The Future of Climate Urbanism

The Urban Institute have annouced their second Sheffield Urbanism Lecture Series on the Future of Climate Urbanism. The Sheffield Urbanism Lecture series is an initiative of the Urban Institute to generate provocative and nonstandard propositions for understanding processes of urbanization and urban life. It is intended as a space to reimagine both the conceptualizations and narratives of urban studies.

The Future of Climate Urbanism comprises three lectures in Autumn 2021. The first will be delivered by our CESET Principle Investigator Professor Vanesa Castán Broto.

"The multiple lives of climate urbanism" will explore the emergence of climate urbanism and its current manifestations across different geographies, with particular attention to the ways in which climate urbanism is reinforcing urban inequalities and producing new ones. This lecture asks what is climate urbanism and why does it matter? Climate urbanism has emerged as a perspective that engages with how climate change is transforming the way we think and imagine cities and settlements. Climate change has generated new forms of intervention in urban areas, to reduce carbon emissions and address climate risks. Normative emphasis on collective responses, however, is limiting critical attention to those climate responses, and how they impact on the urban environment. Climate responses are not neutral. Concerns with maladaptation and climate gentrification point towards new forms of inequality that emerge under the umbrella of the climate emergency. It will be proposed that climate urbanism can become a critical theory that both exposes the production of further inequalities associated with urban responses to climate change and provides new radical forms of practice for more progressive urban futures under climate change.