Lead editors Vanesa Castán Broto, Professor of Climate Urbanism, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, Michele Acuto, Professor of Urban Resilience and Sean Fox, Professor of Geography & Global Development, University of Bristol invite papers that offer novel and disruptive thinking about the interplay between climate urbanism, resilience and justice against the backdrop of the climate crisis and calls for greater inclusion of voices, experiences and needs. This special issue seeks to foster new engagements, balancing deep and grounded case studies with a conceptually and theoretically ‘global urban theory’ appeal, including insights from cities in the Global South.
‘Climate urbanism’ explores the multiple ways in which climate change, as a massively distributed phenomenon, is transforming our relationships with the built environment. When examined in the context of rapid urbanization, growing inequalities, and the deepening of patterns of spatial differentiation across the world, climate urbanism can be read as a diagnosis of the new impositions that people face in urban environments.
Using this thematic focus, the Journal invites novel contributions that expand the current body of scholarship, but also contest it. We welcome papers that critically examine concepts and theories related to climate urbanism, resilience and justice, as well as those that interrogate climate change action discourses in cities and the diffusion of narratives of social change and resilience linked to calls for swift action in urban environments. We are particularly interested in papers that offer new ground in this field of research, whether this is because they expand the theoretical toolbox of the field, or because they engage with methods or empirical locations that can be rarely explored in the literature.