What are the enabling conditions for rapid urban transitions for sustainability?
Outlining the starting points of my PhD inquiry
This blog is part of a ‘thinking out loud’ series where I share updates from my PhD inquiry, which focuses on the enabling conditions for rapid urban transitions to sustainability. For the previous post, see here.
The text below is part of my research proposal, which charts the starting points of my PhD inquiry. The current questions (more reflections on how I defined them here) I’m exploring are:
What are the enabling conditions for rapid urban transitions for sustainability?
- What are the characteristics of rapid urban transitions?
- What might we learn from the places and communities already prefiguring alternative urban futures?
- How might learning from these pioneers inform ways to create a tipping point in pluralistic urban transitions for sustainability?
Context
We find ourselves within a threshold possibility space to make meaningful changes in order to stay within planetary boundaries and avert climate breakdown. As the most recent IPCC report highlights, the years in the run up to 2030 present themselves as a closing window of opportunity within which to enable transitions to sustainability.
In recent decades, cities have started to be seen as a bounded unit of analysis and intervention in the pursuit of systemic change for sustainability. As neighbourhoods, towns and cities are the locus where systems like energy, food, mobility, health, education, governance and finance intersect, a place-based lens is seen to have the potential to tackle the integration challenge of coalescing ‘wicked problems’.
This research starts from Tonkiss’ definition of the urban as ‘a site of social encounter and social division, as a field of politics and power, as a symbolic and material landscape, as an embodied space, as a realm of everyday experience’. It aims to relate an understanding of the urban as permanently negotiated rather than as a static unit of analysis; as a web of dynamic human and nonhuman stocks and flows, rather than the sum of systems such as energy, food, mobility, or the built environment.
However, the dominant discourse around how cities can lead the change has largely ignored the social processes involved in transforming a space into a place, or as Lefebvre put it, the social production of space. For example, the currently hyped concept of resilience is not ideologically neutral and in its worst application it reinforces a ‘hegemonic status quo of dispossessing, predatory capitalism’:
‘Resilience is fundamentally about how best to maintain the functioning of an existing system in the face of an externally derived disturbance. Both the ontological nature of “the system” and its normative desirability escape critical scrutiny. As a result, the existence of social divisions and inequalities tend to be glossed over when resilience thinking is extended to society.’ (MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013:258)
A pluralistic approach to urban futures
Resilient, smart, green, eco, low carbon, liveable, are emerging paradigms attributed to preferred urban futures, however the above critique applies to all of them. Therefore, how might we challenge a homogenous definition of ‘The Future’ and enable a plurality of urban futures to come to life? And more importantly, how might we do that within the critical possibility space in the run up to 2030?
This research sets out by acknowledging that:
- Urban transitions are not solely technical process, but require permanent negotiations around our preferred collective futures.
- The Future is not a terra nullius — the processes we are putting in place today will shape what the possibility space of tomorrow can look like.
- Across the world, there are already places and communities of practice actively experimenting with urban transitions. They form prefigurative movements who conduct ‘real-life experiments with their desired alternative futures’, therefore prefiguring what alternative societies could look like. They are translocal, embodying a ‘cosmopolitan localism’ in that they are globally connected, yet locally rooted.
Therefore, this research examines the relations between social processes and urban transitions to sustainability through seeking to observe and understand what the enabling conditions are across a number of places that have already made significant progress in pursuit of sustainability.
So what am I doing next?
Over the next months, my objective is to explore and narrow the boundaries of the research questions to establish the ground for inquiry. So, I’ll be…
- Exploring the characteristics of rapid urban transitions;
- Developing a map of places and communities of practice actively experimenting with urban transitions;
- Setting up preliminary chats with different people from different places to test my thinking and snowball my reach.
Selected bibliography
DeVerteuil, G. & Golubchikov, O. (2016) Can resilience be redeemed? City. [Online] 20 (1), 143–151. Available from: doi:10.1080/13604813.2015.1125714.
Escobar, A. (2018) Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, Duke University Press Books.
de Jong, M., Joss, S., Schraven, D., Zhan, C., et al. (2015) Sustainable–smart–resilient–low carbon–eco–knowledge cities; making sense of a multitude of concepts promoting sustainable urbanization. Journal of Cleaner Production. [Online] 109, 25–38. Available from: doi:10.1016/j. jclepro.2015.02.004.
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. 1 edition. Malden, Mass., Wiley-Blackwell.
Luque-Ayala, A., Marvin, S. & Bulkeley, H. (2018) Google-Books-ID: smRRDwAAQBAJ. Rethinking Urban Transitions: Politics in the Low Carbon City. Routledge.
Maeckelbergh, M. (2016) The Prefigurative Turn: The Time and Place of Social Movement Practice. In: Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (ed.). Social Sciences for an Other Politics. [Online]. Cham, Springer International Publishing. pp. 121–134. Available from: doi:10.1007/978–3–319–47776–3_9 [Accessed: 8 November 2018].
Monticelli, L. (2018) Embodying Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st Century. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society. [Online] 16 (2), 501–517. Available from: doi:10.31269/triplec.v16i2.1032.
Tonkiss, F. (2006) Space, the City and Social Theory: Social relations and urban forms. 1 edition. Cambridge ; Malden, MA, Polity.
Interested in what I’m up to?
Over the next years I’ll be designing and facilitating a series of experiments, coaching and learning alongside existing initiatives, as well as helping build a global community of practice situated at the interconnection of the topics above. I’d love to hear from you if the topics I’ve talked above resonate.
It might be that you’re a city strategist or urbanist working on socio-environmental resilience, a change maker pursuing different solutions to complex urban challenges, an activist already living the change, or a fellow researcher inquiring into similar topics.
Get in touch at @futuresforensics / corina.angheloiu17@imperial.ac.uk
