Cities and Low Carbon Transitions

Harriet Bulkeley, Vanesa Castán Broto, Mike Hodson, Simon Marvin

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415586979
• eBook ISBN: 9781136883262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Current societies face unprecedented risks and challenges connected to climate change. Addressing them will require fundamental transformations in the infrastructures that sustain everyday life, such as energy, water, waste and mobility. A transition to a 'low carbon' future implies a large scale reorganisation in the way societies produce and use energy. Cities are critical in this transition because they concentrate social and economic activities that produce climate change related emissions. At the same time, cities are increasingly recognised as sources of opportunities for climate change mitigation. Whether, how and why low carbon transitions in urban systems take place in response to climate change will therefore be decisive for the success of global mitigation efforts. As a result, climate change increasingly features as a critical issue in the management of urban infrastructure and in urbanisation policies.

Cities and Low Carbon Transitions presents a ground-breaking analysis of the role of cities in low carbon socio-technical transitions. Insights from the fields of urban studies and technological transitions are combined to examine how, why and with what implications cities bring about low carbon transitions. The book outlines the key concepts underpinning theories of socio-technical transition and assesses its potential strengths and limits for understanding the social and technological responses to climate change that are emerging in cities. It draws on a diverse range of examples including world cities, ordinary cities and transition towns, from North America, Europe, South Africa and China, to provide evidence that expectations, aspirations and plans to undertake purposive socio-technical transitions are emerging in different urban contexts.

This collection adds to existing literature on cities and energy transitions and introduces critical questions about power and social interests, lock-in and development trajectories, social equity and economic development, and socio-technical change in cities. The book addresses academics, policy makers, practitioners and researchers interested in the development of systemic responses in cities to curb climate change.

1 Introduction

Harriet Bulkeley, Vanesa Castán Broto, Mike Hodson and Simon Marvin

The transition to a low-carbon economy will be one of the defining issues of the 21st century.

(Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Foreword,
The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, 2009)

We truly don’t know if this will work. Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale.

(Transition Network, April 2010)

We, the mayors and governors of the world’s leading cities . . . ask you to recognize that the future of our globe will be won or lost in the cities of the world.

(Copenhagen Climate Change Communiqué, December 2009)

Climate change is a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel and Webber 1973). The nature of the climate change problem, in scientific, policy and political terms, is uncertain and there are multiple contested and conflicting discourses concerning how the issue should be addressed. In this context, it has become clear that conventional approaches to environmental management which address single parts of the climate change puzzle one at a time are inadequate. Instead, as the quotations above illustrate, proponents have begun to call for a wholesale transition to a low carbon future. In 2009, the UK government published The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, which set out a ‘route-map’ for ‘becoming a low carbon country: cutting emissions, maintaining secure energy supplies, maximising economic opportunities, and protecting the most vulnerable’ (DECC 2009: 5). Using similar language but portraying significantly different ideas, the Transition Towns movement, founded in the United Kingdom in 2007 and by 2010 involving more than 250 communities globally, also argues that transition is needed in order to

look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question: ‘for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience . . . and drastically reduce carbon emissions?’

(Transition Towns 2010)

Low carbon transitions are therefore gaining political salience and public currency. This book seeks to examine the emergence of low carbon transitions and explore their politics and possibilities in the urban arena. The role of cities in addressing climate change has increasingly been recognized over the past two decades (Betsill and Bulkeley 2007; Bulkeley 2010). From being acknowledged by a handful of pioneering municipal authorities in the early 1990s, climate change has risen on the agenda of urban governments and attracted the interest of private and third-sector organizations. Citing the growing proportion of the world’s population living in cities in the twenty-first century and their contribution of over 70 per cent of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions (IEA 2008), the mayors of eighty world cities gathered in Copenhagen prior to the 2009 international climate negotiations and called for recognition of the critical role that cities will play in responding to climate change. During the past decade, membership of transnational networks such as the ICLEI Cities for Climate Protection and Climate Alliance has grown, and new networks, including the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and the Rockefeller Asian Cities Resilience Network, have been formed. In the United States, in 2005 the mayor of Seattle, Greg Nickels, challenged mayors across the nation to take action on the issue, and by 2009 over 900 mayors had signed up to the US Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement (Gore and Robinson 2009: 143). This approach has been replicated globally, most recently with the launch in 2009 of the European Covenant of Mayors, which now has more than a thousand members. At the same time, private actors, including financial institutions, property development companies, utilities, foundations and non-governmental organizations, are increasingly involved in initiatives to address climate change. Further, new grassroots networks, including ‘transition towns’, are emerging which take the urban as an explicit arena within which to address climate change.

The conjunction of the growing prominence and plurality of urban climate change responses and the emergence of calls for a low carbon transition raises important questions about the future of cities, and in particular the infrastructures that sustain urban life. The provision and organization of urban infrastructures – including energy, water, waste, shelter and mobility – have largely been perceived as unproblematic and taken for granted as primarily engineering challenges and administrative issues (Graham and Marvin 2001). Recent analyses have called these assumptions into question, demonstrating the critical role played by infrastructures in urbanization and vice versa, and highlighting structural shifts taking place in the provision and use of urban networks. Recognizing the intimate connection between, on the one hand, cities and climate change and, on the other hand, urbanization and infrastructure systems, it is increasingly clear that addressing climate change will require fundamental transformations in the urban infrastructure networks that sustain daily life. In short, it is clear that urban infrastructure networks will be central to any effort to achieve a low carbon transition.

There is therefore a pressing need to consider how system transitions take place within the city. Such systems, we suggest, should be conceived as socio-technical – that is, they comprise, and are co-produced by, social and technical elements. For example, a photovoltaic energy system comprises a form of energy conversion technology (photovoltaic cells), made from materials (e.g. silicon), installed through a particular configuration of technical artefacts (e.g. a building integrated system), in the context of political and legal institutions (e.g. planning requirements), processes of design (e.g. house building) and social practices (e.g. domestic use of electricity). The resulting system is considered socio-technical because it emerges through the conjunction and co-evolution of these ‘technical’ and ‘social’ entities and processes. While there are a variety of approaches to understanding socio-technical systems and their dynamics, the one which has to date engaged most explicitly with the challenges of sustainability and in particular energy systems is that based on the ‘multilevel’ analysis of systems in transition (Geels 2004; Elzen et al. 2004). However, while there is a growing scholarship on transitions in socio-technical systems, this work has to date paid little attention to the urban scale. In this book, we critically examine this underexplored relationship between the multilevel perspective (MLP) on socio-technical transitions and cities, where pressures to undertake low carbon transitions in infrastructure systems are, as we have outlined above, particularly pronounced. In so doing, we seek to answer the key question: how, why and with what implications are cities effecting low carbon transitions?

In order to address this question, the book is organized in two parts. Part I examines the key interconnections between cities and transitions by looking critically at the historical, theoretical, conceptual and methodological relations between the urban, infrastructural systems and socio-technical change. It outlines the key concepts underpinning theories of socio-technical transition, the emergence of the low carbon imperative within cities, and the extent to which such a phenomenon might be understood in terms of systemic change. Part II is more empirical in orientation. Through a series of case studies, contributors address how, and with what consequences, we understand the role of ‘the city’ in undertaking urban transitions in practice. In the remainder of this Introduction, we consider in turn these two related aspects of the book in more detail before introducing the contributions made by each of the following chapters.

Conceptualizing low carbon transitions and the urban

As the quotations at the beginning of this Introduction make clear, there are many different ways in which the concept of a ‘transition’ might be understood. In seeking to understand the nature and potential of urban low carbon transitions, Part I of this book draws on three sets of debates to outline some of the key issues concerning how we might theorize such processes. First, as we set out above, a primary concern of this volume is to consider the applicability to the urban arena of insights from the debates concerning socio-technical regimes and their transition (Geels 2002; Shove and Walker 2007; Smith et al. 2010; Hodson and Marvin 2009). As a field of study that has explicitly engaged with the ways in which Large Technical Systems, such as energy systems, remain stable and undergo change, this analytical framework holds significant promise for understanding the ways in which urban infrastructure networks may be transformed in response to climate change. Central to current analyses of the historical and future transformation of socio-technical systems is the ‘multilevel perspective’, which suggests that such systems can be analysed in terms of a broad landscape of institutions and norms, distinct socio-technical regimes that structure the ways in which particular systems operate and their dynamics, and niches where innovation and experimentation take place (Geels and Kemp 2007; Geels and Schot 2007; Smith et al. 2010). Transformation in such systems can be both incremental and radical, and is dependent on the alignment of innovations at the niche level, with windows of opportunity created within incumbent regimes and through the dynamics of landscape change. The appeal of such an analytical framework lies both in its comprehensive nature and in its ability to explain long-term and far-reaching shifts in socio-technical systems. However, critics have cautioned that the politics of transitions receive limited attention in a framework more concerned with innovation and social learning (Shove and Walker 2007), and that the places within and through which transitions occur have largely been absent from analysis (Hodson and Marvin 2010). In Part I of this book, the authors consider the merits and limitations of the multilevel perspective and in particular seek to bring concepts of place and the urban into the analytical frame, while in Part II the contributors consider the analytical purchase of the multilevel perspective for explaining urban responses to the low carbon imperative.

A second set of debates with which this book directly engages considers urban low carbon futures in terms of policy, politics and governance. Within the growing literature on urban responses to climate change, analysis has predominantly focused on the processes of policy change which have or have not sustained shifts towards low carbon strategies and measures in the urban arena. The extent of policy transformation is explained in terms of issues of institutional capacity and urban politics, and conceived as structured within a ‘multilevel governance’ framework where decisions and actions at international, national and regional levels and emerging through governance networks serve to create the conditions of possibility within individual cities. While there are similarities here with the MLP on socio-technical systems transition, in terms of recognizing the different arenas through which transitions are simultaneously produced, in the multilevel governance approach these arenas are regarded not as separate entities but as continually structuring and reproducing one another. However, analyses of policy change have rarely taken into account the socio-technical, or explicitly addressed questions of transition. Chapters in this book take up these challenges, examining the growing imperative of ‘carbon control’ in urban governance and the emerging political economies of low carbon transitions (Bulkeley et al., Chapter 3; Hodson and Marvin, Chapter 5; While, Chapter 4). In these accounts, cities are reproduced through, and at the same time actively reconfigure, structural social, economic and political processes. Cities become critical to ‘state strategies’ of carbon control, while urban actors respond to new low carbon imperatives in a variety of ways, from radical plans for localization to efforts to embed urban economies in low carbon technological futures, in turn reshaping what effective and legitimate state strategy might entail. In short, such analyses suggest that the urban is a fundamental part of low carbon transitions, whatever their spatial scale.

The third set of debates with which this collection engages problematizes the relation between the urban and infrastructure systems further through focusing on processes of ‘urban metabolism’, in which the city is described as a process of socio-ecological change (Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003). Rather than attending to the political economy of socio-technical systems, these debates are concerned with the ways in which infrastructure (and other) networks mediate socio-ecological flows in the city. The resulting political ecologies consider how uneven power relations orchestrate and are reproduced by the city, examining human and nonhuman agency in these processes. The flux and flow of urban metabolism suggests that transformation is a continual process, and, rather than being taken for granted, the fixity of urban socio-technical systems is a complex accomplishment. In this reading, transitions in urban systems are as likely to emerge from the co-incident actions of multiple agents and everyday actions as from purposive attempts to transform the city. Indeed, the success, or otherwise, of transitions may be located not in broader political and economic processes, or in terms of the processes of innovation, but through the ways in which they are mediated by everyday life and the myriad power relations that sustain and constrain such actions. Contributors in Part I of this book consider the implications of this alternative understanding of the urban, and of its transformation, suggesting that it may open up the analytical space for considering transitions in more diverse and plural forms while placing issues of social and environmental justice at the centre of the research agenda (Bulkeley et al., Chapter 3).

Cities in transition?

If Part I is more conceptual in orientation, Part II of this book starts the significant and pressing task of understanding the processes of low carbon transition that are taking place in cities. Drawing from a range of urban places – from global cities to local communities, in the North and global South – the contributors focus on three sets of related issues. The first, and in some ways most fundamental, concerns whether we can identify processes of ‘low carbon transition’ taking place within urban arenas and, if so, what they entail. Contributors take diverse methodological approaches to this question, for example, considering the changing nature of energy use and demand (Dhakal, Chapter 6), providing an historical analysis of the emergence and implementation of low carbon strategies and measures (Späth and Rohracher, Chapter 7), or demonstrating the ‘performance’ of low carbon transitions in the Transition Town movement (Smith, Chapter 11). Nonetheless, across a range of cases the chapters in Part II suggest that the imperative of responding to climate change is firmly on the urban agenda. Evidence is found for the emergence of transitions – in energy use (Dhakal, Chapter 6), in low carbon urban planning and development (Evans and Karvonen, Chapter 9; Pickerill, Chapter 12; Späth and Rohracher, Chapter 7) and urban infrastructure systems (Aylett, Chapter 10; Coutard and Rutherford, Chapter 8) – but the picture is fragmented. While, following the multilevel perspective on transitions, this may be interpreted in terms of the emergence of low carbon urban niches, the contributors also find theoretical insights from the literatures on urban infrastructures, political ecologies and policy useful in explaining their findings.

A second set of issues that Part II addresses concerns how transitions are taki...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction
• Part I: Conceptual frameworks for understanding urban transitions
• Part II Urban transitions in practice