In this seminar, PhD scholar Andreas Brandt will present his ongoing ethnographic work where he investigates the effects of Vejle Municipality’s appropriation of resilience as a strategy of the future to tackle climate changes. In particular, he shall focus on what emerges from the municipality’s resilience tactic through which urban environments are transformed into laboratories targeting challenges like floods in the city. As he shall demonstrate, through these practices, the making and re-making of the city, including its infrastructures and subjects, become fragmented into an array of experimental projects. He shall refer to these emerging initiatives as adjacent spaces: Each urban project engenders different private-public relationships in the municipality and prompts multiple urban development aims; aims and relations that thus appear to be both in synch as well out of synch with the initial problem at hand of protecting the city against floods. Ultimately, resilience and the practice of laboratorizing urban planning processes relate therefore not just to how the municipality must adapt the city to an environmental climate that is changing. He suggests that these resilient government tactics are telling of a story of how the social, cultural and political climates of what a municipality is, what it must govern and how, appears to be changing as well.

Discussants for the seminar are: Hannah Knox, University College London and Helene Ratner, Aarhus University.

The seminar is open to all. If you want to participate via Zoom, please send an email to Andreas Brandt (brandt@edu.au.dk)

The format of the seminar:

1. A 20-30 minutes presentation by the PhD student, Andreas Brandt
2. 15‐20 minutes for each of the two opponents, Hannah Knox and Helene Ratner 
3. 20 minutes for a general discussion including the principal supervisor, Maja Hojer Bruun (AU) and the two co-supervisors, Jakob Krause-Jensen (AU) and Kasper Tang Vangkilde (KU).