Cities, the world over, are increasingly recognised to be both a principal source of the environmental and social sustainability challenges facing contemporary society and a critical site for addressing these challenges. Socio-technical systems are at the heart of these challenges as they configure central aspects of urban life: from mobility and energy infrastructures to leisure activities and patterns of mobility. This observation has led to substantial interest in how societies might initiate and actively steer radical transitions in these systems in the pursuit of sustainable urban futures. This book contributes to emerging debates on the politics of urban transitions by examining the intimate interlinkages between knowledge, power and governance. Drawing upon real-world examples of urban governance, the authors explore the strategies, struggles and controversies involved in configuring knowledge and how knowledge constructions influence governance by rendering some concerns and issues visible and valuable, while obscuring others. The book draws attention to how novel ways of conceptualising, knowing and observing socio-technical systems may be harnessed productively in redefining the power relationships underpinning unsustainable practices. Understanding these dynamics can ultimately inform and enable new approaches to support much-needed urban transitions. This book provides a compelling examination of urban knowledge politics for the twenty-first century that will be of great value to academics, policy-makers and practitioners working in the social sciences, urban studies, geography, urban governance or sustainability transitions.

The world’s population is currently undergoing a significant transition towards urbanisation, with the UN expecting that 70% of people globally will live in cities by 2050. Urbanisation has multiple political, cultural, environmental and economic dimensions that profoundly influence social development and innovation. This fundamental long-term transformation will involve the realignment of urban society’s technologies and infrastructures, culture and lifestyles, as well as governance and institutional frameworks. Such structural systemic realignments can be referred to as urban sustainability transitions: fundamental and structural changes in urban systems through which persistent societal challenges are addressed, such as shifts towards urban farming, renewable decentralised energy systems, and social economies. This book provides new insights into how sustainability transitions unfold in different types of cities across the world and explores possible strategies for governing urban transitions, emphasising the co-evolution of material and institutional transformations in socio-technical and socio-ecological systems. With case studies of mega-cities such as Seoul, Tokyo, New York and Adelaide, medium-sized cities such as Copenhagen, Cape Town and Portland, and nonmetropolitan cities such as Freiburg, Ghent and Brighton, the book provides an opportunity to reflect upon the comparability and transferability of theoretical/conceptual constructs and governance approaches across geographical contexts. Urban Sustainability Transitions is key reading for students and scholars working in Environmental Sciences, Geography, Urban Studies, Urban Policy and Planning.

This book contributes to current debates regarding purposive transitions to sustainable cities, providing an accessible but critical exploration of sustainability transitions in urban settings. We have now entered the urban century, which is not without its own challenges, as discussed in the preceding book of this series. Urbanization is accompanied by a myriad of complex and overlapping environmental, social and governance challenges – which increasingly call into question conventional, market-based responses and simple top-down government interventions. Faced with these challenges, urban practitioners and scholars alike are interested in promoting purposive transitions to sustainable cities. The chapters in this volume contribute to the growing body of literature on city-scale transformative change, which seeks to address a lack of consideration for spatial and urban governance dimensions in sustainability transitions studies, and expand on the basis established in the preceding book. Drawing on a range of perspectives and written by leading Australian and international urban researchers, the chapters explore contemporary cases from Australia and locate them within the international context. Australia is on the one hand representative of many OECD countries, while on the other possessing a number of unique attributes that may serve to highlight issues and potentials internationally. Australia is a highly urbanized country and because of the federal political structure and the large distances, the five largest state-capital cities have a relatively high degree of autonomy in governance – even dominating the rest of their respective states and rural hinterlands to a certain extent. This context suggests that Australian cases can provide interesting “test-tube” perspectives on processes relevant to urban sustainability transitions worldwide. This volume presents an extensive overview of theories, concepts, approaches and practical examples informed by sustainability transitions thinking, offering a unique resource for all urban practitioners and scholars who want to understand and transition to sustainable urban futures.

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.

Cities in Transition focuses on the sustainability transitions initiated in 40 European cities. The book presents the incredible wealth of insights gathered through hundreds of interviews and questionnaires. Four key domains—local energy systems, local green spaces, local water systems and local labour markets—have been the focus of the field research investigating local potentials for social innovation and new forms of civil society self-organisation. Examining the potential of new organizational frameworks like co-operatives, multi-stakeholder constructions, local-regional partnerships and networks for the success of such transitions, this book presents the key ingredients of a sustainable urban community as a viable concept to address current global financial, environmental and social challenges. Crucial reading for academics and practitioners of urban planning and sustainability in Europe, Cities in Transition is an innovative roadmap for sustainability in changing cities.

Reading this book will lead to new insights compelling to an international audience into how cities address the sustainability challenges they face. They do this by not repeating old patterns but by searching for new and innovative methods and instruments based on shared principles of a transitions approach. The book describes the quest of cities on two continents to accelerate and stimulate such a transition to sustainability. The aim of the book is twofold: to provide insights into how cities are addressing this challenge conceptually and practically, and to learn from a comparison of governance strategies in Europe and Asia. The book is informed by transition thinking as it was developed in the last decade in Europe and as it is increasingly being applied in Asia. The analytical framework is based on principles of transition management, which draws on insights from complexity science, sociology, and governance theories. Only recently this approach has been adapted to the urban context, and this book is an opportunity to share these experiences with a wider audience. For scholars this work offers a presentation of recent state-of-the-art theoretical developments in transition governance applied to the context of cities. For urban planners, professionals, and practitioners it offers a framework for understanding ongoing developments as well as methods and instruments for dealing with them. The content is potentially appealing to post-graduate and graduate students of environmental management, policy studies, and urban studies programs.

The confluence of global climate change, growing levels of energy consumption and rapid urbanization has led the international policy community to regard urban responses to climate change as ‘an urgent agenda’ (World Bank 2010). The contribution of cities to rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions coupled with concerns about the vulnerability of urban places and communities to the impacts of climate change have led to a relatively recent and rapidly proliferating interest amongst both academic and policy communities in how cities might be able to respond to mitigation and adaptation. Attention has focused on the potential for municipal authorities to develop policy and plans that can address these twin issues, and the challenges of capacity, resource and politics that have been encountered. While this literature has captured some of the essential means through which the urban response to climate change is being forged, is that it has failed to take account of the multiple sites and spaces of climate change response that are emerging in cities ‘off-plan’. An Urban Politics of Climate Change provides the first account of urban responses to climate change that moves beyond the boundary of municipal institutions to critically examine the governing of climate change in the city as a matter of both public and private authority, and to engage with the ways in which this is bound up with the politics and practices of urban infrastructure. The book draws on cases from multiple cities in both developed and emerging economies to providing new insight into the potential and limitations of urban responses to climate change, as well as new conceptual direction for our understanding of the politics of environmental governance.