Materiality and sustainability transitions: integrating climate change in transport infrastructure in Ontario, Canada
<p class="first" id="d270417e69">Infrastructure threatens to lock-in societies to fossil fuels unless something is done now. This is because infrastructure lasts for such a long time, meaning that any infrastructure built or rebuilt now will last wel...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Pluto Journals
2016-08-01
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| Series: | Prometheus |
| Online Access: | https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.1080/08109028.2017.1331612 |
| Summary: | <p class="first" id="d270417e69">Infrastructure threatens to lock-in societies to fossil fuels unless something is
done now. This is because infrastructure lasts for such a long time, meaning that
any infrastructure built or rebuilt now will last well into the twenty-first century
– until the end of the century, in some cases. Consequently, there is a need to integrate
climate change into infrastructure now or societies will be left with infrastructure
designed around unsustainable socio-technical systems (such as combustion engines,
roads, and suburbanization). Such change is conceptualized in the literature as a
sustainability transition. However, any attempts at such transitions have to address
the ‘materialities’ of infrastructure systems (physical form, environmental context,
and so on). In this paper, I develop the concept of ‘socio-material systems’ and apply
it to transport infrastructure in Ontario, Canada.
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| ISSN: | 0810-9028 1470-1030 |