Exploring the Extent, Selected Topics and Governance Modes of Urban Sustainability Transformations

Abstract

With cities acknowledged as key players for active involvement towards more sustainability (Parnell 2016), the city – or the urban scale – is seen as a, or even the, decisive field that can make transformations towards sustainability work (WBGU 2011; UBA 2015b). And, there is “general agreement that effective and integrated solutions can only be found and efficiently implemented through cities and urban areas” (McCormick et al. 2013, p. 2). Cities are, today, assigned a role as pioneers or frontrunners of sustainability transformations (Wolfram 2014; Wolfram and Frantzeskaki 2016). Nevertheless, it still needs to be seen whether these aspirations and expectations about the role of cities is only born out of desperation about slow progress toward sustainability or if they can actually become the real focal point of transformation. The increasingly important notion of “transformation” in policy and research, when talking about changes that need to be undertaken, provokes the question about possible differences between the terms transformation and sustainable development. In this regard, Brand (2016, p. 24) has argued that the term transformation is “more radical and more attractive than the term sustainable development” and stresses both the urgent need for action and the “how to come to” the implementation of sustainability. For Brand (2016, p. 24), transformation is the “new critical orthodoxy”, characterized by a radical problem diagnosis, promising far-reaching change, but also involving a relatively incremental understanding of the processes and steps of social change, in order to cope with the problems. Loorbach concludes that “Sustainable Development itself has become part of the problem” because it has become part of the established regime and has primarily served to make it a little less unsustainable (Loorbach 2014, p. 32). According to this ambitious target, we explore three aspects of urban transformations: extent, topics, and governance (UBA 2015b).