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      Materiality and sustainability transitions: integrating climate change in transport infrastructure in Ontario, Canada

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            Abstract

            Infrastructure threatens to lock-in societies to fossil fuels unless something is done now. This is because infrastructure lasts for such a long time, meaning that any infrastructure built or rebuilt now will last well into the twenty-first century – until the end of the century, in some cases. Consequently, there is a need to integrate climate change into infrastructure now or societies will be left with infrastructure designed around unsustainable socio-technical systems (such as combustion engines, roads, and suburbanization). Such change is conceptualized in the literature as a sustainability transition. However, any attempts at such transitions have to address the ‘materialities’ of infrastructure systems (physical form, environmental context, and so on). In this paper, I develop the concept of ‘socio-material systems’ and apply it to transport infrastructure in Ontario, Canada.

            Content

            Author and article information

            Contributors
            Journal
            10.2307/j50022063
            prometheus
            Prometheus
            Pluto Journals
            0810-9028
            1470-1030
            1 September 2016
            : 34
            : 3-4 ( doiID: 10.1080/prometheus.34.issue-3-4 )
            : 191-206
            Affiliations
            Innovation Policy Lab, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
            Article
            08109028.2017.1331612
            10.1080/08109028.2017.1331612
            49a8b381-91bd-4d3d-9b25-4b6294f6906a
            © 2016 Pluto Journals

            All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

            Custom metadata
            eng

            Computer science,Arts,Social & Behavioral Sciences,Law,History,Economics

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