Abstract
Cities are key for sustainability and the radical systemic changes required to enable equitable human development within planetary boundaries. Their particular role in this regard has become the subject of an emerging and highly interdisciplinary scientific debate. Drawing on a qualitative literature review, this paper identifies and scrutinizes the principal fields involved, asking for their respective normative orientation, interdisciplinary constitution, theories and methods used, and empirical basis to provide orientations for future research. It recognizes four salient research epistemologies, each focusing on a distinct combination of drivers of change: (A) transforming urban metabolisms and political ecologies; (B) configuring urban innovation systems for green economies; (C) building adaptive urban communities and ecosystems; and (D) empowering urban grassroots niches and social innovation. The findings suggest that future research directed at cities and systemic change towards sustainability should (1) explore interrelations between the above epistemologies, using relational geography and governance theory as boundary areas; (2) conceive of cities as places shaped by and shaping interactions between multiple socio-technical and social-ecological systems; (3) focus on agency across systems and drivers of change, and develop corresponding approaches for intervention and experimentation; and (4) rebalance the empirical basis and methods employed, strengthening transdisciplinarity in particular.
Highlights
From the origins of the concept of “sustainable development” until today, there is a well substantiated concern about the role and contribution of cities
Boolean search terms were formed to capture an explicit concern for both cities and systemic change, expressed through the adoption of particular terminology (“system transition”; “system transformation”; “sustainability transition”; “sustainability transformation” AND urban; city; cities)
Based on a methodical literature review, this paper has discussed the interconnections emerging between the two broad interdisciplinary research fields of urban studies and systemic change studies
Summary
From the origins of the concept of “sustainable development” until today, there is a well substantiated concern about the role and contribution of cities It can be traced from the Brundtland report and its analysis of the “urban challenge” to the more recent identification of an “urban opportunity” [1], or the formulation of a dedicated “urban” sustainable development goal [2]. This concern refers to the quantitative weight of cities in terms of urban population, metabolism and form in a quickly urbanizing world. This has increasingly been related to the necessity of understanding and influencing the complex systemic interactions between social, ecological and economic processes across spatial and temporal scales that are shaping and shaped by cities cf. [6,7,8]
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