Narratives of green (anti-)development: A natural language processing exploration of climate “common sense” in housing development controversies

Keywords: climate change, discourse, Montreal, consultation, urban development, natural language processing
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 14

Abstract

Over the last several decades, cities have undergone a remarkable transition in public and expert discourse on sustainability—from a sustainability problem to a solution to global sustainability problems. But how—if at all—has this transition touched the ground in everyday discussions and controversies over urban sustainability? We answer this question by drawing on a large, as-yet unexamined set of structured text produced by the Office de consultation publique de Montréal—an independent public agency tasked with organizing and documenting public consultation processes on urban planning and development in Montreal. Mobilizing a corpus of more than 150 consultation reports produced by the OCPM over 20 years (including extensive primary text from members of the public), we explore the changing discursive structure of climate change “common sense” in public discussions of urban development. In particular, we use simple “off-the-shelf” natural language processing tools—topic modelling and sentiment analysis—to identify the emergence of climate crisis as a normative resource which is mobilized both to support and to oppose new housing developments, and explore the different clusters of language, meaning, and politics which have developed in these contexts. We conclude with reflections on the relationship between language and politics in contemporary urban political ecologies.