Acknowledgments
This book’s cover image, “Playing in the Sunset,” captures the art installation “Greetings to the Sun” at Croatia’s Zadar waterfront. The installation, done by the architect Nikola Bašić, is part of the revitalization and transformation of the harbor area. The monument consists of a large circle of solar panels, interspersed with LED lights that come to life after sunset, releasing the solar energy stored during the day. The technology of photovoltaics thus becomes a stage for the playfulness of life, with kids riding bikes or running around, and for moments of reflection by people gathering in and around the monument. The installation, which is at once technical and cultural, speaks to many of the themes explored in this book, from renewable energy and urban transitions to experimentation and everyday life. Each evening, the installation brings together a new “low carbon public.” And, similar to the large chunks of Arctic ice (harvested as free-floating icebergs from a fjord outside Nuuk, Greenland) that Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing placed for melting in a ring formation at the Place du Panthéon during COP21 in Paris (December 2015), the space gets its meaning and importance from the conversations it gives rise to. Both these art installations are about emergence, from the playfulness at the sunset to the tangible experience of the fragility and decay of the Arctic. The book that you hold in your hand is not about “climate art projects” as such, but about culture in a broader sense. The book travels through many sites where the material and social come together in particular ways; sites through which society’s response to climate change is coming to be realized – homes, workplaces, markets, infrastructure systems, and local economies. What is at stake in society’s response to climate change are not the isolated actions of individual agents, but, rather, the socially and materially constituted ways in which climate change comes to be made meaningful, realized, and contested.
This book arose out the workshop “Devices and Desires: The Cultural Politics of a Low Carbon Society” that we, the editors, organized in Lund in May 2014. The workshop was part of Harriet’s King Carl XVI Gustaf’s Professorship in Environmental Science at Lund University, and we would like to gratefully acknowledge this support. The book has also greatly benefited from support from the SSHRC Grant “Cultural Politics of Climate Change” and from the FORMAS grant “Governing Climate Change.” Apart from these financial contributions, we are very thankful to all scholars who participated in the workshop, presenting papers, acting as discussants, and generously sharing their ideas and thoughts in joint conversations. As editors, we have been blessed to work with an excellent group of chapter authors who have worked hard to integrate comments by fellow chapter authors and by us as editors.
We are thankful for all assistance from Cambridge University Press along the way, and to Samuel Teeland in working with the workshop and the early stages of the book. Mary Anne Carswell provided an excellent editing of the final manuscript. We are thankful to the copyright owners for the rights to reproduce different kinds of material (specified separately in each chapter), in particular Ivo Dukic for his image “Playing in the Sunset,” Zadar Pier, 2009.
