This chapter examines the critical role of renewable energy and energy efficiency in circular economy liveable cities. As cities account for the majority of global energy use, transitioning to renewable energy and improving energy efficiency are essential for achieving climate goals and sustainable urban development. The chapter emphasises how circular economy principles can enhance energy systems by promoting the use of renewable energy, reducing resource consumption, and minimising waste. Areas of focus include the integration of renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, and waste-to-energy systems, into urban infrastructure. The chapter discusses innovative technologies like smart grids, energy storage solutions, and shared mobility systems that can optimise energy use and reduce environmental impacts. It explores energy-efficient practices in the built environment, such as green building design, retrofitting, and modular construction, which help minimise cities’ energy footprint. The chapter highlights case studies from European cities that have successfully implemented circular energy systems, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining renewable energy with circular economy practices. It concludes by addressing the challenges and opportunities for cities to foster sustainable energy transitions, emphasising the importance of policy support, public–private partnerships, and community engagement in achieving long-term energy efficiency and renewable energy goals.

Postmodernity is characterised by a thoroughgoing alteration in the ways in which space is both experienced and conceived. During the post-war period, social and spatial relations were substantially transformed by the far-reaching effects of economic globalisation, neo-imperial conflicts, new transport and communications technologies, mass migrations, political devolution, and impending environmental crisis. Concurrently, space and geography have become existential and cultural dominants for postmodern societies, to an extent displacing time and history. Given such a spatio-temporal conjuncture, this chapter explores the significance of space for British postmodern fiction and describes some of its characteristic geographies, focusing upon three distinctive kinds of spaces: cities; non-places; and regions. Among the texts discussed are novels by J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Christine Brooke-Rose, Angela Carter, Maureen Duffy, Alasdair Gray, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Iain Sinclair, Zadie Smith, Graham Swift, Adam Thorpe, and Jeanette Winterson.

This chapter introduces a new model to represent the heterogeneity of the Italian civitates. The model is based on the abundant archaeological evidence of the inhabited areas of their administrative centres, using it as a proxy for various economic and socio-political aspects of the civitas. This new variation model surpasses previous ones by being continuous (rather than categorical) and by formally incorporating the uncertainties associated with missing data.

Local politics are dominated by older residents, who vote and participate at rates very disproportionate to their share of the population. At the same time, local government has been assigned responsibility for functions featuring inherent generational divides: most pointedly, public education, but also infrastructure development and land use regulation. This combination raises concerns about democratic distortion and local government’s continued ability to invest in the future. If predictions of substantially longer lifespans come true, these concerns about the local political economy will only be heightened. This chapter identifies this tension and reviews how local governments currently manage age-based political conflict. It then describes the limitations of these mechanisms and offers a schematic for the strategies that local governments will have to adopt as they navigate the fault lines of age moving forward: by better aligning the preferences of older and younger residents, by equalizing patterns of political participation, or by reassigning functions that implicate age away from the local level.

In the Pounds parable, a nobleman, disliked among his people, goes abroad, and returns to prove himself a good administrator, though one with harsh standards, as is Jesus in the parable in regard to his enemies. In Genesis, Joseph, disliked by his brothers, had gone abroad to Egypt and proved there to be a good administrator in the time of the famine, but one who, for a time, treated his brothers harshly.

Chapter 1 raises the question of whether there was a decisive break in the nature of the city between Classical Antiquity and the post-Roman world of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. It is suggested that treating ‘the ancient city’ as typologically different from cities before or after obscures both the real degree of continuity and the perceptions of contemporaries of continuity. The chapter explores the historiography of the idea of the ancient city as a distinct type that goes back to Fustel de Coulanges, and has been identified by different schools of thought as religious, economic, political, and physical. Rather than thinking of ‘decline and fall’, or even ‘transformation’, a new approach is offered through resilience theory, that sees a continuous process of drawing on memories of the past and, through them, adaptation.

The Shephelah (Judean lowlands) was only sparsely inhabited in the Iron I, with just a string of small Canaanite villages surviving the upheavals of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BCE, forming a tiny enclave between the Philistines in the coastal plain and the Israelites of the highlands. And yet, in the Iron IIA this same area became packed with towns. The chapter investigates this drastic change, taking place in the tenth century BCE, in tandem with many other changes addressed in other chapters. It shows that the resettlement of the Shephelah was a long process, and that about a generation after the failed attempt to settle Khirbet Qeiyafa, the settlers of Canaanite villages suddenly got off the fence and joined forces with the emerging Israelite polity. This phase is evident by the growth in size experienced by the small Canaanite villages in the first half of the tenth century, when some of them were even fortified, and the finds in them show clear connections with the nascent highland kingdom. Shortly afterward, as part of the colonization of the Shephelah by the United Monarchy, new sites were settled and fortified, exhibiting the growing power of the highland polity.

This chapter analyzes the regional and sectoral differences in how cities and municipalities engage in climate change networks. Over the past 20 years, an increasing number of cities, regions, companies, investors, and other non-state and subnational actors have voluntarily committed to reducing their GHG emissions. Such actions could help reduce the implementation gap. Along with the increase in commitments and the growing number of venues through which non-state actors can cooperate in order to govern climate change, it is necessary to track and evaluate such efforts. This chapter assesses the voluntary commitments made by Swedish municipalities, regions and multistakeholder partnerships to decarbonize by reducing GHG emissions. It finds large differences in which cities and municipalities that engage in networks. Large and urban municipalities in the south and along the eastern coast are well represented, whereas more rural municipalities along the Norwegian border are less represented in the data. The findings are discussed in terms of climate justice, highlighting the importance of having everyone onboard to create acceptance and reduce inequality in the transformation toward decarbonization.

This chapter explores net-zero emission targets in Swedish municipalities. Based on a detailed examination of over 300 local climate and environment plans, the chapter both maps and evaluates the quantity and quality of net-zero emissions targets in Swedish municipalities, as well as how they relate to the national climate mitigation goals. It identifies 39 municipalities with net-zero emission targets. The targets range from highly specific with intermediary goals and plans for how to deal with residual emissions, to lofty, one-sentence visions without any further specifications. The findings are subsequently discussed whether aspirational goals – such as net-zero emission targets – could have an impact on the climate policy of a municipality or whether more specific goals are more effective. The chapter concludes that net-zero emission targets are still in their infancy in Swedish municipalities with large heterogeneity and gaps in how the goals are defined, what they include in terms of GHGs and sectors, and whether they also include measures for dealing with residual emissions.

Urban nature holds great potential to address the web of challenges that cities are facing and support transitions to a more sustainable future. Cities are working with nature in a diversity of ways, such as by using blue and green infrastructure. Blue infrastructure includes, for example, lakes, ponds, drains, and wetlands. These features can regulate storm-water flows, reduce pressure on the urban drainage system, and create sponge cities that lower flooding risks while reducing heat island effects, enhancing biodiversity, and providing recreational opportunities. Green infrastructure can include, for example, urban forests, green roofs and walls, multi-functional parks, and river embankments. These areas can improve air quality and energy efficiency, reduce heat island effects, and contribute to human health and well-being, amongst other benefits. Furthermore, urban gardens can increase access to food and employment while enhancing physical and mental health and social integration.

Chapter 2 provides an overview and critique of discourses about deterritorialisation in international law. The first sections sketch out three main strands to these discourses. The first strand contains accounts of a fundamental transition in the organising logic of international law; a shift from ordering competences on the basis of territory to functions. The second strand groups together accounts addressing the relocation of power but containing imprecise and undertheorised understandings of these spaces. The third strand includes accounts concerning the porosity of states. The chapter then problematises these discourses. Each strand applies a similar legal-spatial imaginary, and in so doing omits the resulting spaces produced by deterritorialisation. Common to all is a tendency to continue to applying a particular and unproblematised concept of territory, limiting theoretical insight, consistently producing deterritorialisation without reterritorialisation, and often conflating at an analytical level actors, spaces, and functions. The reason for this again lies in the continuing prioritisation of the stato-centric approach to territory in international law’s implicit geography.

The chapter seeks to understand how the 2030 Agenda expressed through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and climate urbanism reconfigure urban planning and related processes in Zimbabwe. As discourses of climate change and sustainability have gained traction, urban planning plays a critical role in achieving carbon-free societies. Through the case study of three Zimbabwean cities (Harare, Bulawayo and Gweru), the chapter aims to highlight opportunities and challenges presented to urban planning by Agenda 2030. The chapter employs primary and secondary data sources to understand how urban planning in Africa, and particularly in Zimbabwe, is being shaped by the climate discourse. As such, the chapter contends that there is a seemingly discernible paradigm shift in terms of urban planning processes in Zimbabwe, which seems to be drifting towards a multilateral planning vision dominated by climate-centred urban planning policies. It must be noted that climate-centred urbanisation will be useful in future in curbing and dealing with pandemics like COVID-19. However, it should be noted that climate-centred urban planning processes seem to be more abstract thinking than operationalisation. Finally, the chapter suggests ways to promote a pragmatic shift from abstract thinking to operationalisation of climate-friendly urban planning.