Adaptive publics: building climate constituencies in Bogotá

This essay foregrounds the political constituencies assembling around the problem of climate change in cities. Recent experiments in urban climate governance in Bogotá, Colombia, are shown to challenge liberal democratic notions of the “public” by linking a redistributive economic agenda to the technical project of adaptation. An analysis of interventions aimed at building social infrastructure throughout the city’s hydrological systems reveals how the inclusion of the urban poor is enacted through practices of measurement. While urban politics in Latin America has long revolved around popular demands to be counted, climate change adaptation is the most recent idiom in which claims to recognition-through-enumeration are being articulated.