Algorithmic stewardship for urban climatic justice

Urban governance faces an existential crisis as climate collapse converges with the concealed injustices of algorithmic decision-making. This paper argues that algorithmic stewardship is a transformative framework that retools urban artificial intelligence for climatic justice, rather than prioritizing efficiency fetishism. Extending beyond technocratic smart-city plans, stewardship integrates ethics into computational urbanism through generative transparency, which discloses value hierarchies in climate algorithms; systemic accountability, which hardcodes intergenerational equity; and deliberative polycentrism, which distributes power across human and non-human actors. Dissecting Tehran’s disputed realities, it becomes clear how incumbent systems weaponize optimization: heat-vulnerability maps that erase informal settlements’ thermal knowledge institutionalize spatial apartheid; water rationing algorithms that translate scarcity into hydrological injustice; and pollution controls that outsource their responsibility to marginalized communities. Stewardship intervenes by operationalizing justice through algorithmic courts for civic contestation, ecological APIs that incorporate subaltern environmental epistemologies, and democratic immunity zones that safeguard uncomputable adaptation practices. The model reveals classic resilience paradigms as complicit in computational necropolitics, wherein algorithms, such as Tehran’s disaster-response systems, triage human expendability under climate pretexts. Urban survival thereby requires recentering intelligence on reparation rather than optimization, rendering breathable air and intergenerational water as irreducible rights, rather than allocatable resources. Futures’ horizons demand epistemic resistance, celebrating subaltern climate knowledges, planetary algorithmic literacy, translating code into justice consequences, and post-anthropocentric representation, translating watershed rights into governance logics. It is only through such stewardship that cities can break the fatal bargain trading climatic justice for computational order.