New York City, like many other coastal metropolitan areas, is facing several interrelated impacts of climate change, including sea level rise, more intense and frequent storms, and coastal and inland flooding. Combined with long histories of human-induced transformation and degradation, climate change threatens the capacities of New York’s urban-coastal ecosystems to provide benefits for human and non-human communities. Moreover, climate change intersects with ongoing patterns of (uneven) development and urbanization in ways that challenge public access to waterfronts and coastal spaces, making it difficult for some groups of people to sustain culturally important activities at the water’s edge. In this challenging context, diverse collectives are coming together in NYC to advance environmental stewardship initiatives that generate more equitable human-environment relationships in the city. Some of the key actors are city, state and federal governments, sometimes operating in overlapping jurisdictions, which makes their work valuable for understandings of polycentric governance. Other important actors include community-based organizations, non-profits, university centers, and grassroots activists. Many of them are working together to develop innovative approaches for coping with environmental change and caring for non-human communities as much as human ones. Importantly, they are also working to achieve more just and inclusive environmental stewardship (e.g., enhancing participation, improving access, preserving culturally important connections to the environment). This talk will draw on several local cases to demonstrate how, through this work, both new and longstanding organizations in the city are enacting vital forms of commoning that challenge status quo environmental management and climate adaptation. Reading these local cases through the lens of commoning as well as through the insights of urban political ecology scholarship on the production of nature, the talk will also highlight the role that these various efforts play in disrupting dominant processes of urbanization (and thereby making possible forms of alter-urbanization). In doing so, the talk will examine how these forms of commoning serve as sites for imagining and enacting alternative climate futures in coastal-urban worlds.
