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With a majority of people, consumption and emissions concentrated in cities, they are
critical in dealing with climate change. Social sciences have provided important insights
into city communities and how they work - looking at housing, energy, transport, infrastructure,
the interplay of people and policies.
The 'Urban Transitions' project has surveyed a hundred cities around the globe, mapping
out what is being done to respond to climate change, and pointing to how we can reduce
emissions and strengthen resilience.
So we surveyed a hundred cities around the globe, to see what kinds of experiments they
were doing. And we found over 600 different projects that were going on across this really
diverse range of cities, and that tells us that climate change is really becoming part
of what cities are doing on a day-to-day basis, becoming part of the fabric of the city.
Most of these experiments are in the energy domain, but we also see a large range of other
sorts of projects - across coastal protection, around heat wave vulnerabilities, warning
systems; we see projects around waste and using energy from waste and so on. So there's
a real diversity of things going on, but they're all connected by this idea that cities should
have a role in responding to climate change.
We're finding three main sorts of projects, or three different kinds of logics, or arguments,
why these projects are going ahead. In some cases people are experimenting with climate
change in cities for financial reasons, either to save money or to create new markets. And
in a time of austerity you might argue that that's a really interesting, good thing to
see - that there is something around the notion of green growth. It's a kind of carbon economy
coming to the city.
Another set of reasons that we find across these experiments are questions around security
and resilience. So in a project that we've looked at in Bangalore in India, where there's
a really innovative housing project called 'Towards zero carbon development'. A main
rationale of that project has been to try to provide self sufficiency in energy and
water for a new development on the outskirts of the city.
But a third kind of logic that we see is this notion of trying to achieve some aspect of
social justice - about using climate change as a way of re-distributing resources in cities,
so that people who might not previously have been able to afford energy, or may not have
had access to water, are gaining, through the idea of climate change, they're gaining
some access to new kinds of services.
We can see that addressing climate change in the city is a way to try to bring social
benefits, to bring wider environmental benefits to populations who might be excluded in the
cities. But it's not a guarantee, and so if we think that climate change needs to be addressed
in the city, we probably have to work a bit harder, to think about that progressive element
of how we respond to climate change, how can we assure that it has those social and environmental
justice benefits at the same time as addressing that big global problem of climate change.