urban development research paper

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• Published: 12 February 2021

Perspectives on urban transformation research: transformations in , of , and by cities

• Katharina Hölscher   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4504-3368 1 &
• Niki Frantzeskaki 2  

Urban Transformations volume  3 , Article number:  2 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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The narrative of ‘urban transformations’ epitomises the hope that cities provide rich opportunities for contributing to local and global sustainability and resilience. Urban transformation research is developing a rich yet consistent research agenda, offering opportunities for integrating multiple perspectives and disciplines concerned with radical change towards desirable urban systems. We outline three perspectives on urban transformations in , of and by cities as a structuring approach for integrating knowledge about urban transformations. We illustrate how each perspective helps detangle different questions about urban transformations while also raising awareness about their limitations. Each perspective brings distinct insights about urban transformations to ultimately support research and practice on transformations for sustainability and resilience. Future research should endeavour to bridge across the three perspectives to address their respective limitations.

Science highlights

We outline three perspectives on urban transformations for explaining, structuring and integrating the emerging urban transformations research field.

Transformation in cities focuses on unravelling the diverse factors, processes and dynamics driving place-based transformations in cities. This perspective represents research that aims to examine and explain why transformations occur and are supported in some places and not others.

Transformation of cities examines the outcomes of transformative changes in urban (sub-)systems. It serves to understand and evaluate the emergence of new urban functions, new interactions and their implications for sustainability and resilience.

Transformation by cities looks at the changes taking place on global and regional levels as a result of urbanisation and urban development approaches. The perspective emphasises the agency of cities on a global scale and how transformation concepts travel between places.

Future research should aim to bridge across the perspectives to address their respective limitations, for example by bringing in place-based knowledge (‘in’) into global discussions (‘by’) to facilitate cross-city learning.

Policy and practice recommendations

Experimental, collaborative and place-based governance approaches facilitate the integration of local knowledge, the development of inspiring narratives that boost sense of place and empower local communities to boost transformations in cities.

To assess and coordinate urban transformations, transformations, policy and practice actors need to employ systemic concepts and visions that advance solutions with multiple benefits for synergies and  minimal trade-offs.

Multi-level partnerships and (transnational) networks for policy knowledge exchange between cities help mobilising the potential of cities as agents of change for sustainability at a global scale.

Introduction

The notion of ‘urban transformation’ has been gaining ground in science and policy debates. Urban transformations to sustainability and resilience are enshrined in the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN 2016 ) and the New Urban Agenda (UN-Habitat 2016a ). A rich research field around questions of urban transformations has started to emerge, combining multiple scientific disciplines, ontologies and methods (Elmqvist et al. 2018 , 2019 ; Wolfram et al. 2017 ; Vojnovic 2014 ). Key to these debates is the aim to put cities on a central stage for accelerating change towards local and global sustainability and resilience.

Urban transformation narratives have been driven by the recognition of the need and opportunity for radical change towards sustainable and resilient cities. Cities constantly experience changes, but contemporary urban change processes are unparalleled. Cities grapple with a variety of interrelated challenges, including pollution, poverty and inequality, ageing infrastructure and climate change (Haase et al. 2018 ; UN-Habitat 2016b ; Seto et al. 2017 ). Urbanisation in its current form causes significant changes in land use, energy demand, biodiversity and lifestyles and raises questions about the contribution of cities to global environmental change (Haase et al. 2018 ; Alberti et al. 2018 ; Elmqvist et al. 2013 ; Seto et al. 2017 ). At the same time, cities concentrate the conditions and resources for realising the fundamental changes in energy, transportation, water use, land use, housing, consumption and lifestyles that are needed to ensure liveability, wellbeing and sustainability of our (urban) future (Romero-Lankao et al. 2018 ; Koch et al. 2016 ; Elmqvist et al. 2018 ). The potential and momentum in cities is visible in for example the ‘climate emergency’ declarations of local governments that call for accelerated climate action in view of international stalemate.

The notion of urban transformation guides and formulates a better understanding of urban change. On the one hand, ‘transformation’ serves as an analytical lens to describe and understand the continuous, complex and contested processes and dynamics manifesting in cities, as well as how these dynamics alter urban functions, local needs and interactions between cities and their surroundings (McCormick et al. 2013 ; Iwaniec et al. 2019 ). On the other hand, the transformation perspective provides a normative orientation that emphasises the need for radical and systemic change in order to overcome persistent social, environmental and economic problems and to purposefully move towards sustainable and resilient cities in the long-term (Hölscher et al. 2019 ; Kabisch et al. 2018 ). Accordingly, sustainability and resilience are complementary concepts to asses and orient urban transformation processes (Elmqvist et al. 2019 ; Pickett et al. 2014 ; Simon et al. 2018 ).

In this paper, we distinguish three perspectives on urban transformations to structure and guide research and practice on urban transformations. Urban transformation research is an emergent, loosely connected interdisciplinary field combining urban studies and complex system studies. Various research fields and disciplines converge in urban transformation research; the multitude of disciplines has been systematically reviewed in Wolfram et al. ( 2017 ) and Wolfram and Frantzeskaki ( 2016 ). This diversity engenders multiple entry points and provides complementary concepts, theories and insights. However, the diversity causes ambiguities in ontologies, use of concepts and fragmented knowledge about how urban transformations unfold and can be supported.

Urban transformation research would benefit from “gradual interconnection, and the articulation of a certain range of research perspectives” (Wolfram and Frantzeskaki 2016 : 2). To facilitate this, we distinguish and describe three perspectives on urban transformations that provide areas of convergence across diverse research approaches. Each perspective provides distinct starting points to generate, structure and integrate knowledge along certain questions. Ultimately, the perspectives outline an agenda for advancing theory and practice on urban transformations for sustainability and resilience: they generate implications for urban policy and practice and a way forward to bridge across the perspectives to address the respective limitations.

Perspectives on transformations in, of and by cities

We distinguish between perspectives on urban transformations in , of and by cities. The perspectives provide entry points for formulating and structuring research questions on urban transformations, integrating research approaches and knowledge, and deriving implications for practice.

The three perspectives start from similar assumptions about cities and urban transformations. They focus on urban transformations as complex processes of radical, systemic change across multiple dimensions (e.g. social, institutional, cultural, political, economic, technological, ecological) (Hölscher et al. 2018 ; Frantzeskaki et al. 2018a ; McCormick et al. 2013 ). Cities are understood as complex, adaptive and open systems (Alberti et al. 2018 ; McPhearson and Wijsman, 2017 ; Ernstson et al., 2010 ; Collier et al. 2013 ). This implies that urban transformations are not spatially limited, and driven by and driving cross-scale and cross-sectoral dynamics: cities are “local nodes within multiple overlapping social, economic, ecological, political and physical networks, continuously shaping and shaped by flows of people, matter and information across scales” (Wolfram and Frantzeskaki 2016 : 143; see also Hansen and Coenen 2015 ; Chelleri et al. 2015 ). To describe, explain and evaluate urban transformations, cities are increasingly approached as social-ecological-technical systems (SETS), including (1) socio-economic, political and institutional dimensions (social); (2) natural resource flows and physical phenomena (ecological); (3) as well as the manmade surroundings (technological) (McPhearson 2020 ; Alberti et al. 2018 ; Bai et al. 2017 ). Actors have a central position within urban systems, influencing how cities are organised and resources are produced and consumed. Given the open character of urban systems, actors are diverse and include household members, local governments, and entrepreneurs also regional and national governments, international bodies and multinational companies, amongst others (Glaas et al. 2019 ; Webb et al. 2018 ).

Urban transformations can be desirable or undesirable (Elmqvist et al. 2019 ; Hölscher 2019 ). A shared aim across urban transformation research perspectives and approaches is to generate actionable knowledge to intervene in urban transformation processes and support radical change towards sustainable and resilient urban systems (cf. Wittmayer and Hölscher 2017 ).

Despite these shared starting points and aims, the perspectives ask distinct questions about transformations vis-à-vis urban systems. They look at systemic change dynamics taking place in cities (“in”), the outcomes of systemic change of cities (“of”), or systemic change on global and regional levels driven by cities (“by”). These entry points and corresponding questions manifest in differences along key descriptors of urban transformations (cf. Hölscher et al. 2018 ). The differences are not contradictory: they generate complementary insights for understanding and supporting urban transformations given the different level of aggregation, analysis and understanding of system dynamics and points of intervention (Table 1 ). 

The main aim of the perspectives is to facilitate structuring of urban transformation research along shared themes and questions. Specifically, in articulating these, we show the actionable knowledge generated through each perspective to support urban transformations for sustainability and resilience. We also show that the perspectives offer bridges across knowledge to strengthen research and practice.

Transformation in cities: cities as places of transformations

Transformation in cities focuses on unravelling the diverse, local, regional and global factors, processes and interactions that converge in cities as places of transformations, thus driving or constraining place-based transformations.

The perspective zooms in on cities as spaces and places. Cities are geolocated in an objective, abstracted point, i.e. space, which is for example demarcated by geographical and administrative boundaries. Cities as places are defined by the physical (i.e. urban form) and philosophical (i.e. imagination and representation) relationships between people and place (Roche, 2016 ; Knox 2005 ). Thus, cities as places are both “a centre of meaning and the external context of people’s actions” (Knox 2005 : 2). As spaces and places of transformations, cities harbour specific potentials, driving forces and barriers (Hansen and Coenen 2015 ).

Place-based transformations are the result of the social construction by people responding to the opportunities and constraints of their particular locality (Fratini and Jensen 2017 ; Späth and Rohracher 2014 ). Endogenous conditions and developments include geographic location, climate, local economic structure, population dynamics and the built environment. For example, urban segregation and inequality result from and are reinforced by interactions between residential choices, personal preferences, job markets, land and real estate markets and public policies (Alberti et al. 2018 ). The construction of place-based transformations does not take place independently of societal norms and representations of the world. Economic and cultural globalisation and the resulting ‘network society’ becomes manifest in cities and shape place-based transformation dynamics (Roche, 2016 ). Scholars seeking to understand the ‘geography in transitions’ emphasise that cities are positioned within cross-scale spatial and institutional contexts that influence local change dynamics (Hansen and Coenen 2015 ; Truffer et al. 2015 ; Coenen et al. 2012 ; Hodson et al. 2017 ; McLean et al. 2016 ). Along similar lines, Loorbach et al. ( 2020 ) show the translocal character of social innovations that are locally rooted but globally connected.

This perspective positions transformative agency as deeply embedded in socio-spatial contexts. A central research focus is on urban niches that experiment with and scale new solutions (McLean et al. 2016 ; Ehnert et al. 2018 ), governance arrangements (Wolfram 2019 ; Hölscher et al. 2019a ) and ways of relating and knowing (Frantzeskaki and Rok 2018 ). Urban experimentation or real-world laboratories have become process tools to facilitate co-creative and innovative solution finding processes that empower actors to deal with urban problems, for example related to mobility, regeneration, community resilience or green job creation (Bulkeley et al. 2019 ; von Wirth et al. 2019 ; Hölscher et al. 2019c ). Such approaches represent situated manners of  place-making to co-develop inspiring ‘narratives of place’, empower local communities and foster urban transformative capacities (Wolfram 2019 ; Jensen et al. 2016 ; Ziervogel, 2019 ; Castán Broto et al. 2019 ). The idea of place-specificity recognises the particular role of ‘sense of place’ and ‘place attachment’, which can be an outcome of experimentation and in turn drive transformative change (Frantzeskaki et al., 2016 ; di Masso et al. 2019 ; Brink and Wamsler 2019 ). Ryan ( 2013 ) describes how multiple small ‘eco-acupuncture’ interventions can shift the community’s ideas of what is permissible, desirable and possible.

A key value of this perspective lies on its embedded research inquiry into the ‘black box’ of a city, including social, economic and ecological situated and contextual knowledge. A main implication for urban policy and planning practice is to facilitate place-based innovation by going beyond sectoral infrastructuring and top-down masterplanning towards situated and cross-sectoral place-making. Experimental and co-creative governance approaches help recognise and mobilise place-specific capacities. The need for place-based innovation further calls for higher-level policies to be centred on the local dimension. For example, the current European Union Cohesion Policy puts a place-based approach into practice that recognises place variety (Solly 2016 ) and further extends it to a governance capacity building programme that engages with cities on the ground through the URBACT program ( www.urbact.eu ).

A limitation of this perspective is that knowledge about and actions instigating transformations in a specific city context are very entrenched in context dynamics. This can  limit transferability or scaling other than ‘scaling deep’ pathway (Moore et al.  2015 ; Lam et al. 2020 ) if not connected with mechanisms for global and transnational learning and knowledge transfer (Section 2.3). In (Moore et al. 2015 ; Lam et al. 2020 ) addition, neighbourhood-level interventions need to be connected to knowledge about city-level outcomes. This calls for critical evaluations of systemic outcomes in urban systems (Section 2.2).

Transformation of cities: outcomes of transformation dynamics in urban systems

Transformation of cities examines and evaluates the outcomes of transformation dynamics in urban (sub-)systems in terms of new urban functions, local needs and interactions and implications for sustainability and resilience.

This perspective focuses on urban (sub-)systems defined by specific functions (e.g. economy, energy, transport, food, healthcare, housing). Compared to the other perspectives, it most explicitly applies socio-technical and social-ecological, and increasingly SETS, frameworks to describe urban (sub-)systems. Urban transformations are the outcome of radical changes of dominant structures (e.g. infrastructures, regulations), cultures (e.g. values) and practices (e.g. mobility behaviours) of such urban (sub-)systems. As a result of these changes, what kind of and how system functions are delivered is fundamentally altered (Ernst et al. 2016 ).

The main aim of this perspective is to explain and evaluate how transformation dynamics affect urban systems’ functions. Frameworks and models to investigate how transformation dynamics influence urban (sub-)systems pay attention to the complex processes and feedback loops within, across and beyond urban systems and the accumulated effects on the urban system level. For example, studying social-ecological-technical infrastructure systems in cities advances understanding of urban structure-function relationships between green space availability, wellbeing, biodiversity and climate adaptation (McPhearson 2020 ). Similarly, urban metabolism analysis and ecosystem studies seek to understand energy and material flows (Bai 2016 ; Dalla Fontana and Boas 2019 ). An emerging perspective on cities as ‘multi-regime’ configurations investigates dynamics across different functional systems (e.g. energy, water, mobility, food) (Grin et al. 2017 ; Irvine and Bai 2019 ). This provides opportunities to unveil interactions across multiple urban systems and scales. For instance, rapid changes in electricity systems can have knock-on effects for urban mobility or heat systems (Chen and Chen 2016 ; Chelleri et al. 2015 ). The relational geography perspective puts forth a differentiated view of urban systems: it zooms in on different boroughs, districts or neighbourhoods and raises questions such as how innovation and change in one location affects neighbouring locations (Wachsmuth et al. 2016 ).

This perspective most explicitly addresses prescriptive, ‘goal’-driven and recently mission-driven orientations for reinventing cities to be more sustainable, resilient, inclusive, attractive, prosperous, safe and environmentally healthy (Elmqvist et al. 2018 ; Kabisch et al. 2018 ; Rudd et al. 2018 ). Researchers and urban practitioners and planners employ concepts like ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’ as frames to evaluate the state of urban systems and to inform urban planning and regeneration programmes (Elmqvist et al. 2019 ). The systemic focus and application of such concepts also helps to identify synergies and trade-offs across urban systems and goals. For example, the sustainability paradigm of maximising efficiency in mobility or energy systems might result in vulnerability to natural disasters when systems lack parallel or redundant back-up systems (ibid.). Similarly, scholars point to the risks of green gentrification: while urban greening interventions have multiple benefits for the environment and climate adaptation, if not planned and governed inclusively, they can create unintended dynamics of exclusion, polarisation and segregation (Anguelovski et al. 2019 ; Haase et al. 2017 ).

This perspective takes a meta-level view on the agency and governance in cities, highlighting strategic partnerships and interventions based on desired system-level outcomes. From this perspective, cities may act as coherent strategic entities based on systemic understandings of city-specific and long-term effects to pursue managed transitions of their large-scale (sub-)systems (Jensen et al. 2016 ; Hodson et al., 2017 ). Urban transformation governance needs to facilitate alignment, foresight and reflexive learning to recognise, anticipate and shape transformation dynamics and leverage points (Hölscher et al. 2019b ). Key starting points are shared definitions of what ‘desirability’ means in specific contexts. Orchestration can align priorities and connect emerging alternatives, ideas, people and solutions (ibid.; Hodson et al., 2017 ). Shared and long-term visions re-orient short-term decisions and interventions that create synergies across multiple priorities. For example, Galvin and Maassen ( 2020 ) analyse Medellín’s (Columbia) mobility transformation that also contributed to inclusiveness and public safety. Transition management is a practice-oriented framework to co-develop shared visions, pathways and experiments in an ongoing learning-by-doing and doing-by-learning way (Frantzeskaki et al. 2018b ; Loorbach et al. 2015 ).

In summary, this perspective provides a view on interpreting transformation dynamics and developing orientations and practical guidance for intervention. It becomes visible in urban planning and policy practice through the development of systemic urban concepts as ‘anchor points’ or attractors for urban transformations such as ‘sharing cities’, ‘circular cities’, or ‘renaturing cities’. Cities like Rotterdam in the Netherlands and New York City in the USA are using such concepts to formulate long-term climate, sustainability and resilience agendas and establish cross-cutting city-level partnerships for their implementation (Hölscher et al. 2019a ). A main implication of this perspective is about the need to institutionalise and prioritise such long-term agendas into policy and planning across sectors and scales (ibid.).

A limitation of this perspective is that it overlooks place-specific implications and can nuance or be agnostic to politics and contestations at local sub-system level. Strategically linking place-based initiatives (Section 2.1) with systemic urban concepts and visions provides a powerful tool to align the multitude of activities taking place in cities and to coordinate urban transformations on (sub-)system scale. Additionally, this perspective requires explicit attention to the relationships between urban systems and their hinterlands or other distant territories, which affect and are affected by urban system’s functioning (Section 2.3).

Transformation by cities: cities as agents of change at global scale

The third perspective on transformation by cities draws attention to the changes taking place on global and regional levels as a result of urbanisation and urban development.

The main emphasis is here placed on cities as “agents of change at global scale” (Acuto 2016 ). As open systems, cities are not just influenced by developments outside their spatial boundaries (see Section 2.1). Urban transformations also have implications on global resources, environmental conditions, commodities and governance.

On the one hand, cities – including their social-ecological-technological configurations and the diversity of actors influencing them – can be viewed as culprits driving global high emissions, resource depletion and unsustainability. This raises critical questions about the relationship between current and unprecedented urbanisation and global sustainability (Seto et al. 2017 ; Haase et al. 2018 ). For example, the expansion of cities will triple land cover by 2030, compared to 2000, with severe implications on biodiversity (Alberti et al. 2018 ; Elmqvist et al. 2013 ). Different frameworks and concepts are employed to describe and assess the linkages between cities and their hinterland and other distant territories, including ‘urban land teleconnections’ (Seto et al. 2012 ), ‘regenerative cities’ (Girardet 2016 ) and ‘urban ecological footprint’ (Folke et al. 1997 ; Hoornweg et al. 2016 ; Rees and Wackernagel 2008 ).

On the other hand, cities have become key loci for trialling sustainable approaches and solutions that inform the global sustainability agenda (UN-Habitat 2016b ; Seto et al. 2017 ; Bai et al. 2018 ). Cities – especially local governments – play key roles in shaping global sustainability programmes and discourses and in developing and sharing knowledge and best practices. Local governments have also become celebrated for taking action when the national government is not (van der Heijden 2018 ; Acuto 2016 ). Governance strategies such as experimentation, best practices or imaginaries have been taken up globally (Haarstad 2016 ; McCann 2011 ; van der Heijden 2016 ). This raises questions about how the experiences and best practices showcased in cities become knowledge to be diffused and shared, as well as how transformations travel between places and across scales (Lam et al. 2020 ).

This perspective supports a polycentric and multi-level approach to global environmental governance. Global environmental governance is becoming increasingly decentralised and polycentric, which is visible for example in climate governance (Ostrom 2014 ; Jordan et al. 2018 ; Hölscher and Frantzeskaki 2020 ) and the urban SDG (UN 2016 ). The recent ‘city charters’ of global organisations such as the IPCC Cities and Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity and Cities and Future Earth Urban Knowledge Network, showcase the recognition of ‘cities’ as key players on a global level. While urban sustainability governance has often proliferated without leadership at national levels, the nestedness of local governance in legal and institutional frameworks at regional, national and international levels requires alignment of priorities and legislation across governance levels (Hughes et al. 2017 ; Keskitalo et al. 2016 ).

In summary, this perspective creates knowledge about the role of cities in contributing to global change and what it means for governance, policy and planning at global, national, metropolitan and regional levels. It provides and requires big data from cities and their resource footprints, flows and dynamics so as to draw on patterns and pathways for change that can inform and reinforce global agendas for action. A key mechanism for urban practitioners is to strengthen policy knowledge exchange across frontrunning cities (Hölscher et al. 2019a ). Transnational city networks such as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), C40 and 100 Resilient Cities facilitate knowledge exchange and inter-city learning, foster the creation of collective goals, lobby for international attention, and enable the transplantation of innovative, sustainable and resilient policy and planning approaches (Acuto et al. 2017 ; Lee 2018 ; Mejía-Dugand et al. 2016 ; Frantzeskaki et al. 2019 ; Davidson et al. 2019 ).

A danger of this perspective is that this global discourse is mainly focused on ‘global cities’. Medium-sized and middle-income cities are leaders in terms of actual sustainability performance and need to be actively acknowledged and considered (Vojnovic 2014 ). Florida ( 2017 ) criticises how “winner-take-all cities” reinforce inequality, while many cities stagnate and middle-class neighbourhoods disappear. This requires more research into how resources and opportunities are distributed and made accessible across different cities, for example ‘global’ cities, metropolitan cities and developing countries’ cities (Coenen et al. 2012 ; Gavin et al. 2013 ). Additionally, cities are not necessarily a united front: priorities and interpretations differ across cities (Growe and Freytag 2019 ). To address these issues, this perspective would benefit from a more critical and contextual research approach on place-based transformations (Section 2.1), questioning why transformations occur and are supported in some places and not others. Comparative analyses into the factors and dynamics influencing place-based transformations can facilitate transnational knowledge transfer and upscaling of place-based initiatives.

Conclusions

We offer three perspectives on urban transformations research as a means to cherish and celebrate, but also structure the diversity of the growing urban transformations research field. Our paper is a first attempt to distinguish these perspectives, by discussing key questions, entry points, practical implications and limitations. We show that the perspectives help converge research approaches and clarify how different perspectives provide evidence for urban policy and planning.

The perspectives are not merely conceptual devices: they show up in cities’ agendas, programmes and approaches and give guidance to practitioners. The ‘transformation in cities’ perspective asks practitioners to experiment with collaborative place-making approaches like urban living labs to integrate local knowledge and strengthen a sense of place and empowerment. The ‘transformation of cities’ perspective appears as underlying integrative systems’ approach for core urban strategies such as climate change and biodiversity strategies. The ‘transformation by cities’ perspective highlights the need to invest in policy knowledge exchange between cities, for example through transnational city networks.

The three perspectives on urban transformation do not exist in isolation from one another. We have shown how the perspectives can feed into and complement each other to address respective research gaps and practical challenges. The main future research direction we put forth is to bridge across the perspectives to address their respective limitations and generate comprehensive actionable knowledge. This means to formulate integrative research questions bridging across perspectives: How do place-making initiatives in a specific neighbourhood affect urban systems’ functioning? How can place-based transformation knowledge be transferred to other city contexts? How can place-based experiments and transformation initiatives or projects inform policy at city and city-network level? What are the conditions for downscaling strategic initiatives from global level – for example, post-Aichi biodiversity targets – considering capacities of urban sub-systems?

Availability of data and materials

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

Abbreviations

US Department of Housing and Urban Development

International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives

International Panel on Climate Change

Sustainable Development Goal

Social-ecological-technological system

United NationsMeerow, S

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Integration of urban science and urban climate adaptation research: opportunities to advance climate action

• José Lobo   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0814-7168 1 ,
• Rimjhim M. Aggarwal   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3579-5363 1 ,
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There is a growing recognition that responding to climate change necessitates urban adaptation. We sketch a transdisciplinary research effort, arguing that actionable research on urban adaptation needs to recognize the nature of cities as social networks embedded in physical space. Given the pace, scale and socioeconomic outcomes of urbanization in the Global South, the specificities and history of its cities must be central to the study of how well-known agglomeration effects can facilitate adaptation. The proposed effort calls for the co-creation of knowledge involving scientists and stakeholders, especially those historically excluded from the design and implementation of urban development policies.

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Urban change as an untapped opportunity for climate adaptation

Accelerating climate research and action in cities through advanced science-policy-practice partnerships

Global multi-model projections of local urban climates

Introduction.

Urban areas and urbanized regions present concentrations of populations vulnerable to the consequences of climate change but also have significant potential to reduce societal vulnerability through an enhanced adaptive capacity to mitigate its impacts 1 . The principal challenge is how to minimize growing vulnerabilities while enabling far-reaching and equitable climate action for sustained and sustainable development. Urban-focused climate adaptation research is central to this discussion. Urbanization tends to refer to the population shift from rural to urban areas, a perspective that presupposes a clear distinction between urban and rural. Here we use the term urbanization to refer to the agglomeration of population settlements of diverse types, scale and density. What is seen as essential in the urbanization process is the concentration of populations thereby increasing proximity and closeness in physical space which in turn facilitates interactions in social space.

According to the IPCC 2 , urbanization offers a global and time-limited opportunity to work towards widespread and transformational adaptation and climate-resilient development. Local governments have taken the lead—ahead of national governments—in developing comprehensive adaptation plans 3 . These plans are increasingly aligned with international agreements, such as the Sendai Protocol, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Change Agreement, and the New Urban Agenda. Recent research and data analyses have indeed emphasized the disproportionate importance of cities and urbanization in achieving the goals set by these international agreements 4 . Nevertheless, only a few of these plans have been fully implemented, and the urban share of global GHG emissions continues to increase 5 . Furthermore, it has become increasingly clear that many proposed climate adaptation plans can exacerbate urban poverty, promote gentrification, and aggravate long-standing environmental injustices 6 . Therefore, the scientific and practice communities propose ongoing dialogues to link climate action and development in a coherent set of transitions framed by climate-resilient, environmentally sustainable and equitable socioeconomic development action plans 7 .

Climate adaptation requires social interventions and resource investments which are especially challenging against a backdrop of inflation, rising costs of living, energy poverty and economic insecurity affecting not only low-income countries. Urgent problems such as unemployment and underemployment, entrenched poverty, lack of affordable housing, and inadequate access to public services demand policy attention. While these challenges are exacerbated by climate vulnerabilities, adaptation as a practice has become increasingly siloed into technocratic and managerial mindsets, characterized by hyperlocal and fragmented approaches, distinct from the broader scope and scale of transformative action that it requires 8 . To inform effective and equitable actions, we argue for the development of a concerted research effort on urban-focused climate adaptation. We recognize that the concept of climate change adaptation, although widely used, is often fraught with ambiguity and hampered by the lack of agreed-upon definition 9 . Here we define urban adaptation to climate change (hereafter ‘urban adaptation’) as the set of actions by which urban societies adjust, change, and transform their energy systems, economies, infrastructures, support systems, interactions, and governance mechanisms to mitigate the adverse effects on urban communities of the environmental changes brought about by climate change. Urban adaptation does not imply that all components of urban societies and urban systems need to change at the same time. There are temporal and scale differences in the implementation of adaptation solutions, as well as differences in who takes adaptation efforts and who benefits from them. Furthermore, whether a set of actions is useful can change as new information and conditions emerge, especially in a non-stationary climate and technological future. Adaptation is therefore also about facilitating processes that enable actions or responses.

Implementable research on urban adaptation must integrate the social, ecological, and technological interactions which, across time and space, constitute urban systems. We refer to urban systems, rather than cities, to underscore the complex reality that what constitutes the urban defies political and administrative boundaries, crosses spatial scales, and is best understood in terms of dynamic and networked relations. Relevant research questions on urban adaptation have been posed already 10 but here we put forth a revised set of questions, constituting a research agenda, motivated by the multifaceted nature of cities and urban systems. Some examples of these questions, emerging at the junctures between different disciplinary perspectives, are proposed in Table 1 . The proposed research agenda is grounded on eight tenets. (1) Multiple and networked urban actors (individual and collective, formal and informal, public and private) are involved in the socioeconomic development of urban areas. (2) Urban settings concentrate and accelerate interactions and their social, economic and political outcomes in space and time. (3) The historical trajectories of cities result from technological capabilities and socioeconomic processes. (4) Climate risk exposure and adaptive capacity vary with the scale and heterogeneity of urbanization. (5) The vulnerabilities of urban systems should be understood, and adaptive capacities developed, with careful attention to how their history channeled their current conditions. (6) The nexus of climate change, biodiversity, ecosystem services, and urban development must be considered; (7) urban climates are partly socially constructed. (8) Co-creation of knowledge among public and private sectors as well as citizens, specifically the urban poor and residents of informal settlements, must be part of the new research agenda.

To achieve global scope and applicability, research on urban adaptation to climate change must confront the challenges of multi-level, multi-actor and polycentric governance of and in urban systems, acknowledge the Global North’s relatively greater share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and address the prevalence of urban informality in the Global South and its growing presence in the Global North. Such an effort must also address the inherent inequalities embedded in knowledge production, which favor perspectives from the former colonizing powers and tend to reproduce the socioeconomic systems that produce climate change and drive vulnerabilities to its impacts. Below, we address how novel research in urban adaptation can be developed through transdisciplinary collaborative efforts.

Urban adaptation research: imperatives and challenges

Cities occupy less than 2% of the land surface but house 65% of the world’s population, with a projected increase of 2.5 billion urban dwellers by 2050 11 . The growth (or decline) of cities unquestionably reshapes overall land use, degrades ecosystems and natural landscapes, and perpetuates the development of underdevelopment/disparities 12 , 13 . Cities in the Global North―typically growing more slowly, with some even experiencing shrinking populations―approach climate change as a challenge to enhance their resilience and often an opportunity to close equity gaps 14 . By contrast, fast-growing cities, particularly in the Global South, see investments in urban adaptation (e.g., emissions reduction) competing with their urgent need to provide public goods and basic infrastructure and services 15 . The risks posed by extreme weather events and changes in climate patterns are leading policymakers and practitioners worldwide to take steps to confront immediate and expected adverse consequences 16 . Many cities (such as those in the C40 compact and the 100 Resilient Cities) are responding to climate change by creating new kinds of policy approaches in the form of comprehensive climate and sustainability plans addressing both near and long-term impacts 3 .

Cities and their inhabitants have always had to contend with environmental variability 17 . What has changed recently is the pace and increasing severity and variability of extreme weather events which are projected to affect many more urban areas, and thus much larger populations into the foreseeable future. Variability beyond historical climatic envelopes calls for adaptative capacities that go beyond risk management and mitigation. Landscape learning―how humans learn about the environments they inhabit and modify their behavior accordingly―is an important component of climate adaptation 18 . This learning is manifested in ‘urban landscapes’ and is not easy to transform or replace, as attested by the difficulties in decarbonizing the supply of electricity to cities in the US, Germany, India, or China 19 . Conventional adaptation strategies, via hardened infrastructure or the expansion of air conditioning use, are also subject to catastrophic failures, long-term deterioration, and positive feedback that amplify climate change harms. There are natural limits to adaptation as well, such as more slow-changing risks to cities through coastal inundation and sea-level rise 2 .

The ongoing implementation of climate adaptation measures in cities relies on the importance of systemic knowledge that can anticipate new scenarios, harness the positive effects of urbanization, and inform the management of adverse distributional effects and unintended (negative) consequences 20 . Urban adaptations have consequences at many scales from local communities’ health to global geopolitics, biodiversity, and trade 21 . As adaptation practice advances, stakeholders are recognizing the complexity of the decisions involved, as well as the need to remain agile and adaptive to respond to multiple, intersecting, and dynamically cascading risks 22 . Moreover, acts of commission and omission can exacerbate urban injustices 23 ; and urban adaptation governance must correct long-standing legacies of resource and risk distribution embedded in the current urban physical and social infrastructure 24 .

From urban science to research on urban adaptation

Urban adaptation research must contend not only with the contemporary complexities of modern urban forms but also with the history through which they have developed. To advance an impactful research effort on urban adaptation, we need to build upon our current understanding of cities and urban development processes. The accumulation of discipline-specific insights has given rise to an appreciation of the city as a synthetic unit of analysis 25 . Recent advances in digitalization and computation have led to new measurements of a diverse set of properties and behaviors in cities spanning a wide latitude of cultures, levels of development, and geographies. The comparative analysis of this growing body of evidence has reinvigorated the study of cities with a focus on understanding common generative processes while recognizing the importance of local contexts and histories.

The emergent urban science 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 is inter- and transdisciplinary, convergent, and supports an expanded set of quantitative models providing testable expectations about the fundamental aspects of cities and urban activities. Notwithstanding cultural, technological, and political differences across time and space, cities and urban systems share fundamental generative processes, stemming from the concentration, mixing and interaction of populations, and exhibit empirical regularities linking many of their salient characteristics such as population size, areal extent, density, and infrastructure 30 , 31 . Yet, urban science is not all-encompassing and must be aligned with complementary analysis of urban processes that build on research that emerges from the urban experience with a focus on the co-production of knowledge with study subjects. The co-production approach offers local, fact-based sense-making of lived urban experiences and opportunities for urban development 32 , 33 . This grounded understanding of cities provides a foundation for novel research in urban adaptation.

Systematic research and practice on urban adaptation worldwide have grown in importance, as evidenced by the attention the IPCC has paid to the role of cities in overall climate change adaptation efforts 34 , 35 . The challenge is to create a synthetic analytical framework, agreed-upon metrics, shared goals and comparable indicators. Urban space is constituted through frequent and intense social interactions among a diversity of individuals, activities and organizations enabled and supported by physical infrastructure and the distribution of services 36 , 37 , 38 . In high-income nations, urban adaptations tend to focus on the physical aspects of the city given the urgency of protecting urban infrastructure. Examples include discussions on how infrastructure and services (e.g., utilities) as engineered systems can withstand the effects of frequent and intense extreme weather events brought about by climate change 39 , 40 , 41 . Contrasting these concerns are sustainability issues related to growing socioeconomic disparities in cities, especially in the fast-growing cities of the Global South 42 . Equity and development challenges place the focus of urban climate adaptation on the social, economic, and political aspects of cities. Impactful research on urban adaptation demands that we understand the dynamic interplay between the built environment and underlying support systems (e.g., utilities) that are designed to serve human and ecological well-being across spatial scales.

Figure 1 illustrates the multifaceted nature of urban adaptation to climate change. Cities are complex social, ecological, and infrastructural systems. The intersections of urban climate, technology, and governance lead to the large number of interacting components that define the scope and emerging challenges of a convergent global research agenda on urban adaptation. The figure places the research agenda in a historical perspective to bridge the lesson learned from past urbanization to the development of future cities.

The inner circle identifies the main factors constraining urban adaptation. The outer circle refers to the processes facilitating adaptation.

Cities as complex social-infrastructural-ecological networks

As systems of intertwined social, ecological, and technological interactions―connecting individuals, communities, organizations, institutions, activities, technologies, infrastructure and ecosystems―cities comprise networks that exhibit unique properties 43 , 44 . These networks constitute the unit of analysis for the science of urban adaptation to climate change. The social networks forged by urban dwellers provide channels and relationships through which information is generated and shared 45 . This information regulates the functioning of cities themselves but also orchestrates resource and energy flows worldwide. These information networks are complex networks, i.e., the patterns of connection are neither purely regular nor purely random 46 . Cities facilitate greater interconnectivity between different people and organizations, which in turn is the result of the reduction of physical distance entailed by greater population densities and of supporting services, infrastructure, and institutions 13 . Urbanization also entails complex changes in governance structures and the proliferation of multiple actors able to act in urban environments. The transformation of spatial relations through urbanization and the changing relations between the city, its hinterland and the broader spaces that the city depends upon calls for sophisticated understandings of ways in which the city is governed whether this is because of the need to understand how different levels of government intervene in the city, or the need to understand how multiple actors within and beyond the state (including communities, business, and individuals) are able to deliver purposeful action to address climate change in the city.

The agglomeration of individuals and activities in urban areas has costs and benefits that accrue to both people and the environment. Economically, denser socioeconomic networks promote mechanisms that support economic growth such as specialization, the division of labor, diversity of skills, and the creation and sharing of knowledge 47 . Civic institutions and public services, as well as community organizations and collective action, may enable a fairer (re)distribution of resources and equity. Social conflicts affect collective life in cities, shaping the ability of human societies to adapt, sometimes opening alternative courses of action. For example, higher density is generally considered to facilitate reductions in CO2 emissions. But density also contributes to urban inequality and hence vulnerability to climate change impacts 48 . Costs associated with urban density include congestion, housing, pollution, health, reduced access to greenspaces and personal insecurity. The impact of heatwaves during 2022 in Asia and Europe has further brought into question densification strategies in the context of adaptation. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic reminded us of the special vulnerability of cities to emerging zoonotic outbreaks 49 , a feature of cities throughout history 50 . It should also be noted that cities have historically shown great resilience in recovering from the devastating effects of plagues 51 . The recent pandemic highlights the paramount importance of cities’ governance capacities to respond to exogenous shocks 52 . A key question for adaptation research is how urban agglomeration can support inclusive economies and social innovation while expanding processes resilient to the myriad effects of climate change.

Cities are extended complex socio-ecological and technological systems 53 . Urban networks extend far beyond their immediate spatial and social domain 54 , 55 . The structure of these regional and international networks has several general properties, creating a structural hierarchy that channels energy and resource flows from rural areas and smaller places to larger cities, with information (financial, media, technology) flowing primarily in the opposite direction 56 . Practical efforts of climate adaptation often call for the localization of these flows within cities, creating more circular economies and greater predictability and control of key urban inputs, such as food and energy, while reducing external ecological damage and enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem services 57 . Given that cities, as complex systems, are averse to being managed and planned as engineering systems 58 , how can we identify and promote effective urban management and planning in the context of adaptation to the effects of climate change?

The social construction of urban climates

In the Anthropocene, urban climates are partly shaped by human actions and socioeconomic processes. Urban areas are modified for specific land uses and such changes in land-cover patterns in turn affect local and regional scale climates 59 . One such example is the urban heat island effect, which exacerbates socioeconomic disparity given that it disproportionately impacts poor and minority communities 60 . The effects of climate change are themselves modulated by social arrangements: for instance, the ability of urban communities to deal with altered water supplies, due to frequent and more intense droughts, is greatly determined by socioeconomic status 61 .

Trade-offs in urban adaptation are associated with different pathways for managing urban expansion. Climate change science has not yet adequately incorporated insights from urban spatial sciences and place-based studies of human-climate interactions 62 . Consequently, city policymakers and urban planners rarely use climate model data resolved at neighborhood or even city scales. Understanding how land use policy decisions shape urban climate and its impact on social equity is critical for urban communities to adapt to climate change. At the same time, climate change adaptation raises questions of data justice, in terms of both what data is available and who has access to the relevant data.

Increasing recognition of the important role urban scientists play in implementing climate solutions provides an opportunity to redesign climate models and decision-support tools to meet the needs of communities. New research initiatives increase the spatial and temporal resolution of climate model predictions and foster collaboration with vulnerable local communities to make sense of physical indicators through the lens of their living experience and their own adaptation challenges 63 , 64 , 65 . As climate models become more finely resolved and accurate, they can provide information relevant to neighborhood-level adaptation. This includes, for example, the quantification of risk, frequency and magnitude of heat or flooding events, and the expected consequences of adaptive responses (including inaction) in diverse local urban communities.

The growing integration of physical climate predictions with the heterogeneous and dynamic environments of urban agglomerations raises critical questions for urban adaptation research. How does local geophysical information flow through a city’s social network to influence risk perceptions and collective action? What insights on urban adaptation can be gleaned from research on information processing and collective computation and how can these be operationalized? How does the interplay of socioeconomic dynamics and urban form modulate urban microclimates? How does climate change affect the biodiversity-ecosystem services-urban ecology nexus? Answers to these questions must harness the transdisciplinary, networked character of urban adaptation research and practice as an integrated social, environmental, and technological problem. These linkages are only now becoming actionable, bringing into play feedback between climate change, engineering and political decisions in local contexts aimed at specific objectives. Recognizing that humans partly construct urban climates leads to a recognition that cities are embedded in natural systems―nature is not an externality.

Governance and collective action for urban adaptation

Urban adaptation poses new challenges for governance and requires novel coordination arrangements with greater agility and scope to face the great unknowns and uncertainties. It also requires removing the institutional obstacles that have historically undermined the implementation of mitigation measures. Urban areas, including associated governance structures, are part of regional systems comprising interdependent urban and non-urban communities 66 , 67 . The emergence of urban megaregions redefines institutional boundaries and the form of governance. The distinction between urban and rural varies from country to country. In general, cities and their systems, proximal and distant, are interdependent through infrastructure, migration channels, and trade networks 68 . These systems are also connected locally and globally by ecosystem processes as well as natural and built infrastructures, which influence and are influenced in turn by human behavior. Urban adaptation research must therefore grapple with interdependencies among the three major actors (public, private, and citizens) and the challenges of governance and collective action they generate 69 .

While cities are increasingly connected in global networks of finance, knowledge, and institutional arrangements, the strategies and models of urban adaptation planning will necessarily need to recognize the unique socio-cultural histories, political realities, and geographies of individual urban places. Understanding climate policy adoption and the opportunities for multi-level collective action to advance climate justice within a greater diversity of urban socio-political contexts is critical. Governing urban systems and regions for resilience and adaptation involves diverse actors and organizations with overlapping administrative mandates and scopes of influence 70 and actors with differing understandings, worldviews, and narratives of climate change 71 . Urban actors have varying degrees of agency and power and have different and convergent interests and variable temporal visions. Urban climate shocks underscore current limitations in institutional arrangements. Innovations such as city resilience or sustainability programs face challenges and trade-offs in practice, particularly when they take limited stock of existing efforts 72 . Developing a shared vision among the different actors is a critical starting point to create transformative change; this effort requires explicit recognition of roles and responsibilities and acknowledges that conflict is often a signal of deeper rifts in values, knowledge and power 73 .

Current inequalities in resource access, risk exposure, and participation in urban decision-making often lead privileged classes to attempt to insulate themselves from climate risk. While climate-gating 74 may work in the short run, the reality of urban connectivity undermines such protectionism in the long run. Increasingly, citizens are part of constellations of differently managed public and private spaces in cities, such as gated communities, special improvement districts, private developments and industrial or retail spaces. These may be governed based on stakeholder goals (e.g., profit) with different implications for achieving public policy goals 75 . Mitigating or adapting to climate change are rarely among the stated goals. Recognizing diversity as an urban asset, conflict and contestation show where attention is needed to address the roots of injustice based on class and power 76 . Work in urban sociology shows how neighborhood inequalities threaten governance of environmental and social sustainability 77 , 78 .

The challenge and opportunity of informality

Precarious structures of habitation and of employment opportunities, often referred to as ‘informality’, are widespread in rapidly urbanizing areas, particularly in the peri-urban locations of South Asia, Africa and South and Central America. While informality is not exclusively associated with the urban poor, in much of the world urban informality is often associated with a lack of public services, inadequate housing and high-risk exposures to health and environmental hazards. Rather than a given outcome that can be confined to a restricted or bounded area, informality is better understood as a set of overlapping processes that influence people’s urban experience and generate overlapping inequities such as lack of access to electricity, water sanitation, education, and other public goods and services, and that may occur across the city 79 .

We view urban informality as “an organizing logic, a system of norms that governs the process of urban transformation itself” 80 : (p. 148). We also note that ‘slums’ are communities that themselves exhibit differentiated levels of wealth and access to resources among the households that constitute them.

Worldwide, a third or more of the urban population lives in informal settlements or slums 81 . While being heterogeneous enough to resist sweeping characterization, informality implies the lack of recognition by formal governing authorities of land tenure arrangements and property rights, leading to a lack of legal protections, and formal supporting regulation of economic activities and settlements 82 . Informal housing for the poor—in the form of slum and squatter settlements—is built by communities themselves, in the absence of formal planning and regulations. The absence of these creates uncertainty for residents and city governments and discourages long-term investment and formal adaptation strategies that could enhance resilience and create pathways out of poverty 83 .

The urban poor in the Global South are among those populations most at risk from climate change and associated extreme weather events. A specifically critical vulnerability is the lack of adequate housing and access to services and employment. This problem is present in different cities in distinct forms: in high-growth wealthy urban areas, it often appears in the form of homelessness or inadequate housing, leading to a lack of cooling on hot days or flood protection. Historically, in all fast-growing cities of the past and present, this problem also presents itself as informal settlements, which typically lack basic services (e.g., digital divide), thereby compounding socioeconomic and civic deprivation.

Climate change has confounded development challenges, but it has also created new opportunities for strategic combinations of development and climate adaptation policies to leverage their mutual complementarities and co-benefits 84 . While slums may in some cases act as poverty traps 85 , socioeconomic opportunities and services are often better in urban slums than in rural areas of developing nations 86 . Several urban planning innovations already point the way to new kinds of climate adaptation knowledge and practice 87 . Often, informal communities themselves develop innovative responses to climate change impacts 88 , 89 . However, bearing the burden of adaptation can exacerbate chronic poverty. Moreover, communities alone cannot be tasked with building adaptive capacity 90 .

The availability of data for the study of urban informal communities is much improved now compared to a few years ago. In response to the lack of official data about marginalized communities and informal settlements, described by UN-Habitat in 2003 as a crisis of information 91 , a new movement was born bringing together NGOs, local community organizations, international researchers, and technologists to create appropriate methods and tools for assembling datasets about the various communities residing in slums 92 . These data collections―such as the Slum Dwellers International’s (SDI) ‘know your city’ campaign 93 or UN-Habitat’s Urban Observatories 94 ―show how comparable and verifiable data can be collected in tens of thousands of informal settlements that reflect the lived experience and priorities of local communities, while also addressing the needs of local governments and international organizations. At the same time, efforts to collect this data confront the same inequalities in knowledge production inherent to the scientific process. Residents of informal settlements often faced a deficit of credibility in putting forward their experiences and knowledge. Multiple efforts to collect data lead to research fatigue, especially when those efforts do not result in tangible improvements in the quality of life of urban residents. The challenge remains for various sectors to develop inclusive and actionable innovation to mitigate climate impacts on these communities and to address the epistemic injustices that they face 95 .

Community data collection efforts can bring together different stakeholders around agreed social and spatial facts 96 , 97 . These efforts facilitate collaborative design to improve well-being in urban informal communities. Crucially, they show local lived experience in ways that can drive coupled development and climate adaptation policy. Such local knowledge from the disadvantaged can act as a corrective force during political debate and implementation and drive visions and innovations. In addition to community-driven data collection, many other organizational and technological developments are radically changing what is possible to know and do, with increasing sensitivity and precision, all around the world 98 . Collaborative mapping (e.g., via OpenStreetMap) has expanded the realm of geospatial information relevant to urban (climate) adaptation, while high-precision remote sensing, coupled with Artificial Intelligence and data science methods, allows us to identify functional elements of urban environments (e.g., buildings, utilities, roads, trees, drainage) with greater spatial detail than was previously possible. These new tools and approaches are helping to establish the groundwork for a better understanding of comparative development patterns in cities.

Local community organizations are already distilling their experiences, knowledge, and expertise for addressing climate risk and exposure and engaging in dialogue with funders, governments and NGOs 99 . The urban science and climate change research communities need to join these discussions to learn from the many ways poor urban communities have implemented adaptation for years now. These efforts cannot be naïve, however, to the fact that communities can be justifiably weary of outsiders using their data, of the politicized settings in which such data is collected and that community data collection efforts are occurring in a context in which urban data is being turned into a valuable commodity by consulting firms.

Historical processes and temporal horizons of adaptation

Discussions about adaptation to climate change convey an urgency that implies short timelines. Cities are already experiencing impacts, and policy responses tend to be dominated by short-term concerns and trends. As rapid urbanization proceeds, cities continue to grow in population and expand in areal extent, and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. Despite the time compression posed by current trends, we propose that expanding the historical scope of urban adaptation research is critical to reveal the large-scale patterns in the interactions between nature and society that ultimately shape nuanced prospects for adaptation 100 . Research into urban adaptation is necessarily a science of place-based histories, interweaving people, human and natural landscapes, and institutions. It is also a scientific endeavor that recognizes the historical inequalities embedded in urban forms and in the process of knowledge production, and the need to incorporate a wide range of experiences to understand urban adaptation.

The historical record teaches us that communities can adapt to climate change and exogenous shocks. Worldwide urbanization has occurred, uninterrupted, for the past 7000 years. In this span, individual settlements have come and gone, and some urban systems previously representing prosperous and flourishing societies have vanished; yet many cities and urban systems have lasted for hundred and even thousands of years 101 . To achieve such endurance, problems had to be recognized, solutions devised, collective action coordinated, institutions, norms and beliefs adjusted, new technologies deployed, and previously adequate ways of doing things modified or abandoned. Studying how urban societies and communities have survived, adapted, and thrived over long periods may reveal the properties of resilient urban systems that enable them to confront different types of changes successfully. The urban past is crucial for developing a theoretically rich and empirically robust understanding of cities and urbanization 102 . Studying the history of urbanization brings a broader range of human experiences and cultures to the development of a robust understanding of urban adaptation 103 .

Heritage sites, and their study, can be a source of understanding how current forms of living have come to be and, for contemporary communities, a source of creativity in deciding what elements of heritage matter to them and which they want and hope to carry forward with them into the future 104 . The past is not, however, a source of clear, ready-made answers, nor is it destiny. The history of past urban adaptations creates the choice sets available to urban actors today and these reflect the values, priorities, power relations and consequent actions of urban residents who lived decades, and sometimes centuries, before the present. A long-term, intergenerational perspective is needed to bridge the past with the future with sufficient scope and make visible the structural injustices that must be addressed for building more sustainable, and thus adaptable, urban futures 105 .

A convergent research agenda for urban adaptation

Developing a new research effort on urban adaptation consistent with the focus areas and tenets outlined above calls for constructing a convergent and open research program. Climate change adaptation is a specific and compelling scientific problem, inspired by pressing societal challenges, requiring deep integration across disciplines, and the construction of new analytical frameworks 106 . It is a problem that demands a multi-perspective approach, such as the one developed in the IPCC, engaging with concrete, place-based challenges. Such an effort will require changes in how relevant communities engage in research and collaborate with one another. This class of problem-oriented, convergent, research has transformed the production of scientific knowledge on urgent societal problems, as demonstrated by the global network of COVID-19 researchers.

In the urban adaptation space, convergent research needs methodological innovation to address the challenges of spatial scope and temporal scale, informality, socio-political complexity, and the rapid dynamics of urban change. It also requires much greater sensitivity to the diversity of actors vested in urban systems, with their respective histories, identities and accumulated insights, and collaborative principles based on transparency, equity, and access. Co-production of knowledge needs to be more than a slogan or an aspiration 107 , 108 . Critically, it also requires an international commitment to research funding to enable learning and collaboration across and among Global North and Global South urban systems, supporting knowledge exchange across a far greater diversity of scientific and empirical experiences. There need to be new mechanisms to fund research co-led by disadvantaged communities in cities, working with researchers as partners rather than as objects of study; research that challenges the drivers of inequality and vulnerability; research in which there is a recognition of multiple perspectives and rights of knowledge holders, especially those who have lived through specific experiences of violence and dispossession; research that enables discussion across disciplinary orientations seeking to reach temporary consensus across a diversity of perspectives and inform action on the ground.

A research program is animated, and justified, by the questions it poses. We bring our argumentation to a close by presenting a set of questions that illustrate the sort of inquiry we are advocating for (Table 1 ). The posed questions are deliberately formulated to be relevant to cities and urban systems throughout the world. The themes of the posed questions correspond to and expand the adaptation processes and approaches listed in the outer ring in Fig. 1 . The questions are intended to motivate a discussion on the knowledge gaps that should be addressed with an urgency matching the urgency of responding to the already present effects of climate change in urban areas. The specific answers generated by investigating the questions in specific regions and contexts should, in effect, constitute an actionable and context-relevant research endeavor. We highlight the importance of how the questions are addressed in search of answers: concerns for epistemological adequacy and response effectiveness impel us to devise co-production strategies involving both producers and users of the research outcomes in all phases of the research (in the design, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination of the research impacts). Collaboration with boundary organizations at the urban and neighborhood scales, and with marginalized communities, is critical to ensure research is transdisciplinary, locally accountable, and salient.

Urban adaptation is an emergent property of the interactions among multiple decision-makers, socioeconomic, ecological, and climatological processes, and cultural-political relations with long contested histories 70 . It involves spatial and temporal “spillovers”, risk burden and benefit externalities extending (far) beyond urban administrative boundaries, with ethical as well as material implications far into the future. The framing of what constitutes urban adaptation is critical, with significant implications for recognition, distribution, and procedural justice in the design and implementation of adaptation solutions.

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Acknowledgements

This manuscript has been authored in part by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05–00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Program’s South-East Texas Urban Integrated Field Laboratory under Award Number DE-SC0023216.

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Lobo, J., Aggarwal, R.M., Alberti, M. et al. Integration of urban science and urban climate adaptation research: opportunities to advance climate action. npj Urban Sustain 3 , 32 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-023-00113-0

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Urban Water Sustainability Development: A Systematic Literature Review

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• Mariam Janeeh 5 &
• Tarek Merabtene 5  

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As the earth's regenerative capacity and renewable resources are limited due to climate change, water scarcity is expected to increase significantly over the next two decades. An overview of sustainable urban water indicators is provided in this study, as are suggestions for future research scope. The review has focused on different use cases of urban water like footprint, artificial intelligence, and decision-making. A total of 31 papers were selected based on their Q1 and Q2 journal rankings. FUZZY, AHP, TOPSIS, and PSR models are the most popular models deployed to assess and formulate indicators for sustainable urban water. This paper contributes to the understanding of water sustainability relationships by identifying commonly used attributes and discussing possible interest in methods and fields. We also discussed how to manage sustainable urban water within urban water management conceptualizations attributed to climate change changes and its role in enhancing sustainable planning. The review also provides direction for managing sustainable urban water practices that can benefit managers, government agencies, and stakeholders.

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Abbreviations

Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development Goals

Integrated Urban Water Security Index

Criteria Importance Through Intercriterion Correlation

Discrete Wavelet Transforms

Water Development Planning Indexes

Adaptive Intelligent Dynamic Water Resource Planning

System Dynamics Modeling

Water Resource-Withdrawal-GDP-Footprint

Life Cycle Assessment

Natural based Solution

Water Ecological Footprints

System Dynamic Modeling

Artificial Neural Networks

Fuzzy Inference Systems

Sustainable Urban Water Management

Multicriteria Decision-Making

Fuzzy Decision-Making and Trial Evaluation Laboratory

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Bezdek, J. C. (2013). Pattern recognition with fuzzy objective function algorithms Springer. Retrieved from https://www.vlebooks.com/vleweb/product/openreader?id=none&isbn=9781475704501

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Janeeh, M., Merabtene, T. (2024). Urban Water Sustainability Development: A Systematic Literature Review. In: Chen, X. (eds) New Developments in Environmental Science and Engineering. ICESE 2023. Springer Proceedings in Earth and Environmental Sciences. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-5685-8_7

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Progress in remote sensing and gis-based fdi research based on quantitative and qualitative analysis.

1. Introduction

2. research methods and data, 2.1. research methods, 2.2. data sources and screening, 2.3. data processing, 3. subject categories and publication trends, 3.1. subject evolution, 3.2. trends in the number and cited times of published papers, 4. the intellectual structure, 4.1. quantitative analysis, 4.2. qualitative analysis, 4.2.1. macro-environmental research at national, regional, and city scales, 4.2.2. global industrial development and layout, 4.2.3. research on global value chains, 4.2.4. micro-information geography of tncs, 4.2.5. internationalization and commercialization of geo-information industry, 4.2.6. multiple data and interdisciplinary approaches, 5. discussions and conclusions, data availability statement, acknowledgments, conflicts of interest.

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Li, Z. Progress in Remote Sensing and GIS-Based FDI Research Based on Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis. Land 2024 , 13 , 1313. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13081313

Li Z. Progress in Remote Sensing and GIS-Based FDI Research Based on Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis. Land . 2024; 13(8):1313. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13081313

Li, Zifeng. 2024. "Progress in Remote Sensing and GIS-Based FDI Research Based on Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis" Land 13, no. 8: 1313. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13081313

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• DOI: 10.1007/s00168-019-00957-4
• Corpus ID: 212970659

Agglomeration economies and evolving urban form

• G. Giuliano , Sanggyun Kang , Quan Yuan
• Published in The annals of regional… 25 November 2019
• Economics, Geography

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Theory and Practice of Assessing the Efficiency of Urban Agglomeration Administration Abroad and in Russia (a Case Study of Chelyabinsk Oblast)

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(Volkshochschule Moers–Kamp-Lintfort)

(Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration)

(Chelyabinsk Branch, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration)

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