Claudio Coletta

The Moving of the World on Fire. A New Sensitiveness for the Circulation of Climate Objects and their “Control Rooms”

The paper draws on the well-known metaphor of “landing” by Bruno Latour discussing the relation between mobility and climate around the issue of the “moving of the world on fire”. By adopting a speculative approach, I propose the following thought experiment: could a control room for the mobility of climate objects exist? If so, how would that look like? I argue that a mobility approach to climate change must achieve a new sensitiveness to take into account the circulation of large scale and tiny scale climate object that so far have been represented as the background for the circulation of things. As the earth below our feet is shaking and burning, such sensitiveness should emphasize the temporal over the spatial aspects in order to follow the “invisible other” of climate objects. I conclude introducing the concept of “time magnifiers” as a conceptual and epistemic tool to reinvent a hypothetical control rooms for the planet.

Claudio Coletta is senior assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies at the University of Bologna. His main interest of research is the infrastructuring of ecological and digital timescapes as enacted by urban climate transitions.

Selected publications:

Coletta, Claudio (2021): “The Heartbeat of Fieldwork: On Doing Ethnography in Traffic Control Rooms.” In Gillian Symon, Katrina Pritchard, Christine Hine (eds.), Research Methods for Digital Work and Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 87–104.

Coletta, Claudio/Tobias Röhl/Susann Wagenknecht (2020): “On time. Normative and temporal ordering of mobilities. Introduction.” In: Mobilities, 15 (5), 635–646.

Coletta, Claudio/Liam Heaphy/Rob Kitchin (2019): “From the accidental to articulated smart city: the creation and work of Smart Dublin.” In: European Urban and Regional Studies, 26(4), 349–364

Coletta, Claudio/Rob Kitchin (2017): “Algorhythmic governance: Regulating the ‘heartbeat’ of a city using the Internet of Things.” In: Big Data and Society, 4(2), 1–16.

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