understAnding and governing habitabiLiTy in tHe context of climAtE chAnge

Objective

ALTHAEA will pioneer a novel approach to habitability in the context of climate change by investigating how meaning-making processes, cultural values, social practices, and politics shape what is considered habitable. Emerging scientific debates present habitability as a self-explanatory concept and frame it in deterministic and materialistic terms (i.e., as fixed and objective conditions resulting from crossing a physical threshold and/or exhausting resources sustaining life and livelihoods). Yet, these understandings neglect that habitability is culturally and socially experienced and intersectionally differentiated and overlook the role of human agency in shaping the habitability of places. As a result, there is a critical gap in understanding what habitability means and how it is practiced by people on the ground. My project will combine approaches and ideas from human geography, environmental psychology, political science and climate adaptation science to develop a new theoretical framework of “lived habitability” in a changing climate through comparative case study research and by empirically focusing on the link between (framed) eroding habitability and human (im)mobility. I will investigate an understudied form of climate-related human mobility – preventive planned relocation – to elucidate the meaning and practices around habitability that different stakeholders enact, and I will originally focus on its emerging employment in Europe. My project will offer an extended and comprehensive approach to habitability by studying how it is socially constructed, negotiated and contested by different stakeholders, across places, scales and time. It will also allow for responding to the key question of what makes a place habitable and for whom and to explore how habitability in the context of climate change is governed now and into the future.