Better residential than ethnic discrimination! Reconciling audit andinterview findings in the Parisian housing market

François Bonnet (CNRS, UMR Pacte), Etienne Lalé (Department of Economics, University of Bristol), Mirna Safi (Department of Sociology and OSC, Sciences Po) and Etienne Wasmer (Department of Economics and LIEPP, Sciences Po)

Abstract can be found: http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/07/28/0042098015596107.abstract?rss=1 

We started out this research with two questions. First, is there a banlieue effect operating in the Parisian housing market, i.e. does living in a deprived neighborhood per se undermine the prospects for residential mobility? Second, is it possible to separate this effect from discrimination caused by another potential stigma, namely the ethnic origin (North-African background) of those living in the French banlieues? Answering these questions is of importance for a broad range of academics studying discrimination and the cumulative effects of residential and ethnic/racial inequalities. The French context makes this task all the more challenging and interesting. Indeed, the French Republican model embraces a color-blind, universalistic model of race relations, which notably implies rejecting ethnicity as the basis of categories for official statistics. Recent studies, partly in the aftermath of the 2005 urban riots in France, have challenged the myth of a color-blind society.[i] They provide evidence of discrimination in the labor market. However, at present, there is almost no audit study based evidence of discrimination in the housing market in France.

A distinctive feature of our research is to make complementary use of two methodological designs. We conducted: (i) an experimental paired-testing audit study involving (fictitious) housing applicants and (ii) a series of face-to-face interviews with real-estate agents in Paris and the Paris region. Thus, our research has potential of offering both statistical and discursive evidence on discrimination in the housing market. After juxtaposing the findings from the audit and the interviews, we do find an interesting paradox:

• While the current (alleged) residence of housing applicants has a significant negative effect in the audit, real estate agents clearly deny its relevance as a discriminatory factor affecting access to housing;
• Real estate agents overwhelmingly report that ethnic origin has a discriminatory impact, whereas ethnic origin has no significant effect in the audit when we control for the current residence of housing applicants.

We offer several hypotheses that may solve this apparent paradox. We especially favour the following two hypotheses which, in our view, should not be seen as mutually exclusive.

First, the findings could reflect statistical discrimination whereby real estate agents seek to proxy the risk of non-payment of the rent (insolvency). In particular, residential and ethnic origins could correlate with access to housing simply because real estate agents use these characteristics to infer the risk that truly matter to them. Real estate agents deny the relevance of residential origin as a discriminatory factor with good reasons, in that only insolvency is relevant. In the meantime, if residential origin is strongly correlated with the risk of insolvency, then controlling for this variable explains why ethnic origin does not play a statistically significant role in the audit study data.

            

The other hypothesis is that there is an ethnic stigma and that residential origin is used to proxy ethnicity. That is, it may be that overt information about ethnic origin (like, for instance, an African name) is not used to discriminate against housing applicants because such biased decisions appear highly undesirable. Strong correlates with ethnicity (like, for instance, residential origin) are instead used to select housing applicants. This would explain why real estate agents report that residential origin is not a discriminatory factor while ethnic origin is. This would also help understanding why, in the audit study, overtly signalling ethnicity through the housing applicant's name did not result in discriminatory behaviours.

The more important conclusion of our article is that the complementary use of different methodological designs helps overcome the shortcomings of each. In this respect, the paradox we find is anything but a weakness of this research: it proved very instrumental in developing rich hypotheses to understand discrimination.

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[i]      To our knowledge, the most comprehensive study is the audit conducted jointly by the ministry of labour and the International Labour Organization in 2008. The results, presented in a report written by Eric Cediey and Fabrice Foroni (“Discrimination in access to employment on grounds of foreign origin in France: A national survey of discrimination based on the testing methodology of the International Labour Office”), reveal  that employers prefer candidates perceived as being of “national” origin (French) to strictly identical candidates of African immigrant background in 80% of all cases.

13 out 17 organisations did not comply with CCTV regulations

Keith Spiller (Open University, UK)

Recently I rang the telephone numbers displayed on CCTV signs. After all, this is my right. By law CCTV cameras must be accompanied by signs that notify me I am being recorded and the signs must also provide contact information, just in case I want to see my images. When I sought those images from 17 different cameras only 4 provided my images.

I have been researching in the area of surveillance and surveillance studies for a number of years now and I have a deep interest in how laws governing aspects of surveillance actually work, as well as how people react and live with surveillance. CCTV is probably one of the most recognisable aspects of surveillance; indeed, it is the symbol that most often accompanies any mention of surveillance in the media. So, what better system to examine just how the regulations work in an urban setting.

The control of CCTV in the UK falls under the remit of the Data Protection Act (1998) and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Cameras monitoring private and public spaces for security purposes must adhere to the regulations set out in the Act.  Specifically CCTV operators and data managers must notify people that they are being recorded, must store images with ‘integrity’ and must provide data to anyone requesting their images.

On a mild November morning I walked around the centre of a south of England city and deliberately stood under visible CCTV cameras, in an effort to get myself caught on CCTV.  In total 17 cameras recorded my movement at 2 shopping malls, 3 department stores, 4 banks, 1 stadium, 1 railway station, 1 bus station, 1 university, 1 open street system, 1 town hall, 1 government building and 1 museum.

7 of these cameras had no visible contact information on their signs and of the 10 that did, 4 of the telephone numbers were dead or produced no response. I then resorted to the organisation’s webpages to find contact numbers. Which proved more fruitful, however even when contact was made, staff often did not have the correct information to hand or where unsure how to deal with my requests.

The standard way of asking for CCTV images is to submit a Subject Access Requests (SAR) and this is what I then did, writing to all 17 organisations. The responses I received detailed how on 4 occasions I did not appear in the footage, this despite standing for up to 2 minutes under cameras. My SARs on two occasion got ‘lost’ as the organisations had no record of receiving them, on other occasions my images had been deleted as systems automatically deleted files after 7 days -  this despite making my request within 24 hours of standing under the cameras. Further responses demanded £20 plus VAT to process the request, even when the fee an organisation can charge is only £10.

Evident is the poor ability of organisations to deal with requests for CCTV images or simply they don’t want the hassle, or quite possibly the camera are not on. Nevertheless, what has become clear is the ease of access to urban CCTV images is certainly not as straightforward as the legislation would like it to be. For more detail on this research please see ‘Experiences of accessing CCTV data: theurban topologies of subject access requests’ published in Urban Studies.

Neighborhood Ethnic Composition and Outcomes for Low-Income Latino and African American Children

George Galster (Wayne State University) and Anna Santiago (Michigan State University)

Abstract found at: http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/07/28/0042098015598067.full 

Investigating the adverse consequences of residential segregation for ethnic minority people has a long and distinguished social scientific history in the U.S.  Rigorous studies have identified substantial socioeconomic and health costs that segregation imposes on Latinos and African Americans, though often with contingencies based on ethnicity and gender.

What these quantitative studies do not reveal, however, are the complex underlying pathways through which segregation exacts its toll.  Do the primary mechanism(s) operate through confining minorities in inferior neighborhoods that constrain opportunities because they offer inadequate public services, more intense pollution, poorer access to employment, higher rates of violence and/or concentrated poverty and joblessness?  Or, does segregation operate independently of these ethnically correlated aspects of geographic context and instead work through ethnic composition of the neighborhood per se?  Might concentrations of ethnic minorities impose costs (or benefits) regardless of the particulars of the places where they are concentrated, due to socialization processes within minority communities and/or stereotyping and stigmatizing processes by majority populations external to them?  Stated differently, the issue needing empirical investigation is the degree to which ethnic residential segregation affects the life chances of minorities irrespective of the particular features of the places where they are concentrated beyond disproportionate ethnic clustering.

In this paper we focus on a variety of outcomes for individual children, youth and young adults (“children” hereafter) from the groups commonly thought to suffer the greatest harms from residential segregation in the U.S.: low-income Latino and African American families.  Our original approach bridges two traditionally distinct literatures: “consequences of segregation” and “neighborhood effects.”  The forces of segregation operating at the regional scale inevitably generate one direct outcome at the neighborhood scale: increasing exposures of minority children to neighbors from other minority groups.  They generate another outcome indirectly following from the concentration of minorities: shaping the geographic flows of resources (financial, institutional, human, environmental) and thereby the opportunities and quality of life available to minority children in those neighborhoods.  Potentially both direct and indirect effects of segregation affect child developmental outcomes by altering their neighborhood contexts.  Distinguishing these two effects constitutes the core empirical test of our paper. 

Specifically, our research questions for low-income Latino and African American children are:

            To what extent are the odds of ever experiencing a variety of childhood outcomes in the domains of health, exposure to and use of violence, education and fertility related to the percentages of Latino and African American residents in their census tracts? [i.e., the direct effects of segregation]

            If so, to what degree do these relationships persist when controlling for neighborhood indicators of socioeconomic status, safety, housing stock, institutional resources and environmental conditions ?[ i.e., the indirect effects of segregation]

We answer these questions through a stratified, logistic regression analysis of data on minority children that we collected through a retrospective survey of Latino and African American families whose children resided in Denver (CO) Housing Authority (DHA) dwellings during at least part of their childhood.  This program represents an unusual natural experiment holding great potential for overcoming geographic selection bias because assignment of households on the DHA waiting list to public housing mimics a random process, thereby permitting causal inferences about neighborhood indicators and child outcomes.  Because DHA dwellings are located in a wide variety of neighborhoods throughout Denver County, it also offers an unusual opportunity of observing how low-income minority children fare in places that differ on a host of other neighborhood characteristics beside ethnic composition that we measure comprehensively. 

Regarding our first research question, results show that low-income, Latino and (especially) African American children growing up amid greater concentrations of African American neighbors in Denver pay penalties across several outcome domains, controlling for their own, households’ and caregivers’ characteristics.  By contrast, growing up among greater concentrations of Latino neighbors is associated with both positive and negative outcomes for African American and (especially) Latino children. 

Specifically, low-income African American children living in a neighborhood with a standard deviation-higher percentage of African American residents are predicted to have greater odds of: (1) an asthma diagnosis by 52 percent; (2) witnessing violence in the neighborhood by 62 percent; (3) being victimized in the neighborhood by 78 percent; (4) using violence themselves by 39 percent; and (5) having a child outside of marriage by 51 percent.  These associations with harmful outcomes are more limited for low-income Latino children.  Latino children living in a neighborhood with a standard deviation-higher percentage of African American residents are predicted to have greater odds of: (1) being victims of neighborhood crime by 82 percent; and (2) repeating a grade in school by three percent. 

By contrast, concentrations of Latino neighbors are associated with positive and negative outcomes for children of both ethnicities.  Latino children living in a neighborhood with a standard deviation-higher percentage of Latino residents are predicted to have 56 percent greater odds of witnessing violence, but lower odds of: (1) using violence by 35 percent; (2) dropping out before a diploma by two percent; and (3) having children outside of marriage by 29 percent.  Of interest, the positive dropping out result also applied to African American children in our sample.  However, if they were to live amid a standard deviation-higher percentage of Latino residents they are predicted to have 51 percent greater odds of being victimized in the neighborhood. 

Our second research question asks the extent to which the aforementioned associations persist when a host of non-ethnic neighborhood indicators are added to the models.  Results reveal that all the aforementioned associations between African American neighborhood composition and adverse outcomes for African American children disappear when other aspects of residential context are controlled.  The same is true for Latino children, with one exception (odds of repeating a grade).  Similarly, the few aforementioned associations between African American neighborhood composition and adverse outcomes for African American children disappear when other aspects of residential context are controlled.  Indeed, with the one exception of repeating a grade, all five statistically significant parameters for neighborhood ethnic composition indicate more favorable minority child outcomes.  Controlling for non-ethnic aspects of residential context, low-income African American children living in a neighborhood with a standard deviation-higher percentage of African American residents are predicted to have 84 percent lower odds of an asthma diagnosis.[1]  Were they to live in a neighborhood with a standard deviation-higher percentage of Latino residents, they are predicted to have lower odds of: (1) witnessing violence by 78 percent; (2) using violence by 71 percent; and (3) having a nonmarital birth by 89 percent.  Ethnic effects on low-income Latino children appear more limited.  When they live in a neighborhood with a standard deviation-higher percentage of Latino residents they are predicted to have eight percent lower odds of dropping out of school.

So if ethnic composition per se is not responsible for the negative associations between segregation and negative outcomes, what is?  Two aspects of the residential environment stand out as consistent predictors of negative outcomes:  higher property crime rates and lower occupational prestige among resident workers.  For both Latino and African American children, higher property crime rates are associated with substantially greater odds of: asthma diagnosis, witnessing and being victimized by violence, and repeating a grade; for Latinos the same associations apply to engaging in violence, dropping out, and having children outside of marriage.  For African American children, lower occupational prestige is associated with substantially greater odds of: asthma diagnosis, witnessing violence, dropping out and having children outside of marriage.  For Latino children it is associated with substantially greater odds of: being victimized by and engaging in violence, dropping out and having children outside of marriage.

Several other aspects of neighborhood context prove predictive for certain outcomes and ethnicities.  Places with negative peer influences as assessed by caregivers are associated with greater odds that African American children will witness, be victimized by, and engage in violence.  Places with more social problems (an index focusing in violent and criminal behaviors) as assessed by caregivers are associated with greater odds that Latino children will have these same exposure to violence outcomes, plus have children outside of marriage.

In conclusion, growing up amid concentrations of African American residents was associated with a variety of adverse outcomes for low-income Latino and (especially) African American children, though outcomes associated with concentrations of Latino residents were more mixed.  Virtually all of the negative associations disappeared, however, when other aspects of the residential context were controlled, and several positive ones persisted.  The adverse developmental consequences of ethnic segregation appeared to be generated primarily by concentrating minority children in neighborhoods with higher rates of property crime and lower occupational prestige.

We see our study as bridging two substantial scholarly literatures: consequences of ethnic segregation and neighborhood effects.  We have linked them by positing that the forces of segregation operating at the metropolitan scale directly shape children’s intra-neighborhood exposure to various ethnic groups.  Moreover, because ethnic composition of neighborhoods affects the flows of various resources into them, segregation indirectly affects children’s exposure to non-ethnic aspects of their local context.  Our empirical findings indicate that it is the indirect effects of segregation that create by far the more pernicious neighborhood effects for low-income Latino and African American children.

Our results clearly suggest that policymakers should be cognizant of neighborhood ethnic segregation as an important metropolitan force that continues to shape the developmental context of low-income minority children.  It is not neighborhood ethnic composition per se, but rather the correlated aspects of safety and social status that appear crucial.  Our finding is thus fully consistent with the position that desegregation efforts should not be motivated by an implicit valorization of “whiteness” or stigmatization of “non-whiteness.”

The daunting policy challenge is providing neighborhood environments that are developmentally friendly to low-income, minority children.  This can be approached in principle by either by improving the neighborhoods where they live through community development strategies and/or by improving their access to developmentally superior neighborhoods through well-designed assisted housing programs backed by vigorous fair housing enforcement.  We acknowledge the political difficulties involved in doing so in practice, but urge continued efforts in these regards nevertheless.

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[1] We acknowledge that this is an ambiguous finding insofar as it may indicate a lower probability of caregivers seeking medical diagnosis given a set of symptoms, instead of a lower probability of symptoms.

Waiting for the R Train: Public Transportation and Employment

By Justin Tyndall

 

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy served to highlight the fragility of coastal cities in an era of increasingly unpredictable weather. The impact of the storm on many New York City residents was devastating. The storm’s effects were far reaching, but the stone and steel that forms the skeleton of New York City was largely left intact. Many of the more than 20 bridges and tunnels that connect Manhattan Island to the rest of New York City suffered minor damage, but nearly all were able to reopen in the days or weeks following the storm. A stark exception to this robust recovery of transportation was the severe damage to the Montague Street Tunnel –which carries the R train subway between Brooklyn and Manhattan– the tunnel would take nearly two years to be fully repaired.

The fact that some New York City neighborhoods have historically been extended strong public transit while others have not is far from random. The most economically developed areas of New York are provided with dense public transportation options, while less prominent neighborhoods are not. The same relationship exists in essentially every city where public transportation operates. The simple observation that neighborhoods with transit are doing better economically is insufficient to say anything about the economic impact of transit: transit is certainly a symptom of an economically developed neighborhood, whether it is also a cause of local economic success is normally impossible to say.

The differential fate of the Montague Street Tunnel and the R train offer an unprecedentedly clear natural experiment by which particular neighborhoods were, randomly and without warning, deprived of vital public transportation amenities. This situation allowed for the investigation of the true effect public transportation imparts on the neighborhoods it serves.

In 2013, when the R train disruption was most severe, the unemployment rate within Brooklyn neighborhoods that were dependent on the R train increased by 0.4 percentage points, marking a departure from steady reductions in unemployment over the previous few years. Furthermore, neighborhoods in the remainder of New York City saw unemployment fall 1.4 percentage points in the same period. By controlling for city wide trends in employment, and the characteristics that make the treatment and control neighborhoods different, this paper was able to get a relatively clean estimate of the impact the train closure had on unemployment for those neighborhoods affected: unemployment was a full 1.4 percentage points higher along to Brooklyn R train in 2013 than it would have been if not for the subway disruption.

Job creation in cities has been the goal of numerous and diverse policies including job training programs, and incentives for businesses to locate in disadvantaged areas. These programs have been shown to be tremendously expensive, and are often ineffective. Advocacy for public transit often focuses on the regional economic benefits, and land value effects; however, public transit’s apparent ability to substantially reduce local unemployment should be given more attention. Meeting the employment needs of isolated urban communities through policy should include consideration of the powerful role played by public transportation.

Urban eco-modernisation and the policy context of new eco-city projects: where Masdar City fails and why

Federico Cugurullo – University of Manchester, Geography

http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/05/28/0042098015588727.abstract?rss=1

The main reason for writing this article is because I fear that, across the world, we are building new cities following dangerous models of city-making.

Today, the genesis of cities built from scratch in previously underdeveloped areas is shaping the present and future of the planet and, with hundreds of new settlements under development, we cannot risk the implementation of unsustainable strategies of urbanisation. The environmental, social and economic impact of new urban developments is significant. Environmentally, for example, the construction of a new city requires vast amounts of energy, generates tons of carbon emissions and upsets the balance of local and regional ecosystems. This is not a process that we can overlook. We need to be aware of what exactly makes our cities unsustainable and develop alternative strategies of city- making.

This article uses Masdar City in Abu Dhabi as a case study, to challenge what today is one of the most popular models of sustainable urban development: the eco-city.

The focus of the article is on the policy context of Masdar City, and on how it shapes the mechanics and conceptual underpinnings of the Emirati eco-city project. I argue that eco-city projects are not standalone urban experiments, but rather tiles of broader context-dependent policy mosaics whose understanding can reveal how, in eco-city initiatives, ideas of urban sustainability are cultivated and implemented.

Masdar City (May 2015).

Source: Gianfranco Serra Photography.

Masdar City is the product of a regional development agenda, Vision 2030, which seeks to regenerate the economy of Abu Dhabi through the regeneration of the built environment. The Emirati economic system is largely based on oil: a finite resource which, in the near future, will not be sufficient to sustain Abu Dhabi’s society. The plan of the government is to develop non-oil sectors of the economy and Masdar City, designed as a living laboratory, serves this purpose by providing an urban space where Emirati and international companies can research, develop, test and commercialize new clean technologies: products, such as smart grids and photovoltaics, that will eventually be sold worldwide, thereby generating substantial returns for Abu Dhabi.

In this policy context, the concept of sustainability is understood primarily in economic terms. In Masdar City, sustainability is interpreted as profitability and the attention of the developers is put exclusively on what can be capitalized. As a result, aspects of the city such as its impact on ecosystems and the social distribution of environmental and economic benefits are not taken into account because they are seen as unprofitable by stakeholders.

In addition, in the Masdar City project, environmentalism is understood as consumerism. The developers of Masdar City encourage their customers to buy and consume the Masdarian technologies as a way of protecting the environment, but forget to mention the fact that the consumption of technology (based on energy-intensive processes of extraction, production and distribution) is one of the main reasons why environmental issues exist in the first place.

I fear that what in this paper I call urban eco-modernisation, the vision and application of urban technology as the solution to environmental problems, is becoming an established, international formula of city-making: an urban paradigm that has to be challenged before its socio-environmental consequences will become irreversible.

Uncivil cities

In 2005, I was a witness as a Barcelona resident of a worrying emphasis on ‘incivility’ as a problem. All of a sudden, things that were part of daily life in urban public space, especially in a Mediterranean capital, such as street drinking, skating, prostitution or game-playing, took centre stage and became the object of a deafening policy and media debate. Those things, that we may have seen as annoying but normal, or even been the ‘perpetrators’ of, very quickly became a public problem and portrayed as a clear sign of the decay of Western civilisation. Almost overnight, graffiti and homelessness became punishable offenses, among many other, varied things. Something had changed in the Barcelona of ‘amigos para siempre will you always be my friend’.[1]

Soon after this happened, a copy of Urban Studies’ double issue on ‘(In)civility and the city’ fell in my hands, giving context to the events I had just lived. Incivility was becoming a global issue and different bodies in different countries were looking for tools to pursue a law and order approach to city life. These efforts received different names in different places, but were essentially all part of a global process to turn deviant behaviours into offences and thus turn them into a police matter.

The Barcelona case, however, seemed to have its own dynamic –the role played by the annual neighbourhood festivities, seen by some media as bacchanalia of incivility, or the government crisis the Socialist government at the time was going through, as well as an evident conservative turn experienced by the generation that had lived and been protagonists of the transition to democracy, who now demanded that their ‘right’ to enjoy a clean and non-degraded public space, to rest and to be tranquil and to not be ‘disturbed in the exercise of the freedom of circulation.

I became curious in the interplay between local and global dynamics, and the reason of this ‘defining up’ of deviancy. The international literature gave me clues that resonated with the Barcelona experience, but only in broad terms. The ins-and-outs of the Barcelona case did not match those described in the international literature. Trying to make sense of ‘asynchronic synchrony’ was the main driver behind the paper, written with the hope to get international authors to question some of their assumptions or generalisations, as well as to encourage other to explore similar local processes and contribute them to our scientific field.

Using a combination of urban studies literature, public policy process and transfer theory and media discourse analysis, the paper retraces the policy process of what was called the Civility Ordinance of Barcelona, finally passed on 1 January 2006, in an attempt to contribute a detailed account of the local determinant factors. These are put in light not only of similar processes elsewhere, specially the UK, but also in broader debates on the local security agendas in the 90s and 00s. By presenting a mainly empirical picture, the paper aspires to inform other comparative studies on the role of security and deviancy in urban environments, and on the political role of cities under globalisation.

Now that several years have passed since these schemes were implemented in different countries and cities, and so we can begin to evaluate their impact –and probably validate Bannister and Kearns’ hypothesis, quoted in the paper, that the emphasis on tolerance and respect through civility results in an erosion of tolerance and respect-, and in a time when urban anxieties are centered on the crisis and radicalisation processes, understanding the problems of the civility approach can act as a timely warning sign.

Gemma Galdon-Clavell.

Barcelona, May 2015

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[1] One of the landmark songs of the Olympic Games of 1992, symbolising tolerance, friendship and openness.

Mobile transitions: Exploring synergies for urban sustainability research

by Julia Affolderbach and Christian Schulz

 

When starting our research on green building initiatives and urban low-carbon strategies in Canada, Europe and Australia, we came across the promising complementarities of the Transition Studies approach on the one hand, and the more recent debate around Policy Mobilities. Given our primary interest in political, institutional, regulatory and organisational innovations and their impact on the greening of the building sector, the Social Studies of Technology (or “Transition Studies”) provided us with a useful heuristic to explore the interplay between niches for innovation, evolutions of the established regimes and changes of the general context conditions (“landscape”). But we also had to acknowledge the insufficient conceptualization of space in this approach, in particular when it comes to supra-national relationships, knowledge flows and long-distance influences. Here, the Policy Mobility approach allowed us to operationalize the extent to which local policies and actors’ behaviour are embedded into wider networks of constant policy exchange and learning processes, but also selective adoption and reinterpretation (mutation) of trend setting approaches. A combination of the two approaches gave us the opportunity to study both the localised settings and their impact on green building innovations and the relational articulation of urban sustainability programmes at the international level. The paper thus tries to contribute to the advancing conceptualization of space in the Transitions Studies literature, and – given its sectorial focus – to feed case study results from economic geography into the scholarly debates around the notion of Policy Mobility. We are convinced that a further engagement of the two approaches might not only reciprocally inspire the enrolled communities of researchers, but that it could also open new perspectives for both academics and practitioners/decision makers.

Provision of knowledge and evidence on the actual pathways and biographies of successful urban policies provides a basis to reconsider existing strategies without overrating the importance of local framework conditions in order (1) to facilitate the exchange and critical conversation with practitioners and decision makers in other city regions and (2) to develop a systemic understanding of influential levels and scales, without reifying the latter.

A wide range of topics regarding sustainable transitions might serve as test beds for this recombined approach including the multi-facetted energy policy aspiring for low carbon transitions (encompassing the decentralized use of renewables, low/zero/plus energy buildings, district heating, smart grids), transport and mobility issues, food security and urban farming, and more organizational issues such as community planning, co-housing, or solidary economies, and local sharing schemes. All of these are identified as highly innovative fields showing dynamics of rapid and international dissemination as well as re-adaptation of promising concepts.

 

Photo: Sebastian Fastenrath (used with permission)