Not so global climate change? Representations of post-socialist cities in the academic writings on climate change and urban areas

Abstract

ABSTRACT Climate change is the epitome of a global issue. Cities and their inhabitants face locally specific, yet still globally shared and interconnected problems from heat waves, storms, coastal or fluvial floods to water scarcity, all of which puts pressure on their infrastructure as well as social institutions. Yet, it has been argued that academic research on cities and climate change has so far represented the urban world fractionally, as most case studies of cities are from the developed world. Moreover, urban scholars have been criticized for not being able to fully grasp the transformations that cities are undergoing, nor being able to apply critical urban theory to this field. This article uses these stimuli to critically review current internationally published research on “post-socialist cities” in the context of climate change. It observes how empirical research in this multidisciplinary area is, first, still relatively scarce and especially very recent, and second, that it is largely disconnected from conceptual debates led in urban studies. I argue that this underdeveloped discussion not only slows down development of a more critical academic perspective on the issue that would be based in urban studies of Central and East European cities, but it can also impact how responses to climate change are thought through by local actors.