scholarly journals Lost in Transition? Directions for an Economic Geography of Urban Sustainability Transitions

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 2434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Fastenrath ◽  
Boris Braun
Keyword(s):  
Economic Geography ◽  
Urban Sustainability ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Sustainability Transitions ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Increasing Demand ◽  
The City

Socio-technical transitions towards more sustainable modes of production and consumption are receiving increasing attention in the academic world and also from political and economic decision-makers. There is increasing demand for resource-efficient technologies and institutional innovations, particularly at the city level. However, it is widely unclear how processes of change evolve and develop and how they are embedded in different socio-spatial contexts. While numerous scholars have contributed to the vibrant research field around sustainability transitions, the geographical expertise largely has been ignored. The lack of knowledge about the role of spatial contexts, learning processes, and the co-evolution of technological, economical, and socio-political processes has been prominently addressed. Bridging approaches from Transition Studies and perspectives of Economic Geography, the paper presents conceptual ideas for an evolutionary and relational understanding of urban sustainability transitions. The paper introduces new perspectives on sustainability transitions towards a better understanding of socio-spatial contexts.

scholarly journals Unravelling the role of green entrepreneurs in urban sustainability transitions: A case study of China’s Solar City

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (14) ◽  
pp. 2901-2917 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhen Yu ◽  
David Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Urban Sustainability ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Solar Water Heater ◽  
Sustainability Transitions ◽  
Water Heater ◽  
Solar Water ◽  
Institutional Contexts

This paper aims to understand the role of green entrepreneurs in urban sustainability transitions. We propose an analytical framework combining transition approaches and green entrepreneurship from a relational lens. It includes four processes: emergence of green entrepreneurs, multi-scalar interest coordination, empowering through anchoring, and struggling with the regime at the urban scale. This framework is illustrated through an empirical analysis of the role of green entrepreneurs in the development of the solar water heater industry in China’s Solar City. The analysis unravels how the local institutional contexts and multi-scalar relations empowered local green entrepreneurs to become system builders for urban transitions.

scholarly journals The Role of Experiments and Demonstration Projects in Efforts of Upscaling: An Analysis of Two Projects Attempting to Reconfigure Production and Consumption in Energy and Mobility

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (20) ◽  
pp. 5771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryghaug ◽  
Ornetzeder ◽  
Skjølsvold ◽  
Throndsen
Keyword(s):  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Smart Grid ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Production Systems ◽  
Pilot Project ◽  
Sustainability Transitions ◽  
Pilot Projects ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
Production And Consumption

There is a multitude of experimentation, pilot and demonstration projects across Europe aiming to reconfigure energy consumption and production systems. Demo-projects and experiments have been recognized as important instruments to implement sustainability transitions in practice. Transition scholars have done much to clarify how we should understand experiments and pilot projects, focusing on involved actors, what is learned, and how the knowledge is used. In this paper we study two pilot project and discuss their qualities as sites that bundle new systemic properties, technologies, regulations, business models and user practices in new ways. We discuss these cases as new configurations with promising transformative implications. The two cases studied are a Norwegian and an Austrian smart grid demonstration. Both cases represent companies that have transformed their relation to and participation in the transport system as an outcome of pilot projects and experiments. The study analyses the complexity of factors influencing the effectiveness and success of these reconfigurations in providing destabilization and change within until now relatively stable regimes.

scholarly journals Mapping participatory planning in Havana: patchwork legacies for a strengthened local governance

2021 ◽  
pp. 095624782110325
Author(s):  
Catalina Ortiz ◽  
Alejandro Vallejo ◽  
Jorge Peña ◽  
Emily Morris ◽  
Joiselen Cazanave Macías ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Participatory Planning ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Planning Strategy ◽  
Neighbourhood Level ◽  
The City

In 2019, Cuba approved a new political constitution that calls for deepening citizen participation to strengthen local governance. The emerging decentralization processes and the role of new actors in urban development open new possibilities for inclusive planning. While citizen participation is widely documented in the global South and under Western liberal democracy regimes, participatory urban planning in the context of Southern socialist cities such as Havana has been less scrutinized. This paper aims at mapping the framings, trajectories and legacies of such participatory planning initiatives. Based on mapping workshops and desktop research, we find that participatory initiatives within Havana are spatially dispersed, sporadic, lacking at the city level, and occurring in isolation at the neighbourhood level. We argue that establishing sustained participatory urban planning practices in Havana requires decision makers to scale outwards and upwards the lessons learned from existing initiatives to foster a city-wide participatory planning strategy.

scholarly journals The role of dumas in the adminstration system of the Fergana valley’s cities

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (7) ◽  
pp. 132-136
Author(s):  
Mansurov Ulugbek Umarovich
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Soviet Government ◽  
City Administration ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

This article, relying on the sources, clarifies the impact of political processes in the cities of Fergana Valley on the city administration in 1917. Moreover, the issues of establishment of Soviet government in the cities of Fergana Valley, leading political changes that took place in the cities, the role of Dumasin cities’ administration and the participation of local representatives in these processes are also discussed. The article concludes that the cities of the Fergana Valley in 1917 were among the political centers of Turkestan.

scholarly journals Homelessness and Covid-19 in the City of Tshwane: Doing liberation theology undercover – A conversation with Ivan Petrella

2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan F. De Beer
Keyword(s):  
Public Administration ◽  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Theological Education ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Theological Discourse ◽  
The City ◽  
Liberation Theologian

Ivan Petrella argues that the goals of liberation theology can sometimes be better served by doing it undercover. This article reflects on responses to homelessness during Covid-19 in the City of Tshwane, describing and reflecting upon it from the perspective of a researcher-theologian as well as activist-urbanist. It employed two lenses in its reflection: Petrella’s notion of the ‘undercover liberation theologian’, as well as what is known as deliberative public administration theory, as possibly complementary approaches. It traces ways in which people of faith/theologians participated in the City of Tshwane through means other than explicit theological discourse. It implies that such engagement was not less theological but perhaps more strategic, describing that task of the undercover liberation theologian as that of making space, making plans, making known and making change. Ultimately, it calls for a subversion of suspect models of theological education, suggesting that it is in losing ourselves in the messiness of public processes and multiple solidarities with the poor, that the unfree might experience freedom, and liberation theological goals might find concrete expression.Contribution: This article reflects on responses in the City of Tshwane to street homelessness during Covid-19. It unpacks the notion and role of the ‘undercover’ liberation theologian in local political processes, and how losing ourselves in public processes and multiple solidarities with the urban poor, might help gain freedom for the unfree.

scholarly journals Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-169
Author(s):  
Patrick Huntjens
Keyword(s):  
Urban Sustainability ◽  
Metropolitan Region ◽  
Sustainability Transitions ◽  
Knowledge And Skills ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Governance Challenges ◽  
Ecological Innovation ◽  
Sustainability Challenges ◽  
The City

AbstractMy research group is involved in collaborations with the dynamic ‘Amsterdam Metropolitan Region (MRA)’ and ‘Rotterdam-The Hague Metropolitan Region (MRDH)’, with the objective to investigate the complex governance challenges and opportunities related to urban sustainability transitions, mainly through transdisciplinary collaboration. The resulting knowledge and skills are used to support and engage with Transformative Social-Ecological Innovation (TSEI) in-the-making, which in turn will generate new knowledge and skills (i.e. in iterative learning cycles). This chapter starts with a brief overview of urban sustainability challenges (Sect. 7.1). Research activities are centred around the transition to climate-resilient and healthy cities (Sect. 7.2), feeding and greening megacities (Sect. 7.3), as well as the transition from linear to circular and regenerative economies and cultures in (mega) cities (Sect. 7.4). In parallel, a new transdisciplinary Minor is developed, called ‘Collaboration for the City of the Future’ (Sect. 7.4).

scholarly journals Who makes the city? The evolution of Galway city

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-78
Author(s):  
Patrick Collins
Keyword(s):  
Economic Geography ◽  
Process Development ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Evolutionary Economic Geography ◽  
Population Growth Rates ◽  
Evolutionary Economic ◽  
Path Dependent ◽  
The City

AbstractThis paper sets out to better understand the roles of various actors and actions in the ‘making’ of Galway city. From the formation of the state, with a population of just over 14,000, the city has enjoyed population growth rates above EU and Irish averages over the past three decades. This paper maps a series of growth phases resulting from sometimes deliberate and other times non-deliberate policy decisions. The theoretical lens adopted is that of evolutionary economic geography. This is an attempt to counteract the tendency in broader social science research to underplay geographical aspects, such as places, space and scales. Economic geography – and evolutionary economic geography in particular – better identifies the complexity and nuance of place development. Theorists such as Boschma (2017) and Martin & Sunley (2015) consider development as a path-dependent process. Development is situated and place-based. This requires a more historically attuned perspective and a recognition that the role played by institutions, government and policy is vital. The paper concludes with a broad reflection on the role of spatial development policy and the potential future development of the city.

Cycling the city, re-imagining the city: Envisioning urban sustainability transitions in Thailand

Urban Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (12) ◽  
pp. 2763-2779 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frans Sengers
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Technical Change ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Urban Sustainability ◽  
Sustainability Transitions ◽  
Shared Understandings ◽  
The City

Urban sustainability transitions are journeys of transformative socio-technical change to set course for an envisioned future city. These journeys start out in the minds of change agents as vague conceptual images inspired by far-flung ideals, which are then further substantiated and articulated as ‘urban imaginaries’ – shared understandings of what constitutes a desirable future city. The conceptual contribution of this paper lies in demonstrating the power of the urban imaginaries notion to studying the process of envisioning in the context of sustainability transitions. By following a number of prolific Thai cycling campaigners through the streets of several cities in Thailand – focusing on the urban imaginaries they articulate – this paper shows how urban sustainability transitions are envisioned from the bike saddle, how these imaginaries are mobilised to empower cycling and how a seemingly disparate set of urban development pathways converge around technological artefacts and material infrastructure.

Varieties of green: On aesthetic contestations over urban sustainability pathways in a Copenhagen community garden

2020 ◽  
pp. 251484862090280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob Laage-Thomsen ◽  
Anders Blok
Keyword(s):  
Urban Design ◽  
Urban Sustainability ◽  
Green Spaces ◽  
Community Garden ◽  
Urban Greening ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Urban Gardening ◽  
The City

Alongside kindred civic-driven and place-based urban greening initiatives, studies document an upsurge over the last decade in urban gardening and alternative food initiatives across a range of Euro-American settings. Meanwhile, historical and cultural inquiries into urban design, planning and politics suggest that the place and role of ‘nature’ in the city is now undergoing significant shifts. In this article, we deploy a case study of a civic-driven permaculture garden in Copenhagen in order to suggest a novel analytical grid of the imaginative and material domain of public aesthetic norms shaping current-day tensions over interventions in and valuations of the fabric of multiform green-spaces in the city. Reading across existing literatures, we model this domain along two structuring axes – of ‘orderliness’ versus ‘wildness’ and ‘pastoral nature’ versus city-nature ‘imbrication’ – and illustrate the usefulness of the resulting grid for making sense of internal debates and external criticisms in the Copenhagen permaculture gardening case. By assisting us in explaining how and why this garden struggled to carve out a legitimate space in a city otherwise committed to urban nature, we argue that attention to variable urban-green aesthetic commitments helps recast questions of urban sustainability politics in important ways.

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