Several studies have shown that indigenous peoples are among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and attention has been drawn to indigenous knowledge as an important component of climate change adaptation strategies. This paper argues, however, that in order to take indigenous knowledge seriously, indigenous realities and understandings of climate change need to be taken seriously. This is because knowledge is not produced in an ontological void. Rather, knowledge is produced in relation to notions concerning the nature of reality and being. Moreover, in order not to make a mere instrumentalist use of Indigenous knowledge, this paper argues that the practical outcomes of Indigenous knowledge ought to be acknowledged, along with the ontological lifeworlds within which such knowledge is generated.

This paper is based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork with and among Aymara people in the Bolivian Andes and poses questions about how the partial connections between different ways of producing knowledge, of experiencing and explaining climate change, and of experiencing and generating realities are transformed into spaces of conflict, domination and resistance.

This chapter presents a co-produced research that took place since 2009 between interdisciplinary scientists and herders from a Sami reindeer community in northern Sweden. This research was conceived in response to a participatory mapping program, the Reindeer Husbandry Plan (RHP), led by the Swedish Forest Agency. The RHP is based on a digital tool compiling and mapping habitat use by reindeer herding communities. Mapping land use, even with participatory methods, is a powerful tool which could lead to the best or the worst, despite initial good intentions. Knowing how zoning and mapping the best available pastures was a complex issue in a changing subarctic environment, we wondered how the RHP would succeed in such a difficult enterprise. How could Sami herders map 'good pastures' which can suddenly become bad, while less good pastures, can, according to circumstances, become the best choice? The purpose of the co-produced project was to include the complexity of Sami herders’ knowledge and worldviews, their land management and their science of the snow, into the RHP, while developing an original methodology to map the use of winter grazing lands by Sami reindeer herders in northern Sweden.

The Epilogue summarizes some key general principles to guide the knowledge co-production process as outlined in the Introduction and individual chapters in the book. To create the new intellectual space for rethinking co-production, it is important to view it as a special path, quite different from the previous agenda of documenting Indigenous people’s knowledge for environmental, management and climate mitigation purposes. Its guiding definition is co-production, as being repeatedly argued by Indigenous constituencies worldwide. The Epilogue also addresses the issues of geographic, cultural and historical inequalities in practising co-production and in the acceptance (inclusion) of its outcomes by agencies, governments and academic science. In the early 21st century, knowledge co-production remains an actively ‘negotiated’ process, whose emerging parameters are to influence its eventual application and outcomes.

Based on four consecutive international meetings of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the author describes her experiences negotiating with governments in her capacity as Co-Chair of the International Indigenous Peoples' Forum on Climate Change. She provides an insider view from an Indigenous perspective of the establishment of the Paris Agreement and the struggle to ensure its effective impementation, including official recognition of the importance of traditional knowledge for Indigenous resilience in the face of climate change.

The Iñupiat Eskimo on Alaska’s North Slope live semi-traditional lives characterized by subsistence hunting and fishing and expansive natural travel networks. To the Iñupiat, the North Slope coastline is a social-cultural boundary between sea and land, marked by the location of past and current settlements, burial sites, family hunting locations, traditional places of refuge, and places immortalized through traditional stories. The coastline is where they observe, enter and exit the marine environment, and hence is interwoven throughout their local and traditional knowledge of the ocean and sea ice environment. Rarely, do local experts speak of ocean or ice features, or of a hunting story, without referring to a place on land. North Slope communities and their coastline are also staging areas for scientists who have adopted the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas as their natural laboratories. This chapter will explore a cross-section of the North Slope’s rich history of scientists working with local indigenous experts on coastal and marine topics, with specific attention to coastal emergency preparedness.

Community-based research can produce many outcomes: from the documentation of knowledge to the connection of different types of knowledge to the true co-production of knowledge. In this chapter, we describe our experiences with two projects that lie along this spectrum. The Bering Sea Project documented local and traditional knowledge about the region’s ecosystem, leading to papers that presented that knowledge, connected it to other ways of understanding the human role in the ecosystem and developed a new understanding of the ways in which ecosystem conditions affect hunting success. The Bidarki Project started as an ecological study of a keystone intertidal grazer and developed into a co-production effort exploring history and culture to explain today’s patterns in intertidal abundance. In both cases, the path towards co-production started with personal relationships and continued by taking advantage of opportunities that arose during the course of each project. Not all community-based projects will result in co-production of knowledge nor is that outcome the only measure of success, but all will benefit from the essential foundations of true collaboration which are mutual respect and intellectual equality.

Chapter 20 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet continues the book’s exploration of the early Cold War years and the threshold of the Urban Planet’s Greatest Acceleration. It visits imperial capitals like London and Paris as certain types of spaces there became “proto-Third worlds” where young nationalist leaders formed their early ideas of liberation and development, then brought them back to colonial cities to launch struggles for national independence. Mohandas Gandhi’s Satyagraha or non-violent resistance transformed the practice of mass urban protest even as Gandhi fought global urban industrialism, rising sectarian violence, and the British Raj en route to Indian independence. Mao Zedong took a contrasting route to power that also started with villages, in this case as effective military bases to expel far better-armed imperial and bourgeois nationalist forces and then seize China’s great cities. Dozens of other independence movements adopted mixtures of these two strategies, which coalesced above all around development – starting with state or capitalist investment in advanced industrial facilities as well as the housing, educational, health, transport, and planning infrastructure aimed to erase the sheer inequalities of the imperial-era Urban Planet.

Chapter 8 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of early-modern global mercantile capitalism. It shows how imperial states and merchants employed various “spatial fixes” based in cities and their growing plantation hinterlands to overcome obstacles to the growing project of seizing the world’s wealth through land conquests, the enslavement of American and African laborers, and the militarization of trade in the Indian Ocean. Global finance, built upon rich silver mining cities in Spanish America, Chinese imperial tax policies, urban ports, banks, stock markets, joint stock companies, insurance, and the increasing value of urban real estate allowed states and merchants to pool the capital needed for trade across World Oceanic distances. A truly planetary Urban Planet came into being as these new city-enabled circuits of commerce enveloped the Pacific Ocean for the first time after the inauguration of the Acapulco–Manila galleon trade in 1571.

Chapter 12 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet continues the book’s exploration of cities’ role as creators and creations of the age of revolution. The revolution in Paris gave a boost to feminist movements in many Atlantic cities, movements for the emancipation of Jews that opened the gates of Europe’s ghettos, and the movement to abolish slavery. It visits colonial cities and plantations in French Saint-Domingue to follow the most radical revolution of the era – the uprising of enslaved people that resulted in the independence of a black republic of Haiti. After Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in Paris, using his armies to spread populist dictatorships to other European capitals and re-impose slavery in the Americas, he gave new impetus to abolitionism in Britain and the United States while destabilizing the centuries-old webs of imperial power that radiated from Madrid and Lisbon to Mexico City, Lima, and Rio de Janeiro. French revolutionary ideas inspired leaders based in the numerous spaces across Iberian America identified as “liberal” cities to cut those ties and found new nation states.

Chapter 21 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet begins a four-chapter segment on the Greatest Acceleration, the sheer explosion of cities that began after 1945 and picked up at an even greater pace after 1980, resulting in the first megacities and several enormous contiguously urbanized regions. It surveys the vast built realm of Cold War-era imperialism and the increasingly centralized power of global finance capital to clarify the changing political economic conditions – first driven by ideologies of plenty, then “austerity” – under which the Acceleration took place. It also begins to explore the global development work of post-War imperial states, multilateral organizations and corporate foundations, focusing on transformations of public health infrastructure and of “Green Revolution” agricultural environments. All of these were crucial to the broader explosion of global population, the growing immiseration of the rural poor, and the city-ward migration that undergirded the Acceleration.

Chapter 15 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planetexplores the role of professional planners in redesigning cities to manage problems associated with their growth, thus making accelerated Urban Planetary growth possible. Managing and enhancing flows – within cities and beyond them – was central to this work. Partly this was about control of urban water, in rivers, storms, for drinking, and for waste through various systems of embankments. Management of flows of air, foot and vehicular traffic, commerce, and potentially revolutionary crowds were also main goals of their work. The chapter traces two planning traditions as they emerged and then merged – that of eighteenth-century sanitarians and sewer and embankment builders in Calcutta and London, and that of boulevard builders in the French tradition. The latter tradition climaxed in the work of Baron Haussmann in Paris, but his work influenced planners in Buenos Aires, Rio, Rabat, Cairo, and New Delhi among many other places. Attention to flow could also beget inequality and segregation, as planners like Haussmann rebuilt Paris above all to serve the rising bourgeoisie, not the city’s even larger industrial working class.

Chapter 4 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet continues the discussion of the role of cities in enabling small elite groups to amass large pools of wealth while guaranteeing poverty for the large majority of people whose labor made that wealth possible. The focus here is on long-distance merchants, who relied on cities and city-based states for the ability to finance, acquire, and transport goods otherwise unavailable in a city’s hinterland to elite and artisanal customers on a regular basis by building the infrastructure needed for long-standing circuits of point-to-point commerce. The chapter illustrates these points by reference to merchants’ complex relationship to state elites in governing palace districts, the invention of currency, merchants’ own houses, the separate districts for foreign merchants that became ubiquitous in cities, and such infrastructure as warehouses, commercial courts, customs houses, caravanserais, roadside waypoints, stables and signage, ports, docks, shipyards, breakwaters, and lighthouses.

Chapter 25 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet meditates on the crisis of the year 2020 as a culminant result of the Greatest Acceleration and as a moment to reckon with the consequences of humanity’s summoning of hydrocarbon power and People Power to run our cities. Can these driving forces of the Urban Planet generate a Just Transition that at once redesigns cities to harvest renewable forms of the day’s sunshine and wind and erases the many inequalities that beset Earthopolis? The chapter traces two spaces of hope, centered in our cities – spaces filled with burgeoning potential despite the revival of authoritarian politics, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the crisis of atmospheric overheating. These include spaces that generate new knowledge about the Urban Planet and its relationship to the Earth and Sun, and spaces where people are best able to mobilize the multiplicity and diversity of voices needed to re-envision humanity’s rule of Earth.