_{A tiny note from our mini reading group.}

I have started to realise that ‘abolitionism’ and ‘carceral justice’ are rich frameworks, whose use go beyond jails. I am new to it. I am also not used to with looking at the world through the frames of ‘climate justice’, though waste is intimately connected to this realm. So, reading ‘From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC’ by Ranganathan and Bratman (2021) was revelatory. Among other things, the paper connects abolitionism to climate justice, reimagining ‘resilience’– a popular term in American urban planning policy. It is also a term that caught our reading group’s attention.

Per D1, ‘resilience is individual focused, rarely considering the local harms and needs.’ Like much of neoliberal urbanism, strategies that aim to address climate change through ‘resilience’ look at improvisations/ coping methods used by individuals as cheaper alternatives to systemic change. McFarlane (2021), too, discusses this in the context of bad water management in Mumbai’s informal settlements, where poor households use ‘unofficial’ ways to access necessities. People are not infrastructure. However, this is often belied by state tactics relating to ‘management’ (D2) and ‘efficiency’. These terms result in ‘wounded cities’, sometimes caging people into homes without ‘sunlight’ or ‘ventilation’ (D2). Is poor housing– frequently inhabited by the most marginalised communities– akin to incarceration? ‘It is not too far from that, at least’ (D1).