Urban Transformations to Keep All the Same: The Power of Ivy Discourses

Unveiling urban governance diversity: Clustering cities based on mitigation actions

Embracing a "more global" urban comparison in scientific assessments of climate actions by cities is essential to drive greater and more inclusive participation in global efforts to curb climate change. This comparison needs to engage cities irrespective of their size and status: when we do so, distinctive patterns of urban climate mitigation actions across a diverse range of cities emerge. Employing K-means clustering as a pattern recognition method, this study compares cities based on selected aspects of their reported mitigation actions to the Carbon Disclosure Project. It explores whether the identified clusters facilitate the comparison of a socio-spatially diverse range of cities. The study identifies five clusters within two themes, namely the nature and finance-implementation of actions, shedding light on shared and distinct governance aspects of mitigation actions by cities. Notably, the study underscores how governance patterns transcend city size and global status. These findings offer valuable insights for broadening the comparative imagination of cities and inter-city networking opportunities.

Online toolkits for collaborative and inclusive global research in urban evolutionary ecology

Urban evolutionary ecology is inherently interdisciplinary. Moreover, it is a field with global significance. However, bringing researchers and resources together across fields and countries is challenging. Therefore, an online collaborative research hub, where common methods and best practices are shared among scientists from diverse geographic, ethnic, and career backgrounds would make research focused on urban evolutionary ecology more inclusive. Here, we describe a freely available online research hub for toolkits that facilitate global research in urban evolutionary ecology. We provide rationales and descriptions of toolkits for: (1) decolonizing urban evolutionary ecology; (2) identifying and fostering international collaborative partnerships; (3) common methods and freely-available datasets for trait mapping across cities; (4) common methods and freely-available datasets for cross-city evolutionary ecology experiments; and (5) best practices and freely available resources for public outreach and communication of research findings in urban evolutionary ecology. We outline how the toolkits can be accessed, archived, and modified over time in order to sustain long-term global research that will advance our understanding of urban evolutionary ecology.

Debates Paper: COVID-19 and urban informality: Exploring the implications of the pandemic for the politics of planning and inequality

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a major contradiction in contemporary urban planning. This is the relationship between the entrepreneurial modes of urban politics that shape contemporary planning practice and the interrelated dynamics of economic precarity and informalisation of low-income communities that exacerbate contagion, and therefore enable pandemic spread. Through a review of literature on the urban dimensions of COVID-19, and on the historical relationship between pandemics and urban planning, we develop a framework for analysing the debates that are emerging around planning approaches to addressing contemporary pandemic risk in low-income, informalised communities. We argue that post-pandemic debates about urban planning responses are likely to take shape around three discourses that have framed approaches to addressing informalised communities under entrepreneurial urbanism - a revanchist approach based on territorial stigmatisation of spaces of the poor, an incrementalist approach premised on addressing the most immediate drivers of contagion, and a reformist approach that seeks to address the structural conditions that have produced economic precarity and shelter informality. We further argue that any effort to assess the political outfall of the COVID-19 pandemic in a given context needs to take an inter-scalar approach, analysing how debates over informality take shape at the urban and national scales.

The governance of energy transitions in Africa: a sketch of plural perspectives

Building on the contributions to the article collection "The Governance of Sustainable Energy Transitions in the Global South ", this editorial offers a sketch for a research agenda on transitions research with a main focus on Africa. Still being ill-defined in its concrete contours, this research agenda engages with the central themes of heterogeneity, politics, and the material basis of energy transitions. In this editorial, we address both procedural and content-related questions. Regarding procedural questions, we inform about the context in which this collection emerged. On that, a workshop held in Accra in September 2019 was a key milestone. We contextualise the challenges that some workshop participants had with developing their contributions into publishable articles in the context of uneven academic support structures and knowledge hegemonies. Finally, we introduce the contributions to our article collection, emphasising how they connect and contribute to our draft research agenda. With regard to the content dimension, this article collection builds and proclaims the need for plural approaches to understanding energy transitions in Africa. A plurality of specific context conditions calls for pluralistic analytical perspectives. Not taking for granted hegemonic, western ways of understanding energy systems and explaining change, we rather depart from engagements with the diversity of changes that aggregate into transition pathways-a diversity that in the context of Africa is impossible to overlook. To implement such a pluralistic research agenda, scholars need more opportunities to network, exchange and publish.

Compound urban crises

The crises that cities face-such as climate change, pandemics, economic downturn, and racism-are tightly interlinked and cannot be addressed in isolation. This paper addresses compound urban crises as a unique type of problem, in which discrete solutions that tackle each crisis independently are insufficient. Few scholarly debates address compound urban crises and there is, to date, a lack of interdisciplinary insights to inform urban governance responses. Combining ideas from complex adaptive systems and critical urban studies, we develop a set of boundary concepts (unsettlement, unevenness, and unbounding) to understand the complexities of compound urban crises from an interdisciplinary perspective. We employ these concepts to set a research agenda on compound urban crises, highlighting multiple interconnections between urban politics and global dynamics. We conclude by suggesting how these entry points provide a theoretical anchor to develop practical insights to inform and reform urban governance.