Abstract
Different disciplines are grappling with the concept of ‘urban transformation’ reflecting its planetary importance and urgency. A recent systematic review traces the emergence of a normative epistemic community that is concerned with helping make sustainable urban transformation a reality. Our contribution to this growing body of work springs out of a recent initiative at the World Resources Institute, namely, the WRI Ross Prize for Cities, a global award for transformative projects that have ignited sustainable changes in their city. In this paper we explain the competition-based approach that was used to source transformative initiatives and relate our findings to existing currents in urban transformation scholarship and key debates. We focus on one of the questions at the heart of the normative urban transformation agenda: what does urban transformation look like in practice? Based on an analysis of the five finalists, we describe urban transformation as encompassing a plurality of contextual and relative changes, which may progress and accelerate positively, or regress over time. An evaluative approach that considers varying ‘degrees’ and ‘types’ of urban transformation is proposed to establish meaning within single cases and across several cases of urban transformation.
Highlights
There has been a lively debate among urban scholars and practitioners about the potential and mechanisms of ‘urban transformation’
Without establishing conceptual markers for urban transformation, there is a risk that the term remains little more than a catchphrase [32]
This is important because a ‘transformation’ paradigm is beginning to take hold in research, policy and funding practice, often without grounding in sound evidence
Summary
There has been a lively debate among urban scholars and practitioners about the potential and mechanisms of ‘urban transformation’. Despite internal diversity, there is concentration in terms of a focus on higher income cities (in particular, Western Europe) and megacities, which are published within a relatively small radius of academic publications [5,8], and a larger sphere of grey (often not peer-reviewed) publications Our contribution to this emerging community of practitioners is aligned with a recent call for strategic extensions and alternative research methods to complement and push the horizon of the existing empirical knowledge base and methodological repertoire [8,9]. We argue that this approach helped select high impact examples of urban transformation—a significant achievement, given the aforementioned dearth of real-world examples of deep urban transformations.
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