Module GEOG41815: Cities and Climate Change

Department: Geography

GEOG41815: Cities and Climate Change

Prerequisites

• None

Corequisites

• None

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None

Aims

• Investigate how diverse urban contexts and conditions shape the challenges of responding to climate change.
• Critically analyse how different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives position cities and urbanisation as problems and solutions to climate change.
• Develop critical perspectives on the ways in which different actors exploit, live with, mitigate and adapt to climate change in cities.

Content

• Cities are profoundly connected to a range of urgent global challenges, including climate change. The module explores how, across diverse urban contexts and conditions, responses to climate change are being framed, developed and contested. How are cities and urbanisation processes being implicated as drivers of climate change and/or as obstacles in addressing mitigation and adaptation challenges? Conversely, how are they imagined as solutions to these problems? What do global debates concerning loss and damage or climate resilient development mean in the urban context? Practically, how are varied urban actors from households to governments to financial institutions and more exploiting, living with, mitigating and adapting to climate change? What is the significance of these actions for the broader challenge of building sustainable futures for all?
• The module advances this investigation via focused topical treatment of the impact and implications of climate change for cities and how responses to this challenge are taking place across globally diverse urban communities. It fosters engaged conceptual exploration of diverse understandings of the urban as a significant site for mobilising climate responses across different theoretical traditions and disciplines. It deepens this critical analysis via exemplary response cases from across the globe which feature a range of urban actors, sites and forms of power and uses these approaches to reflect on what just urban climate futures might involve.
• The module’s mix of lecture- and seminar- based instruction is designed to foster engaged learning and support varied learning styles. In module assessments, students will solidify their understanding of key issues, ideas and analytical tools and apply them to develop their own original urban climate response case.
• The module will be organised through a series of substantive topics explored through a diverse set of urban contexts and conditions, each of which will draw upon cross-cutting themes. This will enable students to develop a holistic understanding of cities and climate change whilst also providing opportunities to focus on topics and themes that are of particular interest.
• 1. Substantive Topics
• Cities and Mitigation: How are cities being framed as significant drivers of and solutions for climate mitigation? What constitutive urban conditions, legacies and trajectories do such narratives point to, and how can relevant concerns like urban automobile dependence, densities and eco-efficiencies vary across urban contexts and conditions globally?
• Cities and Adaptation: How and why are cities being framed as sites of particular urgency for climate change adaptation? How do such narratives reflect and speak to increasingly diverse but persistently unequal/divided urban places today?
• Loss and Damage at the Urban Scale: What are the implications for cities of global temperatures ‘overshooting’ 1.5 degrees? How and with what consequences are climate disasters likely to become increasingly common at the global scale? What kinds of solutions can be found to protect cities and their critical infrastructure? And what might it mean to bring global of loss and damage to the city scale?
• Urban Climate Resilient Development: Can responding to climate change be compatible with urban development? Are there opportunities to develop approaches that can support co-benefits across climate mitigation, adaptation, sustainable development and nature goals? What about the trade-offs? How can more just approaches to responding to climate change at the urban scale be achieved?
• 2. Cross cutting themes
• Theorising Cities as Problem and Solution: assembling the theoretical and conceptual toolkit for exploring cities and climate change.
• Urban actors, sites and forms of power: exploring the roles of local authorities; regional and national governments; transnational city networks; international organisations and multilateral development banks; private sector; philanthropies; non-governmental organisations; Indigenous People and Local Communities; civil society; and households.
• Urban responses: investigating the factors that enable and constrain change, from governance arrangements, regulation and legislation to resources, finance, knowledge and capacity.
• Justice and equity: critically exploring histories of uneven and unequal urbanisation, such as legacies of colonialism, displacement and gentrification, and the prospects for just transitions and transformative change for social and environmental equity.

Learning Outcomes

• Have advanced topical knowledge of how climate change is shaped in and through diverse urban contexts and conditions globally and how in turn climate change is shaping contemporary urbanism.
• Understand diverse theories and concepts relevant for interpreting the significance and consequences of cities’ roles in responding to climate change.
• Have knowledge of how different urban climate responses, actors, sites, forms of power and approaches to justice and equity are shaping climate outcomes for and through cities.

• Ability to ground the global challenge of climate change and its responses in particular sites.
• Capacity to critically explore and debate theories and concepts relevant in understanding contemporary urban processes and climate responses.
• Ability to apply this geographically informed empirical, theoretical and conceptual toolkit to develop original case-based research.

• Capacity to think critically and solve problems.
• Ability to apply knowledge and conduct original research.
• Capacity to write and communicate effectively.

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• Lectures will introduce core empirical material, theories and concepts. Each lecture will be paired with a seminar, in which students will engage in more depth with specific theories, concepts and/or applied empirical cases through a range of learning activities. In the module’s summative assessment each individual student will develop their own urban climate response case, drawing on module content and original research.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

Building toward the summative, in one or more seminars, each individual student will propose an original urban climate response case for initial peer and instructor feedback.

■ Students who do not attend monitored activities shown under Teaching Methods and Learning Hours, or who fail to complete the summative or formative assessment(s) specified above, may be subject to the Academic Progress procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University.