Programme

Over the last two decades, scholarly debate has focused on the role that cities and urban areas play in developing transformative responses to climate change and resilience challenges. This debate has shifted the narrative away from characterising cities as sites of vulnerability, reimagining them as engines of transformative responses to global challenges. Urban climate action includes experiences such as the integration of emission mitigation concerns into urban design, the development of local adaptation planning, the implementation of measures to deliver infrastructure resilience, the turn towards urban greening strategies, and the enrolment of a wide set of actors from the public, private and civil society spheres who are transforming cities in the name of climate change.

However, such transformations are not inherently positive: unequal access to the benefits of climate action and a lack of voice in local governance generate the spatial injustices that underpin growing discontent with urban climate policy. Climate urbanism emerges as a critical approach to analyse climate change responses within urban environments. It asks: how can the identification of complex socio-spatial impacts of urban climate action imaginaries help develop new forms of engagement with urban environments characterised by uncertainty and unknowability? Using examples from a three-year action research project in collaboration with the Homeless People’s Federation of the Philippines and allied partners, I will argue for paying close attention to the strategies that emerge from mundane interactions between urban living and environmental change.