1.1 Introduction
This book argues that as climate change dramatically reshapes how we understand, imagine, live, and intervene in cities, a New Climate Urbanism is emerging as a way to rethink and reorient urban life. This emergence is rooted in the decade-long recognition that significant actions on cities and urbanization are required as crucial elements in policy responses to climate change (Bulkeley 2013). Rapid urbanization is a major driver of climate change and cities have become important sites for adaptation and mitigation efforts and for developing climate-resilient development pathways (Revi et al. 2014; IPCC 2018). Around the world, urban areas have to respond to the new realities created by a changing climate, including enhanced exposure to climate risks and climate-induced migration. These challenge existing forms of urban management, particularly at a time when cities are adjusting to a new context for urban public health management following the COVID-19 pandemic. With public health and climate crises increasingly overlapping, urban futures now look less certain and more insecure. Some are hoping for the COVID-19 pandemic to be the opportunity to rethink the kind of system and relations that brought us here and to catalyse transformations for promoting long-term sustainability.
Debates around climate change politics, governance, and vulnerability have thus elevated discourses of urban transformation: climate change politics has become an essential driver of new models of urbanism (Castán Broto
2017). Increasing protection against environmental threats is a priority for climate-proofing and retrofitting efforts (Bulkeley et al.
2015). Defensive projects, such as large infrastructural projects and the securitization of ecological enclaves are enhancing existing and creating new inequalities (Hodson and Marvin
2009; Rice et al.
2020). These new models constitute a New ‘Climate Urbanism’ (Long and Rice
2019), whereby different actors within and across urban areas re-define what cities ought to be in a changing climate. This edited volume is the first attempt to map, systematically, the contours of a research agenda on this New Climate Urbanism. Our focus is not only on the material and technical elements that make up urban spaces but also on the changing social practices that follow major transformations of urban cultures. We use the term ‘urbanism’ because, as geographer Eugene McCann (McCann
2017) explained, we are looking into how urban life is defined and understood at different points in time (and space), and how this has historically shaped different ways of intervening in cities. Today we find ourselves in an intensified ‘climate moment’ for cities, as climate change transforms both how we live in urban areas and how we govern them in fundamental ways. This edited volume sets out to explore the challenges posed by the emergence of this new paradigm, starting with the question:
what does climate urbanism consist of, and how does it differ from other models of urbanism? This question articulated discussions during a two-day workshop on the
New Climate Urbanism, hosted by the Urban Institute (University of Sheffield) in September 2019, which brought together many of this book’s contributing authors. Following from this meeting, this book aims to develop a research agenda on the constitutive elements of climate urbanism, its drivers, and its impacts. The contributions gathered here examine the rationalities underpinning how climate urbanism is embraced, promoted, or contested, and how it transforms socio-material fabric of cities, addressing one or more of the following research questions:
How can we define climate urbanism?
What type of expertise and knowledges are produced, mobilized, and needed in this new era of climate urbanism?
What are the absences and silences in research on cities and climate change? What should be the research priorities for the future?
How can a research agenda on climate urbanism encompass the diversities of planetary urban conditions?
How can researchers engage with climate urbanism to make a difference to policy and practice, to create and deliver environmentally just transformations?
This book offers some preliminary takes on these debates, bringing together thirteen contributions from a range of scholars in the field. These contributions aim not only to map the whole gamut of possible research directions on climate urbanism but also to foster multi-disciplinary dialogue. Adapting and responding to climate change will require solutions that mobilize different epistemological and theoretical perspectives in different geographical locations. In this book, we wish to emphasize the importance of accounting for differences in theorizing urban life under climate change—beyond the experiences of cities of Europe and North America. We also call for an honest reckoning with the limits of our disciplinary knowledge to understand the manifold ways in which urban areas change in the age of climate change. All the contributions were written before the COVID-19 crisis. However, climate change is inherently an issue of human health and well-being. The pandemic has therefore not changed our intent: rather, it has reaffirmed the need for a concept of human protection that engages with the urban collective. A safe city is one that addresses both climate change impacts and public health risks in a just manner, and this requires a rethinking of how we, as human collectives living in cities, relate to nature within and beyond our cities.
We have divided this book into four parts that help us conceptualize and trace the contours of a research agenda on climate urbanism.
Part I asks ‘What is climate urbanism?’ and explores the key features of climate urbanism from different locations and epistemological traditions, highlighting the shortfalls of dominant theorizations of climate urbanism, firmly grounded in research in North America;
Part II develops a critical perspective on the transformative potential of climate urbanism, particularly its ability to challenge social and environmental injustices;
Part III focuses on climate urbanism as a knowledge-mobilizing process. It links knowledge production to the delivery of climate urbanism as a distinctive mode of urban development and critically interrogates current knowledge paradigms underpinning climate and urban science;
Part IV envisages the delivery of climate urbanism as a new communal project, focusing on the role of citizens and non-state actors in driving transformative climate urbanism. It seeks to broaden the definition of urbanism beyond a focus on state and private actors to identify more radical pathways for the implementation of just climate action in cities.
1.2 What Is Climate Urbanism?
The book aims to define what climate urbanism is, and the extent to which it differs from previous theorizations of the relationship between climate change and urban transformations. Rather than emerging as a consistent model for urban development or as a compendium of characteristics in the city, a research agenda on climate urbanism has emerged as a critique of how climate change is addressed in contemporary cities. In Chap. 2, Enora Robin, Linda Westman, and Vanesa Castán Broto call for a minor theory of climate urbanism, arguing that existing research has failed to develop theorizations of climate urbanism that reflect the diversity of urban conditions. In doing so, the authors set out future ‘research-praxis’ directions that articulate minor perspectives into broader theorizations of climate urbanism. In Chap. 3, Joshua Long, Jennifer L. Rice, and Anthony Levenda extend previous arguments about climate urbanism as an approach characterized by the emergence of new governance arrangements centred around carbon control and securitization (see also Rice 2010; Rice et al. 2020). To them, these approaches to climate urbanism create new logics of climate apartheid, furthering and creating new form of inequalities in cities.
Scholarly engagement with climate urbanism requires to critically explore its current manifestations and to expose its most damaging impacts, but it also implies exploring how it could be appropriated as a progressive tool to reimagine urban life in the age of climate change. Following Long, Rice, and Levenda, most chapters in this book approach climate urbanism as a polyvocal and generative concept that can be mobilized to engage with pressing issues such as climate-related segregation (or ‘climate apartheid’) and to rethink the relationship between urbanization, cities, and broader processes of ecological violence and dispossession. In this vein, in Chap. 4, Linda Shi stresses two limitations of climate urbanism as currently framed. Firstly, climate change forces us to think through connexions that extend beyond the city’s limits, and future research should not solely focus on cities as a unit of analysis. Secondly, the legacy of already well-known structures of oppression (e.g., colonialism, capitalism) should also be recognized. To her, the emerging framing of climate urbanism is more a manifestation of late capitalist urbanization with climate characteristics than something specifically new. This provocation invites us to consider whether an emerging research agenda on climate urbanism is likely to generate novel insights to support pathways for transformative actions in cities. In Chap. 5, Sirkku Juhola develops a theoretical framework to how climate challenges give rise to new ways of governing cities. This proposition addresses Shi’s concerns about the novelty of the ‘New’ Climate Urbanism, paving the way for a systematic exploration of how urban governance is reconfigured as a result of climate change. Overall, what we call a New Climate Urbanism is distinctive insofar as it enables the analysis of a significant qualitative shift in the way we think about and act in cities under climate change. Still, many of the contradictions embedded in current forms of urbanism remain entrenched in the way urban areas are approached and understood in the context of climate change.
1.3 Climate Urbanism and Transformative Action
The second part of the book engages with a deliberate concern for the ability of climate urbanism to foster just urban transformations. In Chap. 6, Linda Westman and Vanesa Castán Broto show that cities and local governments are still ignored as transformative agents in international climate policies. Working through these tensions and speaking to the question of scale, a central issue for climate urbanism research will be its capacity to reframe the relationship between national and local governments. Climate urbanism may be a mechanism that reinforces urban governance to enable responses to climate change. In Chap. 7, James J. Patterson brings to the fore the question of institutional change to conceptualize transformation towards progressive forms of climate urbanism. In doing so, he stresses the need for future research to understand processes of change within historically and socially distinct settings. In Chap. 8, Eric Chu considers the concept of urban resilience and the way it shapes urban development strategies to address climate change, drawing on the experiences of two Indian cities. His work stresses how popular ‘climate-friendly’ concepts can spur or hinder transformative action on the ground. In Chap. 9, Corina McKendry explores the integration of climate action into the growth agenda of Colorado Springs, a conservative US city led by a climate-denying mayor. Her provoking intervention shows that even the most conservative cities can implement climate-friendly strategies when it suits their economic interests. In this example, social justice and climate change are not political arguments that local leaders put forward to justify low-carbon investments, even when some of those benefit low-income communities. The example stresses the importance of rethinking the geography of climate urbanism to move away from cities that portray themselves as climate l...
