When cities broke into the global stage: 20 years since the publication of ‘Cities and Climate Change’
回顾《城市与气候变化》一书如何确立城市在气候变化治理中的核心角色,四位学者从不同学科反思其遗产,探讨城市行动与国家不行动之间的张力、城市在全球治理中的边缘地位、城市作为创新空间的可能性,以及反殖民政治的必要性。
This short symposium revisits the book Cities and Climate Change by Harriet Bulkeley and Michelle Betsill and its role in establishing cities as central actors in climate change governance. The contributors to this symposium reflect on the research themes and the book’s legacy from their disciplinary perspectives. The first response explores the tensions between the elevation of cities as sites for climate action and the persistent lack of state action, arguing for meaningful public participation and a labour of making visible how city-based practices respond to climate change. The second response examines how the book has enabled generations of scholars to appreciate the complex constitution of city actors and how they interact/enact global climate governance yet remain frustratingly marginal in the discipline of International Relations. The third response explores how the book positioned the urban as a problem space, a manageable scale of intervention, and a political space with the capacity to enact innovation, triggering new questions about the potential and limits of the expanding responsibilities of cities. The fourth response argues that as cities become active in adaptation, they need to engage in an anticolonial politics of love and hospitality that sheds ‘security’ and makes the self vulnerable to ‘others’ for an effective response to climate change. The symposium concludes with a recap by Betsill and Bulkeley which underscores the variety of interdisciplinary debates that the book has generated, and its influence on current thinking on debates on climate change governance.