| Synopsis: |
Rethinking Urban Low Carbon Transition informs a wider societal and policy debate about the potential and limits of low carbon urbanism. The book reflects critically on a decades work, between 2005-2015, undertaken by a wide range of scholars across multiple disciplines-innovation studies, urban studies and environmental studies-concerned with analysing (and in some cases shaping) urban transitions. It opens up the possibility of a next generation of urban transition studies, foregrounding a consideration of transitions in their political, geographical and developmental context. The book outlines the contributions and draws out a broader analytical framework that proposes a novel interpretation of urban low carbon transitions as primarily social, political and developmental processes. This suggests that low carbon transitions go beyond simple municipal efforts aimed at measuring and mitigating greenhouse gases, reinterpreting the low carbon transition as a matter of development modes. The title examines the objects and flows of the material world involved in the production of carbon, and the set of mechanisms and techniques that operate as material, framing and discursive devices capable of influencing both agents and objects. The chapters explore the advancing novel conceptual and empirical ways of examining urban low carbon intermediation, focusing specifically on Australia, Sweden, India, as well as various European and sub-Saharan cities. The volume also seeks to explore the role of communities and subjectivities in the urban low carbon transition, examining how different communities of practice transform meanings and forms of relating to the city and its infrastructures in order to reduce their emissions.Rethinking Urban Low Carbon Transition is an essential text on courses to do with cities, climate change and environmental issues in sociology, politics, urban studies, town and country planning, environmental studies, geography and the built environment. |