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Cities and Climate Change: the Precedents and Why They Matter Urban Studies at 50 50(7) 1332–1347, May 2013 Special Issue Article Cities and Climate Change: The Precedents and Why They Matter Michael Hebbert and Vladimir Jankovic [Paper first received, October 2011; in final form, March 2012] Abstract This paper reviews the long tradition of city-scale climatological and meteorological applications prior to the emergence in the 1990s of early work on the urban/global climate change interface. It shows how ‘valuing and seeing the urban’ came to be achieved within modern scientific meteorology and how in a limited but significant set of cases that science has contributed to urban practice. The paper traces the evo- lution of urban climatology since 1950 as a distinct research field within physical geography and meteorology, and its transition from observational monographs to process modelling; reviews the precedents, successful or otherwise, of knowledge transfer from science into public action through climatically aware regulation or design of urban environment; and notes the neglect of these precedents in contem- porary climate change discourse—a serious omission. Introduction It is an indisputable fact that cities were ini- greenhouse gas inventories were based on tially overlooked in the IPCC process. The the sectors of energy, industry, land use, science consisted of climatic forecasts agriculture and waste, making it hard to framed at a global scale and the policy sta- detect the role of urbanisation. Cities were keholders were international or state actors. not mentioned in the Kyoto Protocol. A Scientists involved in global climate fore- similar sectoral logic applied to the periodic casting were slow to engage with the urban Global Environmental Outlook published phenomenon except as an anomaly, city by the United Nations Environment weather stations being a source of data Programme. Governmental actors rein- distortion within the synoptic grid. The ini- forced this predisposition: it was natural tial techniques for calculating national for the process of international negotiation Michael Hebbert is in the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, Wates House, 22 Gordon St, London, WC1H 0QB, UK. Email: [email protected]. Vladimir Jankovic is in the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Simon Building, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK. Email: [email protected]. 0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online Ó 2013 Urban Studies Journal Limited DOI: 10.1177/0042098013480970 CITIES AND CLIMATE CHANGE: THE PRECEDENTS 1333 to frame the climate change issue in terms 1991, UNCED’s Rio Conference in 1992, of ministerial portfolios. The conventions ICLEI’s Climate Change Programme in of intergovernmental diplomacy discour- 1993, energie-cite´s in 1994, the UN’s Cities aged consideration of urbanisation as a for- and Climate Change in 2008, the World cing factor and cities as distinct territorial Bank’s Mayors’ Task Force on Urban stakeholders within the IPCC process. Poverty and Climate Change in 2009. It is Today, these exclusions are breaking often remarked that the discovery of global down, bringing a sense of fresh opportunity climate change has coincided with the tip- at the urban level. The increasingly fine reso- ping point to a world in which city-dwellers lution of models of the earth’s atmosphere outnumber rural folk. So UN-Habitat sum- (down to 25 km globally) means that cities marises the threat to humanity are for the first time visible within general circulation systems. The environment of the Fuelled by two powerful human-induced city with its three-dimensional geometry, forces that have been unleashed by develop- heat-absorbing materials, impermeable sur- ment and manipulation of the environment faces and pollution concentrations, is begin- in the industrial age, the effects of urbaniza- ning to be resolved in weather models. tion and climate change are converging in Governmental actors have realised that dangerous ways which threaten to have mayors may be able to maintain progress unprecedented negative impacts upon qual- where international agreement had stalled. ity of life and economic and social stability Urbanisation entered for the first time as a (UN-HABITAT, 2011, p. 1). climate change consideration in the fourth assessment report of 2007 and the fifth report This paper challenges none of the above due in 2014 will contain a separate chapter except to put a question mark by the word on cities and attempt a full-scale assessment unprecedented. It was at the scale of the of their role in carbon pollution and their urban heat island that anthropogenic potential adaptability to climate risk. The effects—many linked to carbon contemporary literature on cities and climate combustion—were first systematically change—not least this Special Issue of Urban studied. The seminal contribution came Studies—shows cities at last incorporated from Albert Kratzer whose Das Stadtklima into global climate policy both as causal (1937) originated as a PhD thesis under the agents in greenhouse gas emissions/mitiga- supervision of the geographer Edward Fels. tion and as vulnerable targets. Fels’s own work on environmental impacts In thinking about cities and climate of economic progress—the businessman as change, it is hard to avoid the word ‘unpre- shaper of the earth, Der wirtshaftende cedented’. Everything hinges on recent sci- Mensch als Gestalter der Erde (1954)— entific discovery and response to projected stood directly in line between the pioneer- future threat. The time-frame stretches ing conservation science of George Perkins back no further than 1988, the year of UN Marsh (1882) The Earth as Modified by General Assembly Resolution 43/53 and the Human Action or Nathaniel Shaler (1905) establishment of the Intergovernmental Man and the Earth, and modern environ- Panel on Climate Change; or 1994 and the mental conservation represented by the United Nations Framework Convention on Wenner-Grenn Foundation’s symposium Climate Change; or 1997, year of the Kyoto Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Protocol. All the C3 actors are new-born— Earth (Thomas, 1956), Rachel Carson’s ICLEI in 1990, the Climate Alliance in (1962) Silent Spring, Carrol Wilson’s 1334 MICHAEL HEBBERT AND VLADIMIR JANKOVIC (1971) Report of the Study of Man’s Impact The Scientific Precedents on Climate and Ward and Dubos’s Only One Earth (1972). Urban climatology has Scientific interest in the atmospheric effect a long pedigree in the conservation of urbanisation extends more than 200 movement. years. As a nation of pioneers, Americans Since the study of urban weather systems contributed early research into the effects is explicitly a science of anthropogenic of deforestation, agriculture and town- cause, it has always challenged cities to building on seasonal change (Fleming, assume responsibility for their role as ‘‘co- 1998). Thomas Jefferson suggested in 1824 patterners of their climate’’ (Kratzer, 1956, that anthropogenic impact should be moni- p. 170). So there is also a prequel in the tored through climatic surveys ‘repeated realm of collective action. Greenhouse gas once or twice in a century’ (Landsberg, mitigation is prefigured in municipal energy 1956). However, it was the great cities of provision and public health action against Europe that contained the sites with the soot and smog. The history of modern town longest instrumental measurement series planning can be written in terms of a collec- and here that the climatic changes produced tive response to the externalities of carbon- by industrialisation, densification and sub- based industrialisation—as Patrick Geddes urban growth were most readily visible. defined it in the early 20th century, substitut- Patterns of urban temperature, precipitation ing the clean-energy ‘Neotechnic’ city for the and wind circulation were studied for sites black pollution and physical concentration around London by Luke Howard between of ‘Paleotechnic’ capitalism (Geddes, 1915). 1806 and 1830, for Paris in the 1870s by Adaptation strategy has much older antece- Emilien Renou, and for Berlin and Vienna dents. The design of cities embodies local in the 1890s by Gustav Hellmann and Julius knowledge of wind, sun, humidity and preci- Hahn respectively. The physicist Sir Arthur pitation, and of what is needed to survive in Schuster set up a University of Manchester a given geographical setting against the con- observatory that allowed comparison with a tingencies of weather and human enemies. municipal weather station two miles north. The history of urban habitats is not just one He commented of passive adaptation to regional climate but of active transformation to produce micro- The remarkable differences which appear in climates radically unlike their surrounding the temperature records in different parts of terrain—hotter, cooler, drier, moister, less the city furnish an additional proof, if proof windy, more ventilated, or whatever is most were wanted, that observations taken in or conducive to human comfort at a given lati- near a large town cannot be taken to repre- tude. City design is the oldest type of anthro- sent correctly the meteorological character of pogenic climate change (Egli, 1951). the surrounding districts, but it by no means These precedents are explored in order, follows that these observations are of no the next section dealing with the science of value. On the contrary, they may lead to cities as climatic singularities, and subse- some important conclusions on what may be quent sections with antecedents of urban called town weather
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