The global-urban syndrome of climate-corporate futuring

Situated in interdisciplinary literatures on climate urbanism and future making, this article examines the multi-sited case of climate-corporate futuring in contemporary global urban climate governance. Drawing on a dataset of five workshops on climate resilience organized by two globally facing urban think tanks, the article analyzes critically the contingent and frustrated process by which global in urban climate governance sought to construct “best practice” and manufacture climate commonsense for the world of cities. Such a multi-sited endeavor of co-producing consensus across space is argued to be a methodological and defensive maneuver as professionals seek to adapt to, and capitalize on, climate-changing urban futures. Fleshing out such authoritative geographies of climate knowledge in interurban space reveals the process by which liberal-corporate alliances dominant in transnational climate networks seek to foreclose, from the inside out, more just urban climate futures. They do so by operating across and beyond cities, in stark contrast to extant research that remains trained on the city. It reveals, ultimately, the spatial and institutionalized consolidation of a particular splice of elite financialized coastal urbanism made to stand in for the 21st-century world of cities.