Concluding Reflections: Towards Alternative Peri-Urban Futures?

This final chapter summarizes the main contributions of the book and provides some ideas on carrying forward the research and action research agenda presented in this book. The peri-urban requires concerted engagement and new, transformative, policy approaches. Continued reliance on formal policy approaches is likely to have only a limited impact or even to be counterproductive. Strong partnerships across academics and civil society organizations are required in order to create a stronger scientific discourse on the peri-urban, as well as to catalyze changes within and beyond peri-urban spaces. While selective state apathy towards the peri-urban needs correction, the messy and transitory nature of peri-urban spaces will require engagements across a wide spectrum of actors beyond the state. An understanding of these approaches is necessary before prescribing “policy reforms” for the peri-urban.

How Does the Concept of Resilient City Work in Practice? Planning and Achievements

In the past decade, resilient cities (RCs) have gained extensive attention in academic and political debates as a vision of urban futures. In particular, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Resilient City 100 Program (RC100), a number of cities worldwide have pushed this concept forward from theory to practice through their RC plans/strategies. However, there is widespread doubt regarding how much this holistic idea of the future built environment contributes to urban practice. After developing a scoring evaluation matrix based on the synthesis of existing RC assessment frameworks, this review scrutinizes the plans, reports, city leaders’ speeches, official websites and academic reviews of five representative resilient cities and investigates their motivations, planning and achievements. The results demonstrate a huge theoretical and practical gap in RC: while RC plans attempt to expand as comprehensively as possible from cities’ initially narrow motivations, their achievements in implementation are limited. Although RC provides more holistic solutions to the cities, the limited resources mean that cities have to prioritize their urgent issues in their everyday practice. This paper calls for designating more feasible and specific features in RC visions and maintaining regular alignments from planning to actions in future RC practice.

Cities and Climate Change

This review paper considers the disjuncture between the rapid pace of climate change and the more sluggish ability of cities to fully implement effective strategies of climate change adaptation and mitigation. We will refer to this as the ‘slow city–quick climate change’ dilemma. Climate change is accelerating, quickly rendering obsolete previous urban forms inadequate, while structural adjustments to cities are slower moving. Cities around the world were largely built for previous climate regimes. In the short to medium term, there is a mismatch between the climate regime that cities were designed for and the climate regime they now inhabit. The paper is divided into four parts: a brief review of climate change in general; climate change in cities; a review of climate change adaptation and mitigation in cities; and finally, a discussion of urban futures in the time of climate regime change.