Buildings and Spaces as Contested Boundaries in Climate Justice Activism
Carbon emissions have risen since the industrial revolution contributing to climate change. As the day to day impacts of climate change and the vulnerability of nations become more visible, communities are taking to the streets in acts of protest. Per the Carnegie Endowment’s Climate Protest Tracker, multitudes of climate protests broke out across the world. Most of these protests are located in urban environments and include labor groups, indigenous communities, political parties, youth and civil society groups. How the protests implicate the built environments and the media they use, the impacts that they have, varies widely. This project collects data about how built environments are implicated and used as spaces and surfaces for the protests and their resultant impacts. Each protest serves as a case study with comparative attributes that include, creating visibility on building surfaces, occupying and obstructing access in space, and the impact through dialogue and media attention. Data collected is analyzed through the development of comparative analytical diagramming. This study focuses on the Just Stop Oil protests, Free Land Camp, Wind Farm Protests in Norway, and the Act on Climate projections. The implication of the built environment varies between each protest but can be broken up into three categories: contextual, acontextual, and heteromorphic. Analysis of these protests has assisted in the definition of the taxology for visual protests.