Staging Urban Politics for Environmental Representation

Recently scholars, practitioners and activists have argued that the global response to climate change has been hampered by a crisis of (knowledge) representation. At the same time, political and urban scholars are increasingly identifying the ‘repoliticisation’ of the urban context, including the need to make use of urban context as a stage for civic activity which has global significance, reconstituting what - and whom - we consider as belonging to urban climate politics. In our contribution we present the results of actionbased educational research addressing the question: how do we perform a politics of sustainability in the urban setting, and how can we do this in a way that overcomes the crisis of (knowledge) representation in responding to the climate emergency? We investigated how performance-based interventions in the public space are effective in magnifying marginalised voices, in response to climate and related social injustices. We
analyse how this contributes to new forms of (embodied) knowledge production and communication, bringing new perspectives and ways of knowing from non-human, nonspeaking or embodied sources into urban climate politics.