Urban Transitions/Technological Transitions:
Cities and Low Carbon Transitions
Workshop Call
Department of Geography, Durham University, and SURF, University of Salford.
Manchester
May 7th - 8th 2009
Rationale
Cities may be responsible for up to 75% of global emissions of carbon dioxide.
Consequently cities are emerging as critical sites for “innovative” responses to
climate change through the development of relevant forms of knowledge,
expertise and capability to shape low carbon transitions in the social and
technical organisation of their networks and built environment. Despite
increasing policy and academic interest in the concept of low carbon urban
transitions there has been little explicit attempt to bring together researchers
with knowledge and expertise of “urban transitions”, “socio-technical
transitions” and “low carbon transitions”. Co-hosted by the Urban Transitions
ESRC Climate Change Leadership Fellowship and the SURF centre the purpose
of this workshop is to address this deficit and bring together leading
researchers from each of these broad (and often diverse) disciplinary
approaches to examine three sets of issues and questions.
• Understanding Transitions. What is a “transition”? How is the
concept of a transition understood in the different disciplinary contexts? What
can be learned from historical studies of transitions and applied to
contemporary contexts? How, where and why do socio-technical transitions
take place – what is the role of the urban? What is distinctive about low
carbon transitions? How valuable is a transitions approach for understanding
the transformation of urban socio-technical systems in response to climate
change? What are the limitations?
• Shaping Transitions. Can cities “shape and direct” transitions? What
is distinctive about the urban scale and what are its relations to other scales?
What forms of knowledge and expertise are required to shape low carbon
transitions? How is capacity and capability developed to shape such
transitions and how does this vary? What are the temporalities of urban
transitions – can rapid transformations in response to climate change be
achieved? What are the constraints and limits to cities ambitions and
expectations for low carbon futures? How do low carbon transitions resonate
with cities’ wider economic and social priorities? What are the implications of
low carbon transitions for issues of social and ecological justice?
• Researching Transitions. How are urban transitions
empirically “researched” and their wider consequences understood? What
forms of knowledge, social relations and material consequences are produced?
Do these reinforce or challenge existing urban hierarchies and inequalities?
Submission of Abstracts
Please send a title and one page abstract to Tori Henson
([log in to unmask]) and Vicky Simpson ([log in to unmask]) by
30th November 2008. We welcome papers that attempt to address one or
more of above themes. The workshops will have a maximum of 20 speakers
over a 1 ˝ day event, 30 minutes for presentation and plenty of time for
discussion. Funding is available to meet participants travel and accommodation
costs.
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