounded research when you can’t be on the ground; the relationship between global data and embodied experience; the activities of abstract theory making and multiscalar research; and, in particular, the imperative to know the global and planetary for those who have built a capacity for knowledge production in very grounded ways. I end the talk with a set of propositions for multiscalar climate knowledge – beyond place.

kian goh