[MUSIC] Hello, I'm Harriet Bulkeley. For over 15 years I've been investigating how cities around the world are responding to climate change. As our cities grow, and the effects of climate change become more serious, municipal governments and other actors have become more concerned about what cities can do to combat the risks of climate change, and to reduce their impact on the changing environment. When cities first started to respond to climate change in the 1990s, - the 'Mark 1.0' version if you like, the focus was on actions taken by municipal governments on a largely voluntary basis. Plenty of plans and policies were developed to help cities meet ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by over 20% in under a decade in some cases. But municipal governments found themselves constrained in what they could do through these routes alone. From the early 2000s, we can identify a new wave of action - Cities and Climate Change 'Mark 2.0'. Over the past decade, we have seen a greater range and diversity of cities getting involved with responses to climate change. A number of city networks formed, through which municipal governments cooperate internationally, and a whole host of partners from the private sector to civil society are getting involved and trying to address climate change at the urban level. Part of the reason for this shift is a change in how climate change is seen as a policy problem. Rather than focusing on targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we now see an increasing emphasis on the need for decarbonisation - that is, for uncoupling economic growth and social wellbeing from the use of carbon based fuels. As this requires a more systematic change across urban areas and infrastructure networks, there has also been a shift in how and where climate governance has taken place in the city. Some of you may be familiar with the [children's book] hunt for 'Wally' or 'Waldo' A similar hunt is now on for where we can find climate governance. As urban climate responses come to focus on decarbonisation and a more diverse range of cities and actors get involved, we can find the 'Waldorf' of climate governance not just in City Hall, in this case in London, or in the corridors or walls of private sector organisations, such as the Co-op Tower in Manchester with the largest solar facade in the UK, but also in the mundane design and operation decisions being made in the provision of everyday services - waste, water, transport, and energy. Decisions about whether we heat buildings to 21 degrees, or how much space we allow for bikes on the streets, are also then climate decisions and political decisions. Looking at climate governance in this way has helped us to recognise a new phenomenon - the growth of urban 'experiments' designed to respond to climate change. In our search, we noticed that many of the responses that were being developed at the urban scale were referred as 'innovations', 'living laboratories', test-beds and 'experiments'. What does this language of experimentation mean then? It is not the same as the kind of experiment we might be used to - one carried out in a controlled laboratory environment by a professional scientist. But rather it is a more common way in which we use the term 'experiment' when we are trying out something new. For example, a new haircut, a fashion look, or even a recipe for chocolate cake. Cities are experimenting with responses to climate change as we are 'trying on for size' new approaches to developing technology, organising society and planning urban development. In a survey we conducted for a research project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, we found that in over 100 global cities, there were over 630 different urban climate change experiments taking place. Interestingly, our work found that there was no region of the world more or less likely to have such experiments in its cities - it seems that experimentation, as a response to climate change, is now a global phenomenon. Living in Sweden you soon notice how many kinds of urban experiments there are here. For example in Stockholm, there are innovations with smart grids and smart housing taking place. In Malmö, some of the most radical approaches to urban planning that have put decarbonisation on the agenda are happening in Western Harbor and in the new Hyllie development, which aims to be carbon neutral. And just a short hop from Malmö over the water to Copenhagen, many climate innovations are underway, including new measures to increase the amount of cycling used as a proportion of modal share. For many, such experiments might seem rather ephemeral because they're small in scale and often short term - like a field of 1000 flowers blooming, they're here today, gone tomorrow. But our research suggests that they are now so common that we have to take them seriously as a site of climate governance and understand how and why urban actors are using this approach rather than traditional methods of urban planning or policy to tackle climate change. So just why is experimentation taking place as a means of governing climate change at the urban scale? We find three related explanations. First, municipal governments have limited powers to act on climate change on their own and need to develop projects or specific interventions that attract other organisations to work with them. Second, private sector and community actors also find the urban environment as an important site for action, but they lack the power or capacity to intervene at the level of the city as a whole. And finally, projects that might have taken place in the past without being thought about in climate change terms are increasingly seen through a climate change lens. So in a sense, climate change has come to be a ubiquitous reason for taking lots of different and disparate forms of action at the urban level. Like any response to climate change, urban experimentation is not neutral. It is political. Some agendas and some interests are promoted over others, while others are marginalised. We find that there are a lot of mainstream actors involved in experimentation, from municipal governments to private sector interests, and international development funding. This may mean that experimentation provides a means through which they can continue to replicate business as usual. And some would argue that this will lead to the same patterns of urban development that have led to the problems of climate change in the first place. But it may also mean that experimentation provides a window through which the approaches and practices of these organisations can be changed. In my own research, I've continued to look into how these experiments can lead to new best practice solutions that can reduce our carbon footprint and help us achieve new forms of urban sustainability that are both environmentally effective and socially just. [MUSIC]
