The objective of this chapter is to more fully explore how urban environmental change takes place. The role and significance of economic development and normative planning efforts are explored. These conditions further help refine understanding of how different drivers and social and economic forces influence how cities both create and respond to the environmental crises and how transitions are manifested. Several different narratives of urban transitions are defined. These include urban transitions as sequence, collapse, advance, futures, and just sustainability. An integrated framework that links the different elements of urban environmental transitions is presented and discussed. The framework includes four steps – stress, crisis, transition, and transformation – with coupled components and elements such as drivers, spheres of action, and process and product outcomes. A review of the application areas and specific cases are presented as an introduction to the next section of the book.

Daily life in cities is often about balance and compromise. Urban densities facilitate things being in close proximity and provide convenience for residents, but they also create an opportunity for traffic congestion and increased social and environmental inequity, and the possibility of lower-density suburban sprawl. To promote urban sustainability, a careful balance of economic development, ecology, and equity is required. In this chapter, four examples of urban sustainability crises and the dramatic response to them are examined. The cases include Miami, US; Oslo, Norway; St. Georges, Grenada; and Shenzhen, China. In each situation, the sustainability crisis emerges from a deeply set awareness of diminishing environmental quality of life and a feeling that the residents’ sense of place is under threat. The drivers of this threat are deeply embedded in social and economic factors. In each city, the policy switch to enhanced sustainability results from an aggressive, multi-scalar effort to alter and redirect the pattern of urban spatial development.

A pressing need exists to understand how, when, and why to adjust and build upon urban environmental policies that can influence a city’s capacity to foster and enact climate adaptation and mitigation. The objective of this book has been to define what we can learn from past urban environmental crises and resulting policy transitions that might be applicable to understand how climate change will manifest as crises in cities and what can be done to help accelerate urban climate action. In this chapter, we more directly turn our attention to learning what the book’s case studies reveal about these objectives. The case studies illustrate how existing urban environmental practices can be adjusted and enhanced to better grapple with the challenges of climate change. The analysis provides the groundwork for a set of innovative recommendations on how to perceive the urban climate crisis and how to consider new urban climate change policies. A key overall conclusion is that we should do all we can to learn from previous urban environmental crises as they will continue to inform us moving into the future.

The chapter lays out the goal and objectives of the project by introducing the framing of the book, key terms and concepts, and the structure of the argument. A central element of the chapter is to lay out how the growing climate crisis and the impact on cities can be situated within the broader set of challenges the cities have faced with their growth and development. Explicit here is the assertion that to address the current waves of dynamic climate risk affecting cities and their residents, one can benefit from looking back into their collective histories to understand how and why cities were able to address, and in some cases overcome, past environmental trials. The book presents how these narratives of “solving” urban environmental problems can be set and analyzed within a several-step process of stress, crisis, transition, and transformation. The steps are bounded by a range of conditions through which fundamental issues of impact and vulnerability and resilience of environmental policy regimes come into question. How urban environmental crises build and reach significant tipping points with associated policy transitions are specific turn key components of the book’s storyline.

Urbanization and the concentration of population and activity traditionally have brought cities an array of environmental quality and pollution issues. The process through which cities have responded to their air pollution problems are equally varied. This application chapter focuses on the narratives of three cities and an urbanized region: London, UK; Los Angeles, US; Rhine-Ruhr River Valley, Germany; and Tokyo, Japan. In all cases, worsening air pollution began to have clear and often immediate economic consequences and human health impacts. While different, several important similarities were present among the crisis-to-transformation processes for each city. These include an extended history of ever-worsening air quality conditions, often punctuated or accelerated through large-scale social or environmental trauma, the emergence and rapid application of new science and technology, and the concomitant innovation in public policy and governance capacity to address the problem of urban air pollution. The desire to address urban air pollution became both an economic imperative and an ambition to protect the well-being of the cities’ residents and to restore the sentiment that the communities were pleasant and healthy places in which to live.

The growth and impact of urban environmental problems can manifest as significant stress and eventual crises for cities and their residents. The focus of this chapter is on how and why these stressors and crises are addressed in cities and the conditions under which the crises can eventually result in significant environmental policy transitions and follow-on transformations. Several different types of documented urban crises (including ecological-resource, urban spatial development, socio-economic, and extreme events) are discussed and analyzed in the chapter. Social, environmental/ecological, and infrastructural/technological drivers influence the connection between urban environmental stress, crisis, transition, and transformation. The actual mechanisms that set up and orchestrate the transition process reflect the resilience of the existing environmental and policy management regime and the magnitude of the stress and crisis. The chapter focuses on describing each of the steps in the transition and the mechanisms that connect each step, as well as the key terms and concepts associated with the process. The importance of policy system tipping points or regime shifts is illustrated.

The urbanization process has been long intertwined with environmental problems. Human settlements and their growth create demands on the local resource base often resulting in depletion and degradation of these materials. Urban development and attempts to resolve these issues impact the everyday needs and activities of residents of these places and create stresses and crises. The objective of this chapter is to present the conditions through which these stresses and crises emerge and the associated inefficiencies and inequities typically embedded in these processes. These stresses and crises can take place when resources are both brought into cities and distributed around cities, and when waste generated from these practices is managed. Basic factors that mediate these conditions including population, level of wealth, social organization, and access to technology are introduced. The role of choice and what factors enable or constrain choice are explored and examples are presented. How choice is socially constructed and by whom and in whose interests are significant issues examined. The unintended consequences emerging from interim environmental solutions embedded within policy choices are richly detailed in the urban environmental literature and play a significant role in the chapter’s overarching aim.

Disease outbreaks have been some of the most impactful events in the history of cities. The specter of plague and other epidemics provides stories of dreaded rapid social disruption and in some cases social collapse. The objective of this application chapter is to investigate through a set of case studies how disease outbreaks and epidemics can rapidly shift from a stress to a crisis and in turn drive significant policy transitions and transformations. The chapter introduces how disease crises disrupt daily life in cities and what have been some basic approaches in response. The chapter examines four cases of disease outbreaks that resulted in crises and significant transitions. The examples include two bubonic plague outbreaks (Marseille, France, in the 1720s; Hong Kong, China, in the late 1890s), one flu event (Spanish flu in St. Louis, US, in 1918), and COVID-19 spread (in Seoul, Korea, in 2020). The cases illustrate how the rapid onset of disease simultaneously severely disrupted everyday life and brought on a sudden health crisis that was built upon existing social and economic tensions.

The struggle of how to manage the solid waste produced in cities every day reflects much about the ways in which a city is administered and the extent to which it embraces the requirements of urban environmental sustainability. While often not as environmentally pressing as water access, disease, and extreme event hazards, for the past several decades urban solid waste management has been regularly described as a global crisis. Lack of strategies to effectively and safely handle solid waste, shortage of appropriate waste management sites and facilities, and absence of sufficient financing for these operations have severely hampered the ability of cities to address this crisis. The chapter examines a set of four cases detailing how and when, and under what circumstances did significant policy transition occur, and the extent to which these resulted in transformative shifts in city-level solid waste management. The cases include Buenos Aires, Argentina; Johannesburg, South Africa; Seattle, US; and Taipei, Taiwan. Solid waste management crises were present in each locale and were experienced as a set of policy proposals and failures before longer-term structural policy regime shifts are defined. Across all the cases, these solid waste management policy shifts were directly associated with an emergent reimagining of each city’s identity.

Natural resource scarcities are fundamental challenges for cities – and water is an especially critical resource. The chapter examines how maintaining adequate water supply is a constant challenge for cities. More specifically, this application chapter focuses on how urban water supply can be maintained, and when and why threats to supply emerge and can grow. How urban water supply stress and crisis can lead to significant environmental policy transitions is the focus of four specific city case studies. These include Atlanta, US; Cairo, Egypt; New York, US; and Tel Aviv, Israel. While droughts were relevant proximate drivers of the transitions, the cases illustrate how a range of root drivers (e.g., lack of governance capacity, transboundary conflicts) and context drivers (e.g., competing economic interests, legal precedents, inequity) played significant roles in the policy transitions and resulting transformation. The social conditions, ecological constraints, and technology access all took on important functions. Built infrastructure, including water supply infrastructure (e.g., dams, reservoirs, aqueducts) as massive, fixed assets representing the legacy of past actions, was especially important in the articulation of the transition process.

The 25 case studies in the preceding chapters (Chapters 5–10) reveal how the process of change can erupt from crises and related moments of transition. The goal of this chapter is to bring forward key results and insights from these case narratives and broader application discussions in which they are embedded. To do so, the chapter is structured around two objectives: (1) Provide a general synthesis of the case study transitions and how the sequence of stress, crisis, transition, and transformation was expressed; and (2) present and examine a set of insights revealed by the framework application. Attention is given to the connection between the underlying drivers (i.e., root, context, and proximate) and spheres of action (i.e., social, ecological/environmental, and technological/infrastructural) and the conditions of stress, crisis, and transition. At the end of the chapter, some observations and suggestions on ways to advance the framework are presented. The discussion focuses on the connection between the pattern and pace of crisis and the resulting transition and transformation. Relevant crisis and resilience indicators are presented as an approach to assess the environmental policy transition process.