Gareth A S Edwards

Bringing climate change to the city : towards low carbon urbanism ?

In this paper, we reflect on the role of cities in responding to climate change over the two decades since the historic agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. We find a growth in the scale and nature of municipal responses to climate change that has been one of the most significant features of the changing climate governance landscape over the past two decades. We suggest that this has not been a static or uniform process, and reflect on the changing nature of urban responses to climate change over the past two decades, the emergence of new politics of low-carbon urbanism, and challenges that lie ahead for research and policy as this agenda begins to take shape on the ground.

Environmental justice, capabilities, and the theorization of well-being

Environmental justice (EJ) scholarship is increasingly framing justice in terms of capabilities. This paper argues that capabilities are fundamentally about well-being and as such there is a need to more explicitly theorize well-being. We explore how capabilities have come to be influential in EJ and how well-being has been approached so far in EJ specifically and human geography more broadly. We then introduce a body of literature from social psychology which has grappled theoretically with questions about well-being, using the insights we gain from it to reflect on some possible trajectories and challenges for EJ as it engages with well-being.

Heterotopia and the urban politics of climate change experimentation

Seeking to govern the city in relation to climate change is a political project that at once imagines the present in terms of the future and the future in terms of the present. The urban politics of climate change has brought multiple visions of the possibilities (and limits) of urban futures. In this context, we find urban responses taking experimental form – creating sites through which to explore and experience different futures. They provide spaces in which utopian visions can be imagined, enacted and contested. Conceptualizing urban climate change experiments as heterotopic sites seems fruitful in at least two regards. Firstly, it captures their provisional and ambivalent relationship with the broader urban milieu. Secondly, and even more critically, it opens up the dialogues between the future and present which are at the heart of the climate governance project, and highlights the spatial form of these politics. We examine both with reference to two examples of climate experimentation in Berlin and Philadelphia.

Urban political ecologies of housing and climate change: the ‘Coolest Block’ Contest in Philadelphia

Urban authorities and a range of private and civil society actors have come to view housing as a key arena in which to address climate change whilst also pursuing wider social, economic and environmental objectives. Housing has been a critical area for urban studies, but often considered in sectoral terms and work on urban responses to climate change has followed this positioning. By contrast, an Urban Political Ecology (UPE) perspective would position housing in more integrated terms as part of the metabolism of the city. Yet so far there has been relatively little written in UPE about either housing or climate change. This paper therefore seeks to bring UPE into dialogue with the emergent literature focused on governing climate change through housing. It does so through a detailed study of the ‘Retrofit Philly “Coolest Block” Contest’. We argue that this contest highlights the ways climate change is changing the way housing is embedded in the circulations of the city, pointing to changes in who is governing housing, how housing is being governed and who is able to access the benefits of (climate change-branded) action on housing.

The local governance of climate change: new tools to respond to old limitations in Esmeraldas, Ecuador

This article argues that climate change, seen as a socially constructed anticipation of natural disasters and a future-risk that plays out in present politics, is enabling the emergence of new modes of governance in cities of the global south. The article focuses on the process by which the city of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, developed a Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Strategy. Within the context of climate change adaptation, Esmeraldas mobilised new discourses, stakeholders, and planning mechanisms to address pre-existing urban planning and development limitations. This discursively enabled the municipalitys ongoing governance project by leveraging resources, creating consensus, and informing practice. Climate change adaptation thus became an important mechanism for engaging with local priorities, particularly those of the most vulnerable populations, and for bridging the gap between the formal world of policymaking and the reality of life in the city, which is more often structured by informality.