Rethinking Urban Transitions

Politics in the Low Carbon City

Andrés Luque-Ayala, Simon Marvin, Harriet Bulkeley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351675147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Stadtentwicklung

Rethinking Urban Transitions provides critical insight for societal and policy debates about the potential and limits of low carbon urbanism. It draws on over a decade of international research, undertaken by scholars across multiple disciplines concerned with analysing and shaping urban sustainability transitions. It seeks to open up the possibility of a new generation of urban low carbon transition research, which foregrounds the importance of political, geographical and developmental context in shaping the possibilities for a low carbon urban future.

The book's contributions propose an interpretation of urban low carbon transitions as primarily social, political and developmental processes. Rather than being primarily technical efforts aimed at measuring and mitigating greenhouse gases, the low carbon transition requires a shift in the mode and politics of urban development. The book argues that moving towards this model requires rethinking what it means to design, practise and mobilize low carbon in the city, while also acknowledging the presence of multiple and contested developmental pathways. Key to this shift is thinking about transitions, not solely as technical, infrastructural or systemic shifts, but also as a way of thinking about collective futures, societal development and governing modes – a recognition of the political and contested nature of low carbon urbanism. The various contributions provide novel conceptual frameworks as well as empirically rich cases through which we can begin to interrogate the relevance of socio-economic, political and developmental dimensions in the making or unmaking of low carbon in the city. The book draws on a diverse range of examples (including 'world cities' and 'ordinary cities') from North America, South America, Europe, Australia, Africa, India and China, to provide evidence that expectations, aspirations and plans to undertake purposive socio-technical transitions are both emerging and encountering resistance in different urban contexts.

Rethinking Urban Transitions is an essential text for courses concerned with cities, climate change and environmental issues in sociology, politics, urban studies, planning, environmental studies, geography and the built environment.

1

Introduction

Andrés Luque-Ayala, Simon Marvin and Harriet Bulkeley

Current societies face unprecedented risks and challenges resulting from climate change. Addressing them will require fundamental transformations in the infrastructures that sustain everyday life, from energy and water provision to waste collection and mobility. Cities – the world’s key infrastructural nodes securing service provision and home to the majority of the world’s population – are critical in this transition. While they concentrate a range of social and economic activities that produce GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions, they are also increasingly recognized as sources of opportunities for the implementation of actions towards climate mitigation. As illustrated by the negotiations at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) and its resulting Paris Agreement, whether, how and why low carbon transitions in urban systems take place will be decisive for the success of global mitigation efforts.

Climate change increasingly features as a critical issue in urbanization policies and in the management of urban infrastructure. Research indicates that cities across the world are now engaging in strategic efforts to effect a ‘low carbon transition’ (Betsill and Bulkeley, 2007; Bulkeley et al., 2011; Rosenzweig et al., 2010) – to drastically cut GHG emissions while enhancing resilience and securing access to key resources. The resulting efforts appear to be making headway towards a set of policies, governing arrangements and technologies that promote a low carbon society. Yet significant questions remain unexplored. First, limited research has been undertaken internationally to comparatively examine how different cities in the North and South are responding to the challenges of climate change. Second, the balance between policy vs material interventions has not been examined, a question that is particularly relevant as many cities are failing to achieve GHG emissions reductions in spite of novel governance frameworks designed for this purpose. Finally, it is not clear whether the strategic intent of low carbon transitions can be realized in different urban contexts, nor is the extent to which advancing low carbon is transforming the political configuration of cities.

Rethinking Urban Transitions: Politics in the Low Carbon City informs a wider societal and policy debate about the potential and limits of low carbon urbanism. The book reflects critically on a decade’s work (2005–2015) undertaken by a wide range of scholars across multiple disciplines – innovation studies, urban studies and environmental studies – concerned with analysing (and in some cases shaping) urban transitions. The book updates previous scholarly research on cities and low carbon transitions, actualizing the nature of the challenges and pointing specifically to the decisively political nature of such socio-technical transformations in urban systems. This involves not simply examining implementation and governance pathways, but also looking at cases of failure, retreat, contestation and the potentially regressive social and economic lock-ins established by mainstream low carbon responses. Insights from the fields of urban studies, geography, political science, history and technological transitions are combined to examine how, why, and with what implications cities bring about low carbon transitions.

The main premise of the book is that a second generation of studies on Cities and Low Carbon Transitions (Bulkeley et al., 2011) requires considering transitions in their political, geographical and developmental contexts. A critical reading of the significant contribution of what could be called first-generation urban transition studies (e.g. Bulkeley et al., 2011; Hodson and Marvin, 2012; Hodson et al., 2013; While et al., 2010; Geels, 2010; Rutland and Aylett, 2008 – among many others) would suggest that advancing an understanding of low carbon urbanism requires a shift from an ‘extractive’ model of low carbon transitions – where the focus is on reducing emissions (point-source pollution) – to an ‘embedded’ model of decarbonization – where low carbon logics are both rooted and disputed in and across political rationalities and development pathways. The book argues that moving towards this model requires rethinking what it means to design, practice and mobilize low carbon in the city, while also acknowledging the presence of multiple and contested developmental pathways.

Key to this shift is thinking about transitions not solely as technical, infrastructural or systemic shifts, but also as a way of thinking about collective futures, societal development and governing modes – a recognition of the political and contested nature of low carbon urbanism. Rethinking Urban Transitions provides a novel conceptual framework as well as empirically rich cases through which we can begin to interrogate the relevance of socio-economic, political and developmental dimensions in the making or unmaking of low carbon transitions. It also allows for a comparison of urban low carbon transition dynamics in multiple spatial and temporal contexts, as part of an in-depth examination of technological, infrastructural and policy dimensions. The book draws on a diverse range of examples (including ‘world cities’ and ‘ordinary cities’) from North America, South America, Europe, Australia, Africa, India and China, to provide evidence that expectations, aspirations and plans to undertake purposive socio-technical transitions are both emerging and encountering resistance in different urban contexts.

Governing urban low carbon transitions

An involvement of cities and municipalities in the development of responses to climate change is not new. Cities are hot spots of resources and energy consumption, by some estimates accounting for 71 to 76% of global GHG emissions from final energy use (IPCC, 2014). Large and small cities, particularly many of the so-called ‘global’ cities, have shown a marked strategic interest in responding to climate change. Yet collective and individual urban responses have not necessarily resulted in systematic planning efforts or in the consistent enactment of effective regulation. For over two decades, large and small cities across the world have developed initiatives and partnerships aimed at supporting global climate change mitigation efforts (cf. Betsill and Bulkeley, 2007; Bulkeley and Betsill, 2003, 2013). The focus has been largely within the domains of policy, through institutional initiatives measuring each city’s contribution to climate change (via, for example, emissions inventories) while aligning various urban policies towards a set of objectives for the reduction of GHG emissions (Romero-Lankao, 2007; Dhakal, 2010; Rice, 2010; Hoornweg et al., 2011). Cities have also sought to advance climate mitigation by establishing and joining translational municipal networks and coalitions addressing energy, environmental sustainability and climate change issues (such as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, Energy Cities, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy) (Betsill and Bulkeley, 2004; Acuto, 2013). Transnational municipal networks for climate change have played a critical role in positioning urban responses to climate change, while allowing cities to learn from each other and providing cities with tools for influencing policy at national and international levels (Kern and Bulkeley, 2009; Gore, 2010; Betsill and Bulkeley, 2006). The scope, actions and influence of these networks point to the scalar and multilevel nature of climate governance, subverting traditional top–down governance forms and foregrounding the horizontal and multi-stakeholder nature of urban climate governance.

A focus on policy development (e.g. via decarbonization or mitigation action plans) needs to be balanced with an acute understanding of the limitations experienced by such policies in the context of existing social and material realities of the city (Lovell et al., 2009). Considering the urban brings attention to large- and small-scale metropolitan infrastructure systems, positioning urban networks of energy, water, waste, transport, ICT (information and communications technology) and others as potential sites of intervention towards effective climate responses. This means advancing a governance of climate mitigation that acknowledges the materiality of the urban, recognizing that physical infrastructures define a great deal of how climate change is experienced and addressed. Networked infrastructures play a vital role in structuring possibilities for a low carbon urban transition, operating as both key catalysts for environmental problems and the critical means through which the governing of climate change takes place (Bulkeley et al., 2011; Rutland and Aylett, 2008). Yet, rolling out effective infrastructural responses requires transcending a purely technological approach, emphasizing the need for novel governance arrangements, an acknowledgement of a multiplicity of (human and non-human) agencies, and recognizing the social and political nature of the city’s infrastructures.

Transcending institutional readings of climate governance, recent scholarly work has sought to engage with how governing low carbon in the city is accomplished by a range of state and non-state actors through their social and technical practices – a form of urban experimentation that often bypasses traditional funding and planning mechanisms while at the same time, in the absence of formal policy channels, creating new forms of intervention (Bulkeley et al., 2015; Bulkeley et al., 2012; Evans et al., 2016). Beyond the work of policy documents and commitments (such as local climate action plans and GHG reduction targets), responding to climate change in the city is occurring through a growing patchwork of relatively small- and medium-scale projects and interventions by public and private stakeholders alike. With these, local authorities and other urban stakeholders seek to take advantage of funding opportunities, potential strategic partnerships, or reframe local concerns in the context of the global climate change agenda – an agenda that appears to have widespread traction and political appeal (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2013). This urban low carbon experimentation “create[s] new forms of political space within the city, as public and private authority blur, and are primarily enacted through forms of technical intervention in infrastructure networks, drawing attention to the importance of such sites in urban climate politics” (Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013, p. 361).

Critically, governing urban low carbon transitions demands not only thinking about what cities need to do to achieve these aims, but also reflecting on what they need to stop doing and what they need to undo – the needed changes in decades- and in many cases centuries-old systems and practices supporting urban living (Bulkeley, 2015). “Un-locking carbon is as much of a challenge as locking in new and renewable forms of energy or alternative patterns of consumption” (Bulkeley, 2015, p. 1408). Moving forward towards a low carbon city deems it important to ask questions around the (often energy-intensive) infrastructures that are in place, the planning systems that shape our cities, the consumption practices that keep our economies afloat and the unbundled utility configurations of the liberalized city and what this fragmented and market-based utility landscape means for low carbon.

Materialities, intermediation and subjectivities in the low carbon city

Taking these debates one step further, this book suggest that examining urban low carbon transitions requires engaging with the various socio-materialities (technologies and infrastructures), forms of governance and intermediation, and communities and subjectivities involved in the low carbon experimentation. The book starts with an analytical framework for urban low carbon transitions (Chapter 2) that approaches low carbon transitions as the result of multiple and disparate efforts beyond simply measuring and mitigating GHGs, reinterpreting the low carbon transition as a matter of development modes. It examines the multiple competing ways of designing, practising and mobilizing low carbon urbanism, foregrounding, among other themes, multiplicity in ways of thinking about low carbon, the various agents and subjectivities involved, the many objects and flows enrolled, and the different ways in which learning and scaling up is imagined and discussed. In doing this, the framework outlines conceptual tools for asking what it means to be low carbon, what and who is involved in the transition, how is this transition likely to unfold, and how will we recognize a transition when we see it. The remaining chapters of the book are structured in three parts, dedicated to conceptual and empirical analyses examining the technologies, materialities and infrastructures of the urban low carbon transition (Part I), the various ways of intermediation and governance arrangements at play (Part II), and finally the ways in which communities and subjectivities become central in the making of low carbon urbanism (Part III).

Part I: Technologies, materialities, infrastructures

The first part of the book examines the objects and flows of the material world involved in the production of carbon, and the set of mechanisms and techniques that operate as material, framing and discursive devices capable of influencing both agents and objects. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that thinking about low carbon urbanism requires looking beyond policy interventions and institutional configurations, demanding an examination of the very material networks that make the city and the socio-technical dimensions of the technologies and infrastructures mobilized to bring about change (Rutherford and Coutard, 2014; Moss, 2014; Bulkeley et al., 2015). Drawing on these approaches, and foregrounding the political agency embedded within material technologies, the four chapters of Part I depict a variety of techno-material entry points to understanding both low carbon and energy transitions in Paris, Berlin and Hong Kong, Manchester and a selection of North American cities.

In Chapter 3, Jonathan Rutherford looks at the interplay between the materiality of infrastructures and the politics of low carbon. As Paris sets out to decarbonize its energy provision, Rutherford examines the material constraints to low carbon imposed by city’s energy infrastructures, and the ways in which the very materiality of these infrastructures generates lock-ins and techno-political contestations to the city’s low carbon objectives. Empirically, the chapter looks at the possibilities and impossibilities for expanding Paris’s district heating system, the tensions between private and public interests emanating from the unclear ownership of the city’s electricity distribution networks, and the city’s experimentation with smart electricity as a means for dealing with carbon-intensive peak loads. It argues for an understanding of agency for low carbon as “situated in, around and between particular matters and materialities.” In doing this, the chapter foregrounds the need to consider both human and material agencies, and to understand the ways in which such non-human agencies become embedded in political processes.

Chapter 4 examines the temporal dimensions of energy and low carbon transitions, focusing on the infrastructural lock-ins emerging in the political history of Berlin and Hong Kong’s energy systems. Here, Timothy Moss and Maria Francesch-Huidobro call for an analysis of historical legacies of energy production, and the extent to which these influence future low carbon options. The empirical focus is the twentieth-century need of both cities – isolated geopolitically and forcefully disconnected from wider regional, national and transnational structures – to maximize energy autarky for security purposes. Following from the 1990–97 reunification processes, the legacy of the Berlin’s energy autarky creates challenges for responding to climate change and tensions between environmental sustainability, market competition and energy security.

Chapter 5 looks at the recent history of Greater Manchester, focusing on the process of envisioning a low carbon future as a technology for governing the city. Specifically, the chapter looks at how visions for a low carbon city-region rose and declined through 2006 and 2017, as the city negotiated and implemented decentralization efforts aimed at repositioning itself from an industrial city to a post-industrial entrepreneurial city. The analysis provided by Mike Hodson, Simon Marvin and Andy McMeekin suggests that low carbon visions are often highly mutable, transient and politically produced, largely in response to broader political and economic processes, priorities and power struggles. Examining the interplay between visions of the city and infrastructural priorities, Hodson, Marvin and McMeekin reflect on the implications and limitations of building low carbon capabilities through primarily economic priorities.

The final chapter of Part I also explores the process of implementing low carbon visions through infrastructural interventions. Laura Tozer, in Chapter 6, interrogates the governance documents of nine local authorities in North America to illustrate variation and difference within discourses on ‘carbon neutrality’. The chapter focuses on the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, a transnational network of cities committed to ‘deep decarbonization’ – a target of at least an 80% reduction of GHG emissions by 2050. Tozer’s findings show that there is significant diversity among ways of thinking about low carbon, yet there is a prevalence of hegemonic ideas about the infrastructural shape and form of such carbon neutral urban futures.

Part II: Intermediation and governance

Part II looks at a broad range of activities and structures that make up climate responses at the local level, with a specific focus on municipal governance arrangements and intermediation practices. This includes a set of institutional architectures at national, regional and local levels, operating through a disparate ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Rethinking urban transitions: an analytical framework
• PART I: Technologies, materialities, infrastructures
• PART II: Intermediation and governance
• PART III: Communities and subjectivities
• Index