On the Connection Between Urban Sustainability Transformations and Multiple Societal Crises

Abstract

Crises are a frequent companion of global urbanization; within the last decades, a wide range of crises has influenced the fates of cities and their inhabitants. When reviewing the first two decades of this century, we might feel that we are living in a “time of constant crises”; starting with the real estate and financial crisis in 2007/2008, a wide range of subsequent crises has spread all over the world: various economic, real estate, and bank crises, as well as the Euro debt crisis, which have led to political crises with significant social repercussions, also across Europe (Funke et al. 2015). In addition, a number of wars and violent conflicts such as, e.g., those in Syria and Northern Iraq have caused new crises; in particular, the increased refugee migration towards Europe (preferably to large cities of some European countries), an area that still has to cope with the consequences of the above-mentioned crises. Multiple environmental crises are receiving much less attention at the moment (Gawel 2014). These include biodiversity loss or climate change that evokes extreme events, such as floods or droughts that also regularly impact on cities or urban regions. Last but not least, the increasing demographic polarization of the world's population, with population decrease and ageing in the developed countries and further population growth in the Global South, are perceived as a long-term crisis that is leading, e.g., to increasing south-north migration at a global scale. Given a situation of “multiple crises”, i.e., crises that differ in their nature but are characterized by many interlinkages concerning their roots and impacts, we can observe emerging crisis-driven policies. These policies vary according to the type of crisis: bank rescues and austerity policies to tackle the financial crisis, diplomacy and border closures to regulate the immigration crisis, massive international climate-protection agendas and meetings to address the climate crisis that are characterized by particular interests and symbolic declarations, and so on.