ARC Laureate Project: Cities as transformative agents for a climate-safe future

Transformative changes are urgently needed to achieve a climate-safe future for cities. Distinguished Professor Xuemei Bai argues for a novel reconceptualisation of cities as transformative agents for climate-safe futures in her ARC Laureate Project "Cities as transformative agents for a climate-safe future".

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eri.kashima@anu.edu.au

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The increasing prominence of cities in international climate policy processes is underpinned by more than two decades of research to understand how urbanisation and urban systems affect global change and in turn are impacted by such changes, and how global cities are responding to these changes. Yet, there is a growing realisation that the existing research on cities and climate change is insufficient and fragmented, confined within disciplinary boundaries.

This Laureate Fellowship Project will confront many of these challenges under the novel framework of cities as transformative agents. The project will provide ground-breaking knowledge into urban systems and networked systems of cities, new methods and approaches that bridge disciplinary and theory/practice divides, and alternative governance mechanisms that enable accelerated pathways towards climate-safe futures in Australia and beyond.

Research program

There are three critical gaps hindering rapid action for and by cities:

1) A systems approach is needed. Cities are human-dominated complex systems, and the current sectorised and fragmented research and policy measures are insufficient to turn the tide.

2) To achieve rapid transformation, the agency of cities needs to be enhanced. Past work on transition and transformation for a sustainable future have long focused on actors and agencies of individuals and companies or actors within cities, rather than agency of cities themselves. As a result, the potential for cities to take actions to shape their own futures, and to proactively influence others and benefit from building and interacting via cross-city networks, is by no means fully realised.

3) There is an urgent need to bridge disciplinary boundaries and the theory-practice divide, and seek solutions from on-the-ground, real-world practice. A systematic inquiry with an innovative scientific approach is needed to turn these often anecdotal, context specific insights into transferable knowledges.

The Laureate project contains four work packages (WPs) that address these challenges.