Advancing urban transitions and transformations research

Urban transitions and transformations research fosters a dialogue between sustainability transitions theory an inter- and transdisciplinary research on urban change. As a field, urban transitions and transformations research encompasses plural analytical and conceptual perspectives. In doing so, this field opens up sustainability transitions research to new communities of practice in urban environments, including mayors, transnational municipal networks, and international organizations

Towards a postcolonial perspective on climate urbanism

The growing interest in urban areas as sites for climate action has led to new ways of conceiving and planning the urban. As climate actions reshape existing understandings of what cities are or ought to be, they constitute new modalities of what recent scholarship has referred to as ‘climate urbanism’. This research has framed climate urbanism as a climate‐inflected iteration of neoliberal urban development, geared towards the mobilization of ‘green’ private capital for large‐scale infrastructural projects, focused on carbon metrics, and conducive to population displacement through eco‐gentrification. In this intervention, we commend these efforts to deliver a critical perspective on how climate change gives rise to forms of urbanism that reproduce urban injustices without addressing the root causes of the climate crisis. However, we warn against two biases in recent scholarship, namely an emphasis on technological solutions and an overreliance on familiar contexts of climate action. The literature on climate urbanism does not yet reflect the diversity of urban responses emerging under the broad umbrella of urban climate action. Adopting a post‐colonial perspective on climate urbanism, we call for a greater engagement with the heterogeneous character of climate‐changed urban futures

Environmentalities of urban climate governance in Maputo, Mozambique

Interest in the role that cities can play in climate change as sites of transformation has increased but research has been limited in its practical applications and there has been limited consideration of how policies and technologies play out. These challenges necessitate a re-thinking of existing notions of urban governance in order to account for the practices that emerge from governments and a plethora of other actors in the context of uncertainty. We understand these practices to constitute adaptive governance, underpinned by social learning guiding the actions of the multiplicity of actors. The aim here is to unpack how social learning for adaptive governance requires attention to competing understandings of risk and identity, and the multiplicity of mechanisms in which change occurs or is blocked in urban climate governance. We adopt a novel lens of ‘environmentalities’ which allows us to assess the historical and institutional context and power relations in the informal settlements of Maputo, Mozambique. Our findings highlight how environmental identities around urban adaptation to climate change are constituted in the social and physical divisions between the formal and informal settlements, whilst existing knowledge models prioritise dominant economic and political interests and lead to the construction of new environmental subjects. While the findings of this study are contextually distinct, the generalizable lessons are that governance of urban adaptation occurs and is solidified within a complex multiplicity of socio-ecological relations

The bomb in my backyard, the serpent in my house: environmental justice, risk, and the colonisation of attachment

Theorists have argued that environmental justice requires more than just the fair distribution of environmental benefits and harms. It also requires participation in environmental decisions of those affected by them, and equal recognition of their cultural identities, dimensions most clearly articulated in relation to indigenous struggles, where past devaluation of place-based cultural identities is seen as a source of injustice. I argue for an alternative concept of environmental justice that draws on accounts of how attachment (and place attachment specifically) is constitutive for both self-efficacy and collective agency in the face of an intrinsically uncertain future. Drawing on the work of Peter Marris and using a case study of UK gas pipeline infrastructure, I show how disruption to attachments also disrupts lived strategies for dealing with an uncertain future. The source of injustice involved in such disruption should be viewed as the ‘colonisation of attachment’