A Brave New Sustainable City?

Crisis Knowledge as a Mode of Urban Transformation

Abstract

Crisis is not a state but a relational process of knowledge. It emerges through translocal circulations of models, narratives, and infrastructures, producing specific epistemics that structure political orders of time, responsibility, and the future. In this article, we show that crisis knowledge selectively generates urgency, renders problems visible, and legitimizes interventions – while political-economic entanglements, historical responsibilities, and alternative forms of knowledge recede into the background. Drawing on research on the sustainability governance of European cities and on flood resilience in Ho Chi Minh City, we demonstrate how different epistemics of the crisis emerge: in one case as a narratively ordered past, in the other as an infrastructurally anticipated future. In both cases, crisis knowledge orders time by specifying horizons of the future and stabilizing them as governable spaces of action, thereby powerfully ordering world(s).