Inhabiting the timescape of climate emergency: exploring the regeneration of urban life through Extinction Rebellion's creative spatial protests

Climate change is experienced in the here-and-now, so how is
climate emergency being performed by activists in ways that
enable us to see it? This project explores the 'timescapes' of
climate change in the city by addressing the ways that the
rhythms of capitalism and the rhythms of nature are shown to be
out-of-sync. The timescape of climate emergency draws
attention to the arrhythmia produced by capitalist cities and
lifestyles that do not align with the planet's living systems (Cook
& Swyngedouw, 2012) or the bodily rhythms of citizens. Activists
within Extinction Rebellion (XR), the emergent climate justice
movement, engage with time in the climate emergency a
distinctive way. This research draws on Adam's (2004)
timescape concept and rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004) to think
rhythmically about the relationship between people, the city and
climate emergency, and explore how the timescape of climate
emergency can imagine and co-create healthy and
transformative urban futures. Embodied ethnographic research
will be conducted through two London-based case studies of XR
Guerrilla Gardening and Extinction Theatre, whose civil
disobedience challenges the dominant experience of social time.
This research contributes rich insights into how people are
cultivating the social and cultural processes of radical change
needed to create liveable cities, which connect humans with
other humans, non-humans and the environment, by attending to
the lived experience of urban space and time.