RADICAL ALTERNATIVES TO CLIMATE URBANISM: TOWARDS SOCIALLY AND ECOLOGICALLY JUST CITIES - (Hosted within track 1: Postgrowth Urbanism)

Organizers

Neelakshi Joshi

Contributors

Julian Agyeman, Tufts University
Ethemcan Turhan, University of Groningen

Cities are critical sites for developing responses to climate change. However, popular climate change solutions in the city have not been successful in radically transforming the urban system. Celebrated climate change mitigations solutions like high-tech low-carbon buildings, electromobility and renewable energy remain materially intensive as well as socially exclusive. Similarly, adaptation efforts in cities largely address economically well-off areas, while increasing vulnerabilities for others. Cities continue to remain places of capital accumulation and unsustainability, creating inequalities within the city as well as beyond the city boundaries. While the critique of the mainstream idea of climate urbanism is now well established, open questions remain on alternatives that are socially and ecologically just. 

Building on the theme of the Congress, "Planning as a Transformative Action in an Age of Planetary Crisis,", this roundtable adopts a critical approach to climate urbanism and re-centre social and ecological justice at the heart of the urban response. We would like to learn from both material and social practices drawing from, but not limited to, perspectives of justice (spatial, social and ecological), degrowth, urban political ecology, urban social movements, post-development that challenge as well as create alternative solutions for infrastructure, housing, energy, food, mobility and greening within and beyond the city boundary.

In conversation with the contributors, we will discuss:

1. Why is it necessary to to re-center social and ecological justice in the urban response to climate change? 
2. What do alternative responses to building a just city look like? 
3. How do these alternative responses interact with existing urban planning practices? 

The contributors, experts in thinking of justice and climate action together, will broaden the understanding of climate urbanism that is not limited to reducing greenhouse gas emission through techno-fixes, rather dares to address the systemic and root causes of unsustainability and build their responses from the ground up. The roundtable will lay the foundation for a special issue on the topic in the journals Local Environment or npj Climate Action.

Key words: N/A