Metropolitan Strategies and Climate Governance: Towards New Evaluative Approaches

In the new millennium, cities have become an emerging force among new forms of subnational climate governance. Of interest is how cities act unilaterally and directly in this new climate politics via the provision of relevant tools. Since metropolitan planning strategies have been considered as important mechanisms for achieving urban sustainability in this period, this research has sought to investigate the importance of these master plans in the delivery of urban responses to climate change. For this purpose, the study has employed a qualitative research methodology with the application of a comparative case study and the progression of a conceptual framework for evaluating climate policies in metropolitan plans of two selected cities—London and Melbourne. The study's results suggest that both the ‘London Plan’ and ‘Plan Melbourne’ incorporate critical elements to enhance climate governance, including the promotion of coordination principles, innovative technologies, a participatory planning approach and a long‐term planning scale. However, the review identified a consistent omission of key principles as identified through the proposed matrix for analysing the climate policies of a city's government, which include risk assessment tools, monitoring systems, distribution, impact frame and accountability. Moreover, the research also revealed the lack of vertical integration in policy formulation and implementation of ‘Plan Melbourne’. Our study suggests that a city's governance structure influences the way it undertakes its climate actions and the potential efficacy of these on a metropolitan scale.     

Urban Waterscapes: The Hydro‐Politics of Flooding in a Sinking City

The threat of flooding in cities is often compounded by political and economic decisions made on watershed management, land development and water infrastructure and provisioning. It has also become a point of conflict between cities’ objectives for development and modernization, and the struggles of marginalized residents living in low‐lying coastal and riverine areas to remain in place. Flooding takes on different forms depending on one's point of view. It is a biophysical issue, involving geology, geography, meteorology and ecology. It is one of urban governance, involving planning and maintenance of infrastructure and land use. And it is sociopolitical, involving historical social and spatial marginalization and contestation. This article, based on mixed‐methods research in Jakarta, Indonesia, traces the conceptual and physical contours of urban waterscapes across these conflicting ideas and narratives. It brings into dialogue theories of urban political ecology, landscape ecology and environmental ethnography to explore the interrelationships between biophysical and sociopolitical factors behind urban flooding. In the article the focus is on the varying materialities and scales involved, including the ecological scales of the watershed, the infrastructural scales associated with flood protection, and the urban scales of planning, governance and social activism. The article concludes with a proposition for a multidimensional approach to thinking and acting on problems of urban ecological change.     

Impact of high-speed railway on urban resilience in China: Does urban innovation matter?

Based on calculating the urban resilience index from five aspects of economy, society, institutions, infrastructure, and ecology by adopting the entropy method, this study applies the time-varying DID model to systematically examine HSR's impact on China's urban resilience, on basis of which its heterogeneities and the mediating effect of urban innovation are also quantified. The findings reveal that: (1) HSR can significantly promote China's urban resilience, as supported by various robustness tests. (2) HSR can significantly improve economic and institution resilience of cities, but does not play a significant role on social resilience and infrastructure resilience, and has a negative effect on ecological resilience. (3) The driving effects of HSR on the resilience of core cities, large cities, and non-resource-based cities are more significant. (4) Urban innovation is an important channel through which HSR impacts urban resilience. The conclusions of this study can offer useful insights for China's future HSR planning and resilient cities construction.     

Making ‘Global Sydney’: Spatial Imaginaries,Worlding and Strategic Plans

This article critically examines the expression of global spatial imaginaries in urban policy and planning. Following recent calls to understand how the global is ‘made up' in and through cities, we argue for the usefulness of Roy and Ong's concept of ‘worlding’. By analysing how strategic spatial plans envisage ‘Global Sydney’, the article reveals a constitutive spatial imaginary informed by the articulation of three interrelated elements: global city standards, comparative techniques and extra‐local policy models. Unpacking how cities are selectively worlded through spatial imaginaries, the article advances an approach to urban globality as actively cultivated and differentially produced.     

Thermal Eco‐cities: Green Building and Urban Thermal Metabolism

Eco‐city projects are becoming increasingly prevalent throughout the globe and are often marketed as ‘new’ urban environments focused on achieving sustainable urban living while promoting environmental–economic transitions towards a low‐carbon technological and industrial base. The article argues for the need to consider the thermal aspects of urban metabolism, while at the same time focusing on the link between individual buildings and eco‐city master plans and wider economic development strategies at a state level. In so doing, the article encourages critical analysis of eco‐city design and planning, while keeping a focus on the role of specific building structures within eco‐cities as examples of the intermeshing of what can be termed a ‘political ecology of scale’ which stretches from specific buildings' climatic characteristics, to the metabolic master plan for eco‐cities, to provincial, regional and state‐level plans for the integration of eco‐cities within wider economic and political development trajectories. The article focuses on Masdar, in Abu Dhabi, an eco‐city under construction at the time of writing.     

适应型城市:将适应气候变化与气候风险管理纳入城市规划

气候变化对城市规划提出新的要求,即:通过人口、土地等资源的时空配置,最大限度地减小城市面临的潜在气候风险。本文从"城市发展如何考虑气候变化与风险管理需求"这一核心问题出发,探讨了气候风险、气候风险管理及适应型城市的概念和内容,指出在中国城市化提升阶段,城市发展迫切需要加强气候风险管理的意识和能力。基于国外城市应对气候变化风险的实践与经验,提出将适应与气候风险管理纳入城市规划,提出构建适应型城市的几个要点。     

Sunken Cities: Climate Change,Urban Futures and the Imagination of Submergence

Climate change presents multiple challenges to cities—not only in terms of the resilience and sustainability of the urban fabric, but also in relation to how urban inhabitants imagine they might adapt to a future transformed environment. This article explores imaginative modes of thinking in relation to future cities and climate change, focusing on representations of urban drowning or submergence. It considers, in turn, climate‐change fictions—from J.G. Ballard's 1962 novel The Drowned World to Paulo Bacigalupi's The Drowned Cities, published in 2012; visual representations from Gustave Doré's The New Zealander in 1872 to Alexis Rockman's 2004 Manifest Destiny; and architectural conjecture, from Wolf Hilbertz's Autopia Ampere project from 1970 onwards to CRAB Studio's Soak City in 2009. The article draws out how these imaginaries intersect with theoretical understandings of science fiction and ecology, contending that an emphasis on multiple imaginaries of climate change is critical to expanding the narrow range of possibilities that currently characterize the literature on cities and climate change. Imaginative texts, images and designs mutually inform each other to encourage holistic ways of approaching how we think about the prospect of urban submergence and to incubate radical responses to it.     

City Children and Genderfied Neighbourhoods: The New Generation as Urban Regeneration Strategy

Former industrial cities in the West are employing gentrification as urban policy. In these policies, women and families currently play an important role as gentrification pioneers. In my analysis of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, I propose the term genderfication to understand the gender dimensions of this process. Genderfication refers to the production of space for different gender relations. I analyse Rotterdam's urban planning program for becoming a ‘child‐friendly city’, which entails replacing existing urban dwellings with new, larger and more expensive ‘family‐friendly homes’ as a strategy for urban re‐generation. Urban re‐generation supplements regeneration in the form of material and economic restructuring, and refers to the replacement of part of the current population by a new and better suited generation. The ‘child‐friendly city program’ is considered in tandem with punitive ‘youth policies’.     

‘Eco’ For Whom? Envisioning Eco‐urbanism in the Sino‐Singapore Tianjin Eco‐city,China

Eco‐cities have attracted international attention from governments, corporations, academics and other actors seeking to use sustainable urban planning to reduce urban environmental impacts. China has devoted significant political will and economic resources to the development of new‐build eco‐city projects, reflecting the Chinese government's goals to build a ‘harmonious society' in which environmental sustainability and social stability are mutually reinforcing. We critically analyse the case of the Sino‐Singapore Tianjin eco‐city to demonstrate that the eco‐city's ecologically modernizing visions of eco‐urbanism construct a protective environment for its residents that constrains broader consideration of social sustainability. Through analysis of the marketing and presentation of specific domestic and other spaces of the eco‐city, we examine the application of ecologically modernizing construction and technology to the design of the city. We argue that the eco‐city is discursively constructed as ecologically beneficial for its inhabitants rather than for the broader socio‐environmental landscape. Our analysis of residential spaces in Tianjin eco‐city introduces the question of what ‘eco’ means when considering the construction of eco‐urban environments for the city's residents.     

Decentralizing Indonesian City Spaces as New ‘Centers’

Since the introduction of regional autonomy legislation in 1999, Indonesia has embarked on the world's biggest experiment with democratic decentralization. The intertwined processes of democratization and decentralization have dismantled Indonesia's centralized authoritarian system and reordered its governmental structures. These conjoined processes have set in motion conditions for the transformation of a number of Indonesia's secondary cities into regional ‘centers’ through the influx of new peoples, funding and ways of interacting within localized contexts and with the outside world. In this article I consider Indonesia's decentralization processes through the lens of the city, focusing on three key areas in the rising profile and development of urban centers. First, I look at the framing of Indonesian cities within contemporary urban discourses to highlight the array of urban spaces that coexist in the era of decentralization. Second, I describe how Indonesia's decentralization laws have structurally privileged cities by bypassing the provincial level and devolving most state powers directly to sub‐provincial administrations. Third, I explore how Indonesian cities compete and cooperate over limited state resources under the decentralized system and why some cities have been able to reinvent themselves as new centers in planning, practice and innovation, and why others continue to lag behind.     

Grabbed Urban Landscapes: Socio‐spatial Tensions in Green Infrastructure Planning in Medellín

Cities confronted with unsustainable development and climatic changes are increasingly turning to green infrastructure as an approach for growth and climate risk management. In this context, recent scholarly attention has been paid to gentrification, real‐estate speculation and resident displacement in the context of sustainability and green planning in the global North. Yet we know little about the environmental‐justice implications of green infrastructure planning in the context of self‐built settlements of the global South. To what extent do green infrastructure interventions produce or exacerbate urban socio‐spatial inequities in self‐built settlements? Through the analysis of a greenbelt project, an emblematic case of green infrastructure planning in Medellín, we argue that, as the Municipality of Medellín is containing and beautifying low‐income neighborhoods through grabbing part of their territories and turning them into green landscapes of privilege and pleasure, communities are becoming dispossessed of their greatest assets—location, land and social capital. In the process, community land is transformed into a new form of aesthetically controlled and ordered nature for the middle and upper classes and for tourists. By contrast, communities’ planning alternatives reveal how green planning can better address growth and climate risks in tandem with equitable community development.     

Futures of Crisis,Futures of Urban Political Theory: Flooding in Asian Coastal Megacities

Coastal megacities across Asia have experienced devastating floods in recent years. Studies project dramatic increases in populations prone to chronic flooding and potential permanent inundation of densely populated urban areas in future decades. The uncertainties presented by future flood risks disrupt prevalent state visions of globalization‐driven prosperity. The emerging reality of a shift in relationship between water and urban settlements has begun driving recalibration of power relations around a range of issues, including longstanding contestations over infrastructure delivery, housing, land rights and political representation. Flood mitigation efforts have played out in debates over displacement and eviction, and distributional concerns about the costs and benefits of these initiatives. This article develops a conceptual framework for assessing the implications of projections of flood risk for urban political theory. The article begins by identifying political contestations that emerge around the varied ways water intersects with urban processes—through dynamics of permeability, flow and drainage, aquifers and pipes, and coastal defense. It then explores how projections of the crisis of flooding have reshaped three contemporary debates in urban politics: those around property rights and the question of ‘informality’; around neoliberalization and financialization; and around the rescaling of the state. Finally, it briefly deploys this framework to examine the case of Jakarta.     

RESILIENCE AND ADAPTATION IN GENTRIFYING URBAN INDUSTRIAL DISTRICTS: The Experience of Cultural Manufacturers in San Francisco and Melbourne

Recent urban scholarship shows how zoning and real estate dynamics shape ongoing processes of gentrification and deindustrialization. While studies demonstrate the impact of planning and property market pressures on the arts, less research has examined their effect on urban manufacturers in gentrifying industrial districts. Given the differential impact of zoning and real estate pressures, our research focuses specifically on how ‘cultural manufacturers’ negotiate changing land use patterns in gentrifying urban industrial areas in San Francisco and Melbourne. Our findings show how cultural manufacturers develop flexible workspace arrangements, business models and professional networks to negotiate urban restructuring and avoid displacement. Though innovative, these survival strategies provide limited ability to navigate structural barriers. Here, the presence of intermediary organizations can help coordinate a strategic response to industrial gentrification and indifferent planning policy. In our research we highlight the everyday practices of adaptation and collective action in an under-researched cultural sector to provide a counterweight to macro-scale transitional narratives. While cities have deindustrialized owing to technological and competitive pressures, to focus exclusively on this misses a range of resilience practices that have sustained manufacturers in restructuring cities.     

Business strategies and the transition to low‐carbon cities

Cities are key drivers of global climate change, with the majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions being tied to urban life. Local actions to mitigate and adapt to climate change are essential for stabilization of the global climate and can also help to address other urban ecological problems such as pollution, decreasing biodiversity, etc. Companies are important urban actors in the development of low‐carbon cities because they provide a multitude of goods and services to city populations and directly influence urban carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. This is a new area of research. While studies on corporate sustainability are numerous, there is little, if any, existing research that examines the role of companies in climate change adaptation and mitigation within specific urban areas. Urban ecologists also have not examined how corporate activity affects urban systems. Taking a multi‐disciplinary systems approach, we present a conceptual model of the role of companies in managing urban interactions with the climate system. We also present empirical findings illustrating how one company ‘partners’ with the city of Rotterdam to test electric vehicles as a pilot project for urban climate adaptation and mitigation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Seeing Like a City‐State: Behavioural Planning and Governance in Egypt's First Affordable Gated Community

Haram City is Egypt's first ‘affordable’ gated community, hosting both aspirational middle‐class homeowners and resettled poor urban residents. Amidst legal ambiguity during Egypt's 2011–2013 revolutionary period, the management team of this public–private partnership was tasked with creating a ‘fully self‐sufficient’ city. While Haram City is the product of top‐down ‘seeing like a state’ master planning (Scott, 1998 ), the day‐to‐day resolution of class vulnerabilities and disputes over ‘reasonableness’ in city life requires forms of interpersonal adjudication otherwise addressed through local urban law—‘seeing like a city’ (Valverde, 2011 ). This article uses ethnography of management techniques aiming to ‘upgrade behaviour’ to theorize that a private entity, in a strategically indeterminate relationship with the state, reconciles future‐oriented planning and storied prejudices by merging two visions of governance. Imitating the repertoire of urban law, managers plan the very realm of bottom‐up decision making. They then adapt top‐down urban planning to bottom‐up dispute resolution to spatially consolidate the ‘consensual’ outcomes of a rigged game. Evoking both colonial Egyptian vagrancy laws and neoliberal paternalist welfare, ‘seeing like a city‐state’ governance amounts to authoritarianism that conceals itself within custom, appearing neutral so as to plan streets, codes and inner lives at once.     

A Smooth Ride? From Industrial to Creative Urbanism in Oshawa,Ontario

In mainstream media, policy circles and academic scholarship, economic discourses have highlighted the importance of knowledge, creativity and innovation for generating economic growth. This has been translated into an urban planning and policy agenda which favours the establishment of research parks, innovation clusters, and especially universities along with amenities to attract creative‐class workers. In much of this literature universities are invested with an almost magical power to spur economic growth, and the benign language of ‘transition’ is used suggesting a rather seamless progression from one urban economic engine to another. Through analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews related to the establishment of a new university in Oshawa, Ontario, this case study seeks to challenge the straightforward relationship that is assumed to exist between universities and local economic development. Like other lagging regions across the OECD attempting to repair their economies through creative and knowledge urbanism, Oshawa's recent achievements are tempered by growing concerns about poverty, homelessness and inequality. Planners and policymakers that mistake the complexities of economic restructuring for a smooth ‘urban transition’ put their cities and citizens at risk of creating new problems out of efforts to improve local conditions.     

Impacts from climate change on organizations: a conceptual foundation

Physical impacts from climate change already pose major challenges for organizations, and the trend is rising. Organization theorists, however, have barely begun to systematically consider the organizational impacts of more and increasingly intense storms, floods, droughts, fires, sea level rise or changing growing seasons as part of their domain of study. Eight organizationally relevant dimensions of climate impacts are identified: severity, temporal scale, spatial scale, predictability, mode, immediacy, state change potential and accelerating trend potential. Combined, their scale, scope and systemic uncertainty suggest future conditions of systemic hyperturbulence in organizational environments, defined here as ‘massive discontinuous change’ (MDC). To build a conceptual foundation for organizations to respond and adapt to MDC, the paper examines contributions from literatures on the management of sustainability, crisis, risk, resilience and adaptive organizational change. It highlights gaps for addressing both business challenges and opportunities from MDC, and suggests avenues for future research. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Corporate Carbon Strategies in Responding to Climate Change

With climate change emerging as one of the most important issues affecting the business circle, companies have begun considering the carbon issue in their overall strategic positioning. However, few studies have examined the corporate carbon strategies in developing and advanced developing countries, where climate change regulation is extensive and market uncertainty is relatively high. In addition, there has been growing interest among researchers and practitioners concerning the relationship between the carbon strategy and firm performance. This paper presents a framework for identifying the corporate carbon strategy. The cluster analysis of 241 Korean companies indicates six types of corporate carbon strategy: ‘wait‐and‐see observer’, ‘cautious reducer’, ‘product enhancer’, ‘all‐round enhancer’, ‘emergent explorer’ and ‘all‐round explorer’. This study empirically examines whether there are differences between these carbon strategy types in terms of the sector, firm size and firm performance. The results indicate a significant relationship between a firm's carbon strategy and its sector and size but a significant relationship between the carbon strategy and firm performance is not confirmed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Locating the Urban In‐between: Tracking the Urban Politics of Infrastructure in Toronto

In the urban studies literature, urban politics is usually considered in two distinct locations: the city (often understood in quite conventional centralist ways) and the suburb (understood as spatially peripheral and politically at odds with the central city). At the metropolitan scale, the two types of urban politics are discussed in relation to one another. More recently, the metropolitan scale of urban politics has been expanded to regional dimensions. We pose the question of location of urban politics from a specific deficit in the geography of centre, suburb and metropolis. We argue that in today's regional political socio‐spatiality, politics will have to be found ‘in‐between’ the old lines of demarcation. Following Tom Sieverts' (2003) advice to look at the ‘in‐between’ cities that are neither old downtown nor new suburb but complex urban landscapes of mixed density, use and urbanity, we reveal the political vacuum that is at the heart of the urban region today. Using the politics of infrastructure in Toronto as our empirical example, we will show that vulnerabilities and risks for urban populations in that Canadian metropolis' in‐between city are co‐generated by the failure of conventional political spaces and processes to capture the connectivities threaded through those places that are in‐between the centre and exurbia.     

The Limits of Shrinkage: Conceptual Pitfalls and Alternatives in the Discussion of Urban Population Loss

This essay reflects on the conceptual underpinnings of research on ‘shrinking cities' over the last decade. It criticizes the definition of shrinkage in terms of urban population losses and argues that the state‐of‐the art research on ‘shrinking cities' suffers from a misleading conceptualization of shrinkage which forces essentially different urban constellations into a universal model of ‘shrinkage'. Four problems of this procrustean bed are discussed in detail: methodological pitfalls of threshold definitions of urban shrinkage; empirical contradictions; an absence of attention to scalar interrelations; and insufficient understanding of cities as historical processes. The essay ends with suggestions for a widened conceptualization of shrinkage and a new research agenda.