This research sets out to explore the social and cultural implications of recent moves to make climate change a central component of projects of planned urban change. Focusing on the city of Manchester, and its aim to be the 'UK's Greenest City', I am following current attempts to develop and implement climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies in the city. Using ethnographic methods and focusing on the diversity of practices through which climate change is being responded through networks of collaboration between local government, private corporations, universities and communities, the project aims to provide a much needed account of the ways in which the problem of climate change is working to reorganise a diversity of social situated knowledge practices. Of particular interest is the way in which the material properties of climactic change are providing the conditions for the reorganisation of expertise, and the realignment of interests as they come to redefine the boundaries and potential fields of social intervention.

I will be conducting ethnographic fieldwork on this project between September 2011 and June 2013.