Sarah Knuth
Biographic Data
| ID | 1370943 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sarah Knuth |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sarah |
| FAMILY NAME | Knuth |
| SIGNATURE | KNUTH S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3053-5394 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 312 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Making repair reparative: Towards expanded geographies of repair
This paper analyzes contemporary scholarship on repair and the reparative in Geography and allied disciplines. We understand the term repair to refer to incremental and everyday forms through which cities, objects, and landscapes are held together through processes of fixing, mending, and maintaining. The related concept of the reparative, with links to the project of reparations, is more expansive, opening up possibilities for action that respon…
Decentring urban climate finance. Introduction to the Special Feature
Financial agendas centering on the global fight against climate change have increasingly turned to cities and urban re/development projects as ideal candidates for supposedly ‘future proof’ investment. In the last decade, research has witnessed the development of policy programs, risk assessments, and project pipelines, amongst other efforts to materialize this agenda in the city. Drawing on critical urban geographies of what is loosely known as …
The urbanization of climate finance: Understanding for urban action
Intersecting housing crises and the future of the welfare state
Grappling with real property supremacy in US urban climate finance
In US cities, drives to secure property value against climate risks have become a preoccupation for mainstream climate finance. This real property bias sidelines non-owners and inhabitants of historically marginalized housing types, limiting their capacity to prepare for and recover from climate change events. In this intervention, we survey major pathways of existing climate finance, before turning to emerging trends for residential 'climate-pro…
An urban 'age of timber'? Tensions and contradictions in the low-carbon imaginary of the bioeconomic city
What will the low-carbon cities of tomorrow be made from? We see an unexpected answer today in the return of 'premodern'/'preindustrial' materials to central cities and skylines. Champions of new mass timber materials have driven a race on iconic 'plyscrapers' and, increasingly, novel systems of industrial prefabrication. Drawing on the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, we explore how advocates attempt to 'fix' desirable future cities and urb…
Climate Finance
How will climate change and its governance redraw maps of financial flows across the world, and with what implications for whom? Can the resources needed for decarbonization and adaptation to already‐arriving climate impacts be mustered at the scale and rate needed to mitigate socioecological harms and planetary destabilizations? Can they be deployed in a way that does not exacerbate pre‐existing risks and injustices, themselves often bound up in…
Rentiers of the low-carbon economy? Renewable energy's extractive fiscal geographies
Progressive movements today call for transformative state-led investment in renewable energy and other climate infrastructures—in the United States, a vision that confronts inherited legacies of austerity. I argue that a significant obstacle is the neoliberal toolkit through which the US federal government subsidizes renewables, an indirect, highly opaque system of tax credits and incentives. For forty years, tax subsidies have ‘paid’ private fin…
Financing “climate-proof” housing? The premises and pitfalls of Pace finance in Florida
Amidst growing concerns about climate risks to the U.S. housing markets, strategies to physically retrofit homes are gaining attention—including within debates over how to resolve intersecting crises of housing re/insurability and affordability in highly exposed sites like Florida. We consider an important but under-studied example of this “climate-proofing” strategy unfolding today: Residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) finance. Whil…
Interrupted rhythms and uncertain futures: Mortgage finance and the (spatio-) temporalities of climate breakdown
As intensifying climate-related disasters strike cities across the United States, they are provoking rising concern for the stability of the U.S. housing market and broader financial system. How homeowners, mortgage lenders, federal institutions/regulators, and investors will variously encounter and manage climate risk is an urgent question for urban scholars, as is who might bear the costs of restabilizing mortgage finance under new breakdowns. …
Interrogating China's Global Urban Presence
This paper examines the socio-economic and geopolitical outcomes associated with infrastructure development across multiple scales. Starting from the premise that planetary socio-technical transformations in this vein have distinctly national drivers, we focus on the urban agency of Chinese-led investment. The paper explores how different forms of infrastructural development generated by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) affects transformations …
Emergent landscapes of renewable energy storage: Considering just transitions in the Western United States
New political ecologies of renewable energy
The critique of fossil fuel regimes has been a foundational concern for the field of political ecology, in its drives to expose the injustices and harms of energy extractivism and its early warnings of the climate crisis. However, it is increasingly evident that renewable energy sources and their infrastructures will carry their own costs and trade-offs, and that critique, resistance and alternative movement-building are needed to forge a truly j…
Thirty states of renewability: Controversial energies and the politics of incumbent industry
Renewable energy advocates have positioned a wide array of technologically novel energy sources as fossil fuel alternatives. These efforts to usher in renewable energy transitions have long been shaped by definitional contestations. Political ecological scholarship tells us that such definitions are meaningful. Indeed, labeling energy sources as renewable has become a power-laden act, which may spark innovation, yet simultaneously creates opening…
Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country
‘All that is Solid … ’: Climate change and the lifetime of cities
As critical urbanists confront climate change, and prospective climate responses, we must ask crucial questions about the ‘lifetime’ of today’s urban fabrics and metropolitan forms. How durable or ephemeral will existing urban geographies prove in the face of societal devaluations and destruction associated with climate change? Will breaks in and with existing urban forms be suffered through climate change impacts, or waged proactively in the nam…
Rethinking climate futures through urban fabrics: (De)growth, densification, and the politics of scale
In the face of climate destabilizations and breakdowns, debates about (de)growth and scale have been particularly significant within critical scholarship. These debates counterpose radically different political positionings, with implications for how the planetary future is envisioned. Must societies build their way out of climate change’s existential threat via massive new investments in techno-infrastructural (re)development? Or are these visio…
Urban real estate technologies: Genealogies, frontiers, & critiques
The production, perception, and representation of urban space and urban property relations have been urgent “technological” questions since before the birth of urban geography as a discipline. The growth and differentiation of cities worldwide has been shaped by a long-evolving technical frontier, one often turned toward the accumulation imperatives and exclusions of private real estate development. Today, real estate in global cities is experien…
Whatever Happened to Green Collar Jobs? Populism and Clean Energy Transition
In today’s populist moment, climate change response has become anything but “postpolitical.” The project to decarbonize energy supplies is generating ongoing political clashes today, including between competing forms of capital/ism. In the United States, rising renewable energy industries in places like California contend with fossil fuel blocs and their regional bases. Such confrontations are sparking populist organizing on the right and left. I…
In value's shadows: Devaluation as accumulation frontier
Cities and planetary repair: The problem with climate retrofitting
In the 2010s, major US initiatives framed urban retrofitting as a decarbonization solution. These programs address an obtrusive legacy of industrial capitalism: its built environments shed energy and emissions when they fall into disrepair. Political ecology and economy have been slow to engage retrofitting, an absence that is conspicuous as these fields take on planetary repair as a conceptual provocation and turn in mainstream conservation. Thi…
Speculations on the postnatural: Restoration, accumulation, and sacrifice at the Salton Sea
Using a regional political ecology lens, this paper explores emerging geographies and politics of a "postnatural" ecomodernist turn in mainstream environmentalism. We examine the unfolding case of ecological restoration and renewable energy development at Southern California's Salton Sea. Ambitious proposals to restore the massive, increasingly degraded lake (and finance restoration) by reengineering it as a hub for geothermal energy generation a…
DIY Detroit: Making Do in a City Without Services
Breakthroughs” for a green economy? Financialization and clean energy transition
Green Devaluation: Disruption, Divestment, and Decommodification for a Green Economy
This paper argues that taking up questions of value can help political ecologists and economists develop a more powerful analysis of the green economy, as it introduces new urban, industrial, and technological dimensions into a self-identified green capitalism. More specifically, I maintain that processes of green devaluation, decommodification, and techno-industrial replacement are as important in understanding green economic development as new …
Green Devaluation: Disruption, Divestment, and Decommodification for a Green Economy
This paper argues that taking up questions of value can help political ecologists and economists develop a more powerful analysis of the green economy, as it introduces new urban, industrial, and technological dimensions into a self-identified green capitalism. More specifically, I maintain that processes of green devaluation, decommodification, and techno-industrial replacement are as important in understanding green economic development as new …
New political ecologies of renewable energy
The critique of fossil fuel regimes has been a foundational concern for the field of political ecology, in its drives to expose the injustices and harms of energy extractivism and its early warnings of the climate crisis. However, it is increasingly evident that renewable energy sources and their infrastructures will carry their own costs and trade-offs, and that critique, resistance and alternative movement-building are needed to forge a truly j…
Breakthroughs” for a green economy? Financialization and clean energy transition
Seeing Green in San Francisco: City as Resource Frontier
The early 21st century witnessed a boom in green building in San Francisco and similar cities. Major downtown property owners and investors retrofitted office towers, commissioned green certification, and critically, explored how greening might pay . Greening initiatives transcend corporate social responsibility: they represent a new attempt to enclose and speculate upon “green” value within the second nature of cities. However, this unconvention…
Legal geographies of finance Editors' Introduction
If'the'global'financial'industry'has'escaped'unchastened'from'the'2008'collapse'and' its'aftermath,'its'deep'entanglement'with'the'neoliberal'state'is'clearly'part'of'the' explanation.'CrisisVera'scholarship'has'tackled'the'stateVfinance'nexus'with'renewed' vigor'and'creativity'(e.g.,'Krippner,'2011),'building'on'previous'demonstrations'that' states'have'driven'and'been'enlisted'in'financialization'for'decades'(e.g.,'Arrighi,' 2010[1994]; 'Gowan,…
Cities and planetary repair: The problem with climate retrofitting
In the 2010s, major US initiatives framed urban retrofitting as a decarbonization solution. These programs address an obtrusive legacy of industrial capitalism: its built environments shed energy and emissions when they fall into disrepair. Political ecology and economy have been slow to engage retrofitting, an absence that is conspicuous as these fields take on planetary repair as a conceptual provocation and turn in mainstream conservation. Thi…
Global finance and the land grab: Mapping twenty-first century strategies
Understanding global land transformations today requires greater attention to finance, and how financial institutions are making land and property into financial assets. Drawing on geographical political economy and scholarship on financialisation, I question the nature and temporality of finance's new interest in land – notably, whether it is speculative and short term or an emerging longer-term strategy. I consider how different kinds of financ…
Rentiers of the low-carbon economy? Renewable energy's extractive fiscal geographies
Progressive movements today call for transformative state-led investment in renewable energy and other climate infrastructures—in the United States, a vision that confronts inherited legacies of austerity. I argue that a significant obstacle is the neoliberal toolkit through which the US federal government subsidizes renewables, an indirect, highly opaque system of tax credits and incentives. For forty years, tax subsidies have ‘paid’ private fin…
Interrupted rhythms and uncertain futures: Mortgage finance and the (spatio-) temporalities of climate breakdown
As intensifying climate-related disasters strike cities across the United States, they are provoking rising concern for the stability of the U.S. housing market and broader financial system. How homeowners, mortgage lenders, federal institutions/regulators, and investors will variously encounter and manage climate risk is an urgent question for urban scholars, as is who might bear the costs of restabilizing mortgage finance under new breakdowns. …
In value's shadows: Devaluation as accumulation frontier
Speculations on the postnatural: Restoration, accumulation, and sacrifice at the Salton Sea
Using a regional political ecology lens, this paper explores emerging geographies and politics of a "postnatural" ecomodernist turn in mainstream environmentalism. We examine the unfolding case of ecological restoration and renewable energy development at Southern California's Salton Sea. Ambitious proposals to restore the massive, increasingly degraded lake (and finance restoration) by reengineering it as a hub for geothermal energy generation a…
Thirty states of renewability: Controversial energies and the politics of incumbent industry
Renewable energy advocates have positioned a wide array of technologically novel energy sources as fossil fuel alternatives. These efforts to usher in renewable energy transitions have long been shaped by definitional contestations. Political ecological scholarship tells us that such definitions are meaningful. Indeed, labeling energy sources as renewable has become a power-laden act, which may spark innovation, yet simultaneously creates opening…
Whatever Happened to Green Collar Jobs? Populism and Clean Energy Transition
In today’s populist moment, climate change response has become anything but “postpolitical.” The project to decarbonize energy supplies is generating ongoing political clashes today, including between competing forms of capital/ism. In the United States, rising renewable energy industries in places like California contend with fossil fuel blocs and their regional bases. Such confrontations are sparking populist organizing on the right and left. I…
Emergent landscapes of renewable energy storage: Considering just transitions in the Western United States
Rethinking climate futures through urban fabrics: (De)growth, densification, and the politics of scale
In the face of climate destabilizations and breakdowns, debates about (de)growth and scale have been particularly significant within critical scholarship. These debates counterpose radically different political positionings, with implications for how the planetary future is envisioned. Must societies build their way out of climate change’s existential threat via massive new investments in techno-infrastructural (re)development? Or are these visio…
Financing “climate-proof” housing? The premises and pitfalls of Pace finance in Florida
Amidst growing concerns about climate risks to the U.S. housing markets, strategies to physically retrofit homes are gaining attention—including within debates over how to resolve intersecting crises of housing re/insurability and affordability in highly exposed sites like Florida. We consider an important but under-studied example of this “climate-proofing” strategy unfolding today: Residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) finance. Whil…
Interrogating China's Global Urban Presence
This paper examines the socio-economic and geopolitical outcomes associated with infrastructure development across multiple scales. Starting from the premise that planetary socio-technical transformations in this vein have distinctly national drivers, we focus on the urban agency of Chinese-led investment. The paper explores how different forms of infrastructural development generated by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) affects transformations …
The urbanization of climate finance: Understanding for urban action
Grappling with real property supremacy in US urban climate finance
In US cities, drives to secure property value against climate risks have become a preoccupation for mainstream climate finance. This real property bias sidelines non-owners and inhabitants of historically marginalized housing types, limiting their capacity to prepare for and recover from climate change events. In this intervention, we survey major pathways of existing climate finance, before turning to emerging trends for residential 'climate-pro…
An urban 'age of timber'? Tensions and contradictions in the low-carbon imaginary of the bioeconomic city
What will the low-carbon cities of tomorrow be made from? We see an unexpected answer today in the return of 'premodern'/'preindustrial' materials to central cities and skylines. Champions of new mass timber materials have driven a race on iconic 'plyscrapers' and, increasingly, novel systems of industrial prefabrication. Drawing on the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, we explore how advocates attempt to 'fix' desirable future cities and urb…
Urban real estate technologies: Genealogies, frontiers, & critiques
The production, perception, and representation of urban space and urban property relations have been urgent “technological” questions since before the birth of urban geography as a discipline. The growth and differentiation of cities worldwide has been shaped by a long-evolving technical frontier, one often turned toward the accumulation imperatives and exclusions of private real estate development. Today, real estate in global cities is experien…
Global finance and the land grab: Mapping twenty-first century strategies
Understanding global land transformations today requires greater attention to finance, and how financial institutions are making land and property into financial assets. Drawing on geographical political economy and scholarship on financialisation, I question the nature and temporality of finance's new interest in land – notably, whether it is speculative and short term or an emerging longer-term strategy. I consider how different kinds of financ…
The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law
Seeing Green in San Francisco: City as Resource Frontier
The early 21st century witnessed a boom in green building in San Francisco and similar cities. Major downtown property owners and investors retrofitted office towers, commissioned green certification, and critically, explored how greening might pay . Greening initiatives transcend corporate social responsibility: they represent a new attempt to enclose and speculate upon “green” value within the second nature of cities. However, this unconvention…
Legal geographies of finance Editors' Introduction
If'the'global'financial'industry'has'escaped'unchastened'from'the'2008'collapse'and' its'aftermath,'its'deep'entanglement'with'the'neoliberal'state'is'clearly'part'of'the' explanation.'CrisisVera'scholarship'has'tackled'the'stateVfinance'nexus'with'renewed' vigor'and'creativity'(e.g.,'Krippner,'2011),'building'on'previous'demonstrations'that' states'have'driven'and'been'enlisted'in'financialization'for'decades'(e.g.,'Arrighi,' 2010[1994]; 'Gowan,…
Green Devaluation: Disruption, Divestment, and Decommodification for a Green Economy
This paper argues that taking up questions of value can help political ecologists and economists develop a more powerful analysis of the green economy, as it introduces new urban, industrial, and technological dimensions into a self-identified green capitalism. More specifically, I maintain that processes of green devaluation, decommodification, and techno-industrial replacement are as important in understanding green economic development as new …
DIY Detroit: Making Do in a City Without Services
Breakthroughs” for a green economy? Financialization and clean energy transition
Whatever Happened to Green Collar Jobs? Populism and Clean Energy Transition
In today’s populist moment, climate change response has become anything but “postpolitical.” The project to decarbonize energy supplies is generating ongoing political clashes today, including between competing forms of capital/ism. In the United States, rising renewable energy industries in places like California contend with fossil fuel blocs and their regional bases. Such confrontations are sparking populist organizing on the right and left. I…
In value's shadows: Devaluation as accumulation frontier
Cities and planetary repair: The problem with climate retrofitting
In the 2010s, major US initiatives framed urban retrofitting as a decarbonization solution. These programs address an obtrusive legacy of industrial capitalism: its built environments shed energy and emissions when they fall into disrepair. Political ecology and economy have been slow to engage retrofitting, an absence that is conspicuous as these fields take on planetary repair as a conceptual provocation and turn in mainstream conservation. Thi…
Speculations on the postnatural: Restoration, accumulation, and sacrifice at the Salton Sea
Using a regional political ecology lens, this paper explores emerging geographies and politics of a "postnatural" ecomodernist turn in mainstream environmentalism. We examine the unfolding case of ecological restoration and renewable energy development at Southern California's Salton Sea. Ambitious proposals to restore the massive, increasingly degraded lake (and finance restoration) by reengineering it as a hub for geothermal energy generation a…
‘All that is Solid … ’: Climate change and the lifetime of cities
As critical urbanists confront climate change, and prospective climate responses, we must ask crucial questions about the ‘lifetime’ of today’s urban fabrics and metropolitan forms. How durable or ephemeral will existing urban geographies prove in the face of societal devaluations and destruction associated with climate change? Will breaks in and with existing urban forms be suffered through climate change impacts, or waged proactively in the nam…
Rethinking climate futures through urban fabrics: (De)growth, densification, and the politics of scale
In the face of climate destabilizations and breakdowns, debates about (de)growth and scale have been particularly significant within critical scholarship. These debates counterpose radically different political positionings, with implications for how the planetary future is envisioned. Must societies build their way out of climate change’s existential threat via massive new investments in techno-infrastructural (re)development? Or are these visio…
Urban real estate technologies: Genealogies, frontiers, & critiques
The production, perception, and representation of urban space and urban property relations have been urgent “technological” questions since before the birth of urban geography as a discipline. The growth and differentiation of cities worldwide has been shaped by a long-evolving technical frontier, one often turned toward the accumulation imperatives and exclusions of private real estate development. Today, real estate in global cities is experien…
Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country
Emergent landscapes of renewable energy storage: Considering just transitions in the Western United States
New political ecologies of renewable energy
The critique of fossil fuel regimes has been a foundational concern for the field of political ecology, in its drives to expose the injustices and harms of energy extractivism and its early warnings of the climate crisis. However, it is increasingly evident that renewable energy sources and their infrastructures will carry their own costs and trade-offs, and that critique, resistance and alternative movement-building are needed to forge a truly j…
Thirty states of renewability: Controversial energies and the politics of incumbent industry
Renewable energy advocates have positioned a wide array of technologically novel energy sources as fossil fuel alternatives. These efforts to usher in renewable energy transitions have long been shaped by definitional contestations. Political ecological scholarship tells us that such definitions are meaningful. Indeed, labeling energy sources as renewable has become a power-laden act, which may spark innovation, yet simultaneously creates opening…
Climate Finance
How will climate change and its governance redraw maps of financial flows across the world, and with what implications for whom? Can the resources needed for decarbonization and adaptation to already‐arriving climate impacts be mustered at the scale and rate needed to mitigate socioecological harms and planetary destabilizations? Can they be deployed in a way that does not exacerbate pre‐existing risks and injustices, themselves often bound up in…
Rentiers of the low-carbon economy? Renewable energy's extractive fiscal geographies
Progressive movements today call for transformative state-led investment in renewable energy and other climate infrastructures—in the United States, a vision that confronts inherited legacies of austerity. I argue that a significant obstacle is the neoliberal toolkit through which the US federal government subsidizes renewables, an indirect, highly opaque system of tax credits and incentives. For forty years, tax subsidies have ‘paid’ private fin…
Financing “climate-proof” housing? The premises and pitfalls of Pace finance in Florida
Amidst growing concerns about climate risks to the U.S. housing markets, strategies to physically retrofit homes are gaining attention—including within debates over how to resolve intersecting crises of housing re/insurability and affordability in highly exposed sites like Florida. We consider an important but under-studied example of this “climate-proofing” strategy unfolding today: Residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) finance. Whil…
Interrupted rhythms and uncertain futures: Mortgage finance and the (spatio-) temporalities of climate breakdown
As intensifying climate-related disasters strike cities across the United States, they are provoking rising concern for the stability of the U.S. housing market and broader financial system. How homeowners, mortgage lenders, federal institutions/regulators, and investors will variously encounter and manage climate risk is an urgent question for urban scholars, as is who might bear the costs of restabilizing mortgage finance under new breakdowns. …
Interrogating China's Global Urban Presence
This paper examines the socio-economic and geopolitical outcomes associated with infrastructure development across multiple scales. Starting from the premise that planetary socio-technical transformations in this vein have distinctly national drivers, we focus on the urban agency of Chinese-led investment. The paper explores how different forms of infrastructural development generated by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) affects transformations …
Grappling with real property supremacy in US urban climate finance
In US cities, drives to secure property value against climate risks have become a preoccupation for mainstream climate finance. This real property bias sidelines non-owners and inhabitants of historically marginalized housing types, limiting their capacity to prepare for and recover from climate change events. In this intervention, we survey major pathways of existing climate finance, before turning to emerging trends for residential 'climate-pro…
An urban 'age of timber'? Tensions and contradictions in the low-carbon imaginary of the bioeconomic city
What will the low-carbon cities of tomorrow be made from? We see an unexpected answer today in the return of 'premodern'/'preindustrial' materials to central cities and skylines. Champions of new mass timber materials have driven a race on iconic 'plyscrapers' and, increasingly, novel systems of industrial prefabrication. Drawing on the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, we explore how advocates attempt to 'fix' desirable future cities and urb…
Economics (23 works) · Political science (17 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Business (10 works) · Finance (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Economy (8 works)