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The Climate Just City

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The Climate Just City sustainability Article The Climate Just City Mikael Granberg 1,2,3,* and Leigh Glover 1 1 The Centre for Societal Risk Research and Political Science, Karlstad University, 651 88 Karlstad, Sweden; [email protected] 2 The Centre for Natural Hazards and Disaster Science, Uppsala University, 752 36 Uppsala, Sweden 3 The Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia * Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: Cities are increasingly impacted by climate change, driving the need for adaptation and sustainable development. Local and global economic and socio-cultural influence are also driving city redevelopment. This, fundamentally political, development highlights issues of who pays and who gains, who decides and how, and who/what is to be valued. Climate change adaptation has primarily been informed by science, but the adaptation discourse has widened to include the social sciences, subjecting adaptation practices to political analysis and critique. In this article, we critically discuss the just city concept in a climate adaptation context. We develop the just city concept by describing and discussing key theoretical themes in a politically and justice-oriented analysis of climate change adaptation in cities. We illustrate our arguments by looking at recent case studies of climate change adaptation in three very different city contexts: Port Vila, Baltimore City, and Karlstad. We conclude that the social context with its power asymmetries must be given a central position in understanding the distribution of climate risks and vulnerabilities when studying climate change adaptation in cities from a climate justice perspective. Keywords: just city; climate just city; ‘the right to the city’; climate change adaptation; power; equity; urban planning Citation: Granberg, M.; Glover, L. The Climate Just City. Sustainability 1. Introduction 2021, 13, 1201. https://doi.org/ Cities around the world are increasingly impacted by climate change and in total 10.3390/su13031201 are forecast to experience massive social and economic losses under current trends [1–4]; by any reasonable understanding of the word, this constitutes a crisis [5]. This climate Academic Editor: Ingemar Elander crisis threatens urban settlements [1] at the same time as the number of urban dwellers, in Received: 1 January 2021 part due to ongoing urbanisation in higher-risk cities in low- and middle-income nations, Accepted: 21 January 2021 Published: 24 January 2021 exposed and vulnerable to climate-related events increases [6]. Future predictions state that climate change will increase the occurrence and severity of weather and climate-related Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral hazards to urban settlements [1,2]. Climate change can also worsen existing socio-economic with regard to jurisdictional claims in problems and the risks of other natural hazards. published maps and institutional affil- Hence, issues connected to, or driven by, climate change are receiving increasing at- iations. tention in cities around the world [7,8], and there is also unprecedented social mobilisation around these issues that is increasingly framed around the recognition that climate change is fundamentally a question of justice (cf., [9–11]). Justice, from this perspective, includes issues such as responsibilities for action, the varied vulnerabilities to the impacts of climate change, and how this is connected to structural injustices and power asymmetries that Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. influences cities’, organisations’, and individual’s abilities to mitigate risks and adapt to This article is an open access article unavoidable impacts (cf., [6]). distributed under the terms and Cities, therefore, are critical sites for the implementing measures to fulfill goals both conditions of the Creative Commons for sustainability [12] and for economic growth [13]. At the same time, cities are dynamic Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// “ ... with interacting and interdependent social-economic, ecological-biophysical, and creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ technological infrastructure components ... ” ([14], p. 99). From the perspective of cli- 4.0/). mate change, cities are perceived both as central problems and as important drivers of Sustainability 2021, 13, 1201. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13031201 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability Sustainability 2021, 13, 1201 2 of 20 sustainable development with regard to climate change and other issues [14–18]. There are many demands, expectations, opportunities, and structures in the quest for the sustainable city [19]. Efforts to reorient cities under the rubric of sustainability are, at least in part, often framed by economic rationalities [20,21]. In this sense, climate change adaptation in cities takes place in what Suzanne Mettler has labelled a ‘policyscape’ consisting of layers of earlier political ideas, policies, and regulations that has become institutionalised with tangible “ ... consequences for governing operations, the policy agenda, and political behavior” ([22], p. 369). A feature of this policyscape is path-dependency created by previ- ous policy-making that facilitates some pathways and delimits other potential pathways of contemporary and future policy making [23,24]. Such path-dependency delimiting public governance and institutional activity is, of course, highly problematic, particularly when in a self-reinforcing condition, creating a ‘lock-in’ of extant governance. Such a lock-in in traditional governance models leads to “ ... plans, policies and solutions that prioritize short-term goals over long-term resilience goals” ([14], p. 106). In order to reach transformative and climate governance models and frameworks facilitating climate justice in our cities, this path-dependency needs to be up-ended [14,25]. These circumstances highlight the importance of the issues of equity and fairness, decision making, participation and representation, power and influence, and governance [25–27]. In this article, we employ a critically constructive approach to the just city concept as developed by Susan Fainstein [28] and others, as we increase the complexity of the approach by adding the socio-environmental dynamics of climate change adaptation and focus on the ‘climate just city’. Two cross-cutting topics central to a discussion of the climate just city with the inclusion of climate change adaptation emerges strongly from the discussion above (cf., [29–32]): (1) issues of distributional (or allocative) justice, and (2) issues of participatory (procedural) justice involving the processes, institutions and implications of citizen and stakeholder engagement [10,33,34]. These two aspects involve what Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey and others have termed ‘the right to the city’ [35–38], giving rise to political inquiry, such as: for whom is the city built and developed? What rights to the city as a whole do its inhabitants have? Who is given ‘voice’ in central political processes and whose experiences and knowledge is counted in the future development of urban society? Central for Lefebvre was the eradication of poverty and of unjust inequality [37,38]. Our highlighting of Lefebvre and Harvey also indicates that our outlook on the climate just city is more expansive than that of Fainstein’s view of the just city. This paper critically discusses the just city concept in a climate adaptation context and develops the just city concept by describing and discussing key theoretical themes in a politically and justice-oriented analysis of climate change adaptation in cities. We illustrate our arguments by looking at recent case studies of climate change adaptation in three city contexts: Port Vila (Vanuatu) [39], Baltimore City (USA) [40] and Karlstad (Sweden) [41]. Our cases are situated in different national and local contexts and highlight different aspects of the climate change adaptation challenge from the perspective of justice. Port Vila draws attention to the importance of the inclusion of indigenous populations and their experience-based knowledge in adaptation policy and its implementation; Baltimore City highlights how historical social class and race divisions impact contemporary adaptation policy and implementation. Karlstad brings to light how economic pressures and policy priorities frame adaptation policy and implementation. Before we move on to these case studies, we discuss cities and climate change adaptation, growth-oriented development policies and expand our theoretical perspective on just cities and that of the climate just city. 2. Cities and Climate Change Adaptation Adaptation to climate change is essential for preparing for its impacts (as proactive or precautionary measures) and for responding to impacts that have occurred or are occurring (as reactive measures) (see, e.g., [26]). Measures for adaptation vary greatly, covering be- haviour change and education, engineering and infrastructure, and institutional responses Sustainability 2021, 13, 1201 3 of 20 in law, policy and regulation, and, of course, planning (see, e.g., [1,7]). Furthermore, the goals for adaptation are wide-ranging, and include reducing exposure to hazards, hazard reduction, and vulnerability reduction. Key areas of urban adaptation related to the public sector include the energy, health, transport, water supply and sanitation portfolios [1,42]. As recorded by the UNFCCC, there has been greatly increased national activity globally reported in National Adaptation Programmes
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