Inhabiting the timescape of climate emergency: exploring the regeneration of urban life through Extinction Rebellion's creative spatial protests

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Climate change is experienced in the here-and-now, so how isclimate emergency being performed by activists in ways thatenable us to see it? This project explores the 'timescapes' ofclimate change in the city by addressing the ways that therhythms of capitalism and the rhythms of nature are shown to beout-of-sync. The timescape of climate emergency drawsattention to the arrhythmia produced by capitalist cities andlifestyles that do not align with the planet's living systems (Cook& Swyngedouw, 2012) or the bodily rhythms of citizens. Activistswithin Extinction Rebellion (XR), the emergent climate justicemovement, engage with time in the climate emergency adistinctive way. This research draws on Adam's (2004)timescape concept and rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004) to thinkrhythmically about the relationship between people, the city andclimate emergency, and explore how the timescape of climateemergency can imagine and co-create healthy andtransformative urban futures. Embodied ethnographic researchwill be conducted through two London-based case studies of XRGuerrilla Gardening and Extinction Theatre, whose civildisobedience challenges the dominant experience of social time.This research contributes rich insights into how people arecultivating the social and cultural processes of radical changeneeded to create liveable cities, which connect humans withother humans, non-humans and the environment, by attending tothe lived experience of urban space and time.