World Cities and Climate Change

Relationships between cities and socio-technical energy, water, waste and transport networks are changing.World Cities and Climate Changeargues that this is not something that is happening 'naturally' but is the product of social, economic, political and spatial processes and that these changes have profound implications for the mutual organisation of urbanism and resource flows and consequently for the shape of contemporary and future cities.Drawing on research and examples from London, New York, Tokyo, Melbourne, Shanghai, San Francisco and other world cities the authors develop a critical synthesis of 'new' infrastructure styles that they argue are emerging as a particular set of responses to the systemic pressures of climate change and resource constraint confronting cities and networks. The book outlines the key elements of these new strategies that are being touted as emblematic new configurations that can be unproblematically mobilised, transferred and inserted into other contexts and critically assesses their implications and relevance to other urban contexts.World Cities and Climate Change, therefore, subjects the relationships between cities and socio-technical networks to a critical scrutiny of their politics and processes. In doing this it addresses two key questions: To what extent are 'visions' of future urbanism socially and ecologically 'progressive' and concerned with planetary ecological security? Or are they promoting the 're-bounding' of ecological security in relation to particular social groups and places predicated on new - often hidden - interdependencies?