BENJAMIN
KAPLAN WEINGER

ABOUT ME
     
I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Trained as a political geographer, I research local and planetary climate governance, from the UNFCCC regime to urban and municipal climate planning. For the past few years I served as a Climate Fellow in the City of Los Angeles’s Office of Energy and Sustainability where I supported implementation of the city’s Green New Deal and completed my doctoral research on the institutional logics of urban climate governance. I hold a BA in Geography and Anthropocene Studies from NYU, and an MA and C.Phil in Geography from UCLA.

Research

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My current research and dissertation employs qualitative research methods to trace the development of Los Angeles’s urban climate planning and governance. Examining the rise of an ostensible low-carbon urban polity, I analyze the implications of a burgeoning normative climate politics beyond the boundaries of this city. I draw on a two-year case study built on sustained ethnographic encounters and participant observation with Los Angeles’s municipal climate actors from September 2021 to August 2023. In centering the daily practices of urban climate planners, this dissertation asks a series of questions around the ostensible implementation of low carbon urbanism.

My inquiry centers around 1) the territorial and distributional politics of climate transitions, seeking to complicate normative modes of accounting, spatially delimiting, and addressing carbon; 2) understanding the geopolitical ecological implications of local climate transitions including impacts of carbon leakage, relocation effects, and resource shuffling; and 3) examining whether the urban measures taken by municipalities to combat climate change significantly alter or reconfigure the methods through which carbon enters or exits the city.

PUBLICATIONS

TEACHING
 
At UCLA, I have had the pleasure of serving as a Teaching Assistant for numerous courses, including People and Earth's Ecosystems and Cultural Geography. My teaching philosphy aims to expose inequities structured into global social orders. Attempting to bring climate change back to the scale and experiences of daily life, I strive to shift discussions away from planetary modeling and abstraction so as to highlight those on the front lines of climatic changes.

CV

CONTACT