Cohen, Daniel Aldana

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 13
  • Publication
    Time to Pull the Plug on Urban Fossil Consumption: Review of Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming
    (2016-05-17) Cohen, Daniel Aldana
    Andreas Malm's wonderful book, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, is about power. Since I'm a scholar who researches urban climate politics, I'm especially excited that Malm's analysis of power is so centered on urban politics. I'll explain what I mean by that, then suggest some interesting lessons from Malm's account that his arguments around contemporary climate politics have underplayed.
  • Publication
    The Urban Green Wars: Struggling for Working-Class Control of Cities is Crucial to Bringing Down Carbon Emissions
    (2015-12-01) Cohen, Daniel Aldana
    About half the planet's carbon dioxide emissions originate in urban areas: the cities and suburbs where a growing majority of humanity lives. To survive this century, we'll have to live together in new ways. Few issues are as fundamental to climate politics as this one. And few are as visceral: the urban is rapidly becoming one of the chief terrains of twenty-first century struggle.
  • Publication
    The Rationed City: The Politics of Water, Housing and Land Use in Drought-Parched São Paulo
    (2016-01-01) Cohen, Daniel Aldana
    Specters of rationing haunt metro São Paulo. Water supplies have plunged to historic, dangerous lows. The idea of rationing has become a flash-point. The state’s center-right governor has insisted that rationing be avoided at all costs and the state’s profit-driven water utility has followed suit, even as dwindling water supplies are being opaquely and unequally distributed. To make sense of the situation, I propose, through an exploration of the crisis’s origins and recent developments that builds on over one year of ethnographic fieldwork, a new approach to ecological scarcity. It revitalizes, in a socioecological and crisis-sensitive form, Manuel Castells’s concept of collective consumption politics, with a focus on housing and land use. The question is how acute crises and longstanding socioecological struggles interact, from above and below. In São Paulo, this dilemma takes the form of housing movements’ and environmentalists’ longstanding estrangement, but prompted by crisis, some leaders are experimenting with cooperation. In an echo of the June 2013 bus fare protests, this fledgling coalition proposes a democratic version of rationing that goes beyond the distribution of water through pipes and that threatens broader power arrangements.
  • Publication
    It Gets Wetter
    (2017-01-01) Cohen, Daniel Aldana
    It's a novel scene—New York City, 123 years from now: half-drowned but not out. Still a capital of real estate, still a political powerhouse, still an unequal battleground between finance and housing movements, still a crucible where capitalism and climate politics are smashed, melted, and twisted together. The (true) physical premise is that upper Manhattan is fifty feet higher than lower Manhattan.
  • Publication
    A Tale of Two Sandys
    (2013-12-01) Bergren, Erin; Coffey, Jessica; Cohen, Daniel Aldana; Crowley, Ned; Koslow, Liz; Liboiron, Max; Merdjanoff, Alexis; Murphree, Adam; Wachsmuth, David
    Responses to Hurricane Sandy consistently cluster into two types according to how the issues have been defined and understood. On one hand, the crisis was seen as an extreme weather event that created physical and economic damage, and temporarily moved New York City away from its status quo. On the other hand, Hurricane Sandy exacerbated crises which existed before the storm, including poverty, lack of affordable housing, precarious or low employment, and unequal access to resources generally. A Tale of Two Sandys describes these two understandings of disaster and discuss their implications for response, recovery, and justice in New York City. The white paper is based on 74 interviews with policymakers, environmental groups, volunteer first responders, and residents affected by the storm; ethnographic observation; analysis of public reports from government, community-based organizations, and other groups; qualitative analysis of canvassing forms and data; and a review of the academic literature on disaster response. As a framing document, A Tale of Two Sandys selects certain case studies for their exemplary nature, including how different groups identified vulnerable populations, timelines for aid and recovery, a case study of housing and rebuilding, and finally, urban climate change politics. The primary purpose of A Take of Two Sandys is to propose a sophisticated, accurate, and useful way of understanding the inequalities entwined with Sandy’s aftermath and to enable ways to address them.
  • Publication
    Consumo Consciente
    (2016-01-01) Cohen, Daniel Aldana
  • Publication
    Petro Gotham, People's Gotham
    (2016-01-01) Cohen, Daniel Aldana
    Climate change is an uneasy topic. Good news is welcome. For those lucky enough to live well in Manhattan, it's comforting to imagine that at least as far as carbon is concerned, the borough's density is right and good. Sure, the streets of midtown are clogged with cars. But walking, subways, and tall buildings with their cozy apartments and offices—all are exemplars of energy efficiency. Low-carbon virtuous, by default. This is the story told by the New Yorker writer David Owen in his classic essay "Green Manhattan." It's the story that's been repeated a thousand more times by Michael Bloomberg. But the story is incomplete. And the implications are global. Manhattan isn't a snow globe, and neither is New York City. It just pretends to be one in its annual carbon-accounting reports, the city's official tallies of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming and of those gases' attribution to local activities. The unfortunate norm, which New York follows, is to use a method that ignores the emissions caused by growing and raising the city's food, ignores the carbon emitted to power the factories that assemble New Yorker's smart phones and weave their clothes, and ignores the fumes spewed by planes that ferry New Yorkers around the world.
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  • Publication
    New York's Two Sandys
    (2014-10-01) Cohen, Daniel Aldana; Liboiron, Max
    According to New Yorkers, two different Hurricane Sandys hit their city in 2012. The first was a one-time indiscriminate exceptional catastrophe. The second was an extraordinary acceleration of inequalities affecting the poorest New Yorkers. Daniel A. Cohen and Max Liboiron promote the second perspective as a systemic approach susceptible of helping New York City face the challenges of environmental distress both locally and globally.
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