scholarly journals Towards an Intersectional Perspective in Cycling

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiffany Lam
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Socioeconomic Disparities ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
Multiple Systems ◽  
Spatial Inequalities ◽  
Urban Cycling ◽  
Policy Agendas ◽  
Mode Of Transport

In recent years, concerns about climate change have elevated cycling on urban policy agendas worldwide. The rapid implementation of temporary cycling infrastructure in cities across the globe during the Covid-19 pandemic has further elevated the importance of cycling in facilitating a green and just recovery. However, if cycling is to be a key part of a green and just recovery for cities, then an intersectional perspective is needed to ensure that cycling can be an equitable and inclusive mode of transport. An intersectional perspective acknowledges that there are multiple systems of oppression, which interact in complex ways to compound inequalities and reinforce certain power dynamics. Structural and spatial inequalities contour urban mobility, as evidenced by well-documented gender, racial and socioeconomic disparities in cycling. This paper provides an overview of gender and other inequalities in urban cycling and makes the case for adopting an intersectional perspective to cycling policies and infrastructures, so that cycling in cities can be more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

scholarly journals Evidence of Green Areas, Cycle Infrastructure and Attractive Destinations Working Together in Development on Urban Cycling

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (17) ◽  
pp. 4730 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Sergio Campos-Sánchez ◽  
Luis Miguel Valenzuela-Montes ◽  
Francisco Javier Abarca-Álvarez
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Influential Factors ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
Urban Cycling ◽  
Green Areas ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Sustainable Urban Mobility ◽  
Mode Of Transport ◽  
University City ◽  
The University

The built environment influences and promotes cycling that has now become a challenge for sustainable urban mobility in many cities where this mode of transport carries little weight. This is the case for Granada (Spain), a medium-sized city in southern Europe, which as a university city and with lots of green areas, could find potential supportive factors to promote cycling. Website-apps with a Global Positioning System (GPS), such as Ciclogreen that encourage active accessibility try to promote cycling and are supported by the University of Granada. The aim of this work is to assess the capacity of green areas and some influential factors of their built environment to attract cycling routes. To this end, a spatial analysis was made and interpreted by a statistical model to check the correlation between these factors and a high number of cycling routes through or near the green areas. The results show a high number of cycling routes within urban surroundings that include green areas, cycle lanes, university facilities, and public car parks in proximity relationships. Identifying synergies among these urban factors and the information and incentive coming from a digital catalyst in shape on an app could be useful in urban planning for cycling.

scholarly journals Sharing Lisboa: A Digital Social Market to Promote Sustainable and Energy Efficient Behaviours

Climate ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Catarina C. Rolim ◽  
Patrícia Baptista
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
New City ◽  
Social Market ◽  
The City ◽  
Academic Year ◽  
Change Mitigation

Several solutions and city planning policies have emerged to promote climate change and sustainable cities. The Sharing Cities program has the ambition of contributing to climate change mitigation by improving urban mobility, energy efficiency in buildings and reducing carbon emissions by successfully engaging citizens and fostering local-level innovation. A Digital Social Market (DSM), named Sharing Lisboa, was developed in Lisbon, Portugal, supported by an application (APP), enabling the exchange of goods and services bringing citizens together to support a common cause: three schools competing during one academic year (2018/2019) to win a final prize with the engagement of school community and surrounding community. Sharing Lisboa aimed to promote behaviour change and the adoption of energy-saving behaviours such as cycling and walking with the support of local businesses. Participants earned points that reverted to the cause (school) they supported. A total of 1260 users was registered in the APP, collecting more than 850,000 points through approximately 17,000 transactions. This paper explores how the DSM has the potential to become a new city service promoting its sustainable development. Furthermore, it is crucial for this concept to reach economic viability through a business model that is both profitable and useful for the city, businesses and citizens, since investment will be required for infrastructure and management of such a market.

Resilience to climate change in Ghanaian cities and its implications for urban policy and planning

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Mensah ◽  
Owusu Amponsah ◽  
Patrick Opoku ◽  
Divine Kwaku Ahadzie ◽  
Stephen Appiah Takyi
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Policy And Planning

Indigenous climate change adaptation: New directions for emerging scholarship

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110224
Author(s):  
Danielle Emma Johnson ◽  
Meg Parsons ◽  
Karen Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Adaptation ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Climate Adaptation ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Small Body ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Cultural Continuity ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Indigenous Development

Although Indigenous peoples’ perspectives and concerns have not always been accommodated in climate change adaptation research and practice, a burgeoning literature is helping to reframe and decolonise climate adaptation in line with Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences. In this review, we bring together climate adaptation, decolonising and intersectional scholarship to chart the progress that has been made in better analysing and responding to climate change in Indigenous contexts. We identify a wealth of literature helping to decolonise climate adaptation scholarship and praxis by attending to colonial and neo-colonial injustices implicated in Indigenous peoples’ climate vulnerability, taking seriously Indigenous peoples’ relational ontologies, and promoting adaptation that draws on Indigenous capacities and aspirations for self-determination and cultural continuity. Despite calls to interrogate heterogenous experiences of climate change within Indigenous communities, the decolonising climate and adaptation scholarship has made limited advances in this area. We examine the small body of research that takes an intersectional approach to climate adaptation and explores how the multiple subjectivities and identities that Indigenous peoples occupy produce unique vulnerabilities, capacities and encounters with adaptation policy. We suggest the field might be expanded by drawing on related studies from Indigenous development, natural resource management, conservation, feminism, health and food sovereignty. Greater engagement with intersectionality works to drive innovation in decolonising climate adaptation scholarship and practice. It can mitigate the risk of maladaptation, avoid entrenchment of inequitable power dynamics, and ensures that even the most marginal groups within Indigenous communities benefit from adaptation policies and programmes.

Leveraging Bogotá: Sustainable development, global philanthropy and the rise of urban solutionism

Urban Studies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (11) ◽  
pp. 2263-2281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Montero
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Sustainable Development ◽  
International Development ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Global Development ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
Development Agenda ◽  
Policy Solutions

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is marked by the consolidation of sustainability as a key guiding principle and an emphasis on cities as a potential solution to global development problems. However, in the absence of an agreement on how to implement sustainable development in cities, a set of urban policy solutions and ‘best practices’ became the vehicles through which the sustainable development agenda is spreading worldwide. This article shows that the rapid circulation of Bogotá as a model of sustainable transport since the 2000s reflects an increasing focus of the international development apparatus on urban policy solutions as an arena to achieve global development impacts, what I call the ‘leveraging cities’ logic in this article. This logic emerges at a particular historical conjuncture characterised by: (1) the rising power of global philanthropy to set development agendas; (2) the generalisation of solutionism as a strategy of action among development and philanthropic organisations; and (3) the increasing attention on cities as solutions for global development problems, particularly around sustainability and climate change. By connecting urban policy mobilities debates with development studies this article seeks to unpack the emergence, and the limits, of ‘leveraging cities’ as a proliferating global development practice. These urban policy solutions are far from being a clear framework of action. Rather, their circulation becomes a ‘quick fix’ to frame the problem of sustainable development given the unwillingness of development and philanthropic organisations to intervene in the structural factors and multiple scales that produce environmental degradation and climate change.

scholarly journals Computing climate-smart urban land use with the Integrated Urban Complexity model (IUCm 1.0)

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 525-539 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Cremades ◽  
Philipp S. Sommer
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Urban Land ◽  
Urban Land Use ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
Urban Forms ◽  
Complex Features ◽  
Combat Climate Change

Abstract. Cities are fundamental to climate change mitigation, and although there is increasing understanding about the relationship between emissions and urban form, this relationship has not been used to provide planning advice for urban land use so far. Here we present the Integrated Urban Complexity model (IUCm 1.0) that computes “climate-smart urban forms”, which are able to cut emissions related to energy consumption from urban mobility in half. Furthermore, we show the complex features that go beyond the normal debates about urban sprawl vs. compactness. Our results show how to reinforce fractal hierarchies and population density clusters within climate risk constraints to significantly decrease the energy consumption of urban mobility. The new model that we present aims to produce new advice about how cities can combat climate change.

“Change Agents” on Two Wheels: Claiming Community and Contesting Spatial Inequalities through Cycling in Los Angeles

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 965-982
Author(s):  
Jennifer Candipan
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Spatial Inequalities ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
Urban Cycling

This study uses participant observation to examine how an all–female collective in Los Angeles uses urban cycling culture as a way to contest inequalities and advocate for social change in communities of color. Bridging the literatures on gentrification and social movements, I examine how the collective uses the bicycle as a unifying tool to draw disparate individuals together and, through the group's practices and rituals, generates a shared sense of collective identity and politicized consciousness embedded within the uneven spatial development of Los Angeles. I demonstrate how this politicized consciousness drives a collective spirit of resistance that challenges gentrification by reimagining and re–embodying space through organized actions and everyday practices. I find that organized anti–gentrification resistance is not merely reactionary, but rather entails pre–figurative action and visioning for space and community. Overall, findings speak more broadly to how communities of color facing exclusion and marginalization make claims to space and community.

Climate Change in Foreign Policy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Below
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
International System ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Environmental Threat ◽  
Academic Scholarship

Climate change emerged in the late 20th century as a topic of global concern and thus a prominent foreign policy issue. Academic scholarship on the international community’s response to the environmental threat was not far behind. Scholars apply a number of theoretical constructs in their search to explain why states behave the way they do in their coordinated approaches to addressing climate-related activities. Of these, systemic theories such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism figure prominently. State-centric theories that consider changing power dynamics in the international system, the importance of evolving coalitions, as well as the role of hegemonic and leadership states, provide contending explanations. Nonstate actors, especially the climate regime itself which has received substantial attention, are similarly considered important variables affecting foreign policy. Constructivist arguments emphasizing the influence of ideas, norms, and identity have become increasingly common, especially as they relate to developmental disparities, “common but differential responsibilities,” and climate justice. While there has been less focus on the role of individual actors, domestic-level variables such as concerns for economic growth, reputation, and capacity to act, as well as multivariable explanations, continue to provide insight. In contrast to the diversity of explanations proposed, the young field is relatively homogeneous in terms of methodological approaches, with qualitative case studies or small-N analyses being most common. If history is a trustworthy guide, however, as on-the-ground, practical approaches to global climate governance evolve, so too will scholarly approaches to its study.

Sustainable City as Fantasy

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Policy Maker ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Sustainable City

There can be little doubt that our current ecological crisis is being framed through the idea of sustainability. As we plan to deal with anthropogenic climate change, we talk of becoming more sustainable. We are projecting a sustainability vision; a certain future that we desire to achieve. In this paper I offer a Lacanian interpretation of this vision, arguing that we must understand how ideas such as the “sustainable city” operate as fantasy constructs. Here I want to emphasize the particular operation of this fantasy, since it is the very form of this operation that stymies the true politicization of climate change. The paper draws on Žižek's reading of Lacan to illustrate how sustainability (as fantasy) relates to our knowledge of climate change. Two brief illustrations of the operation of sustainability as fantasy are then outlined. The first draws on recent city planning in London, UK, to show how fantasy has gentrified the traumatic elements of climate change. The second illustration draws on a brief conversation with an urban policy-maker to sketch out how transgression is a functioning part of sustainability fantasies. In conclusion the paper turns to the question of politics through a relating of Lacan's psychoanalytical cure with a politicization of economy.

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