Speaker
Description
In the face of climate change, planning scholars and practitioners have challenged “conventional growth-driven development models” (track 1: post-growth urbanism) and opened the search for adaptation planning practices that could foreground planning futures beyond growth. In this attempt, stakeholder collaboration across public, private, non-profit, and philanthropic sectors has become critical for any innovative adaptation planning initiative. Such assumption has brought scholars to reflect on the meaning of innovative governance institutions capable of generating innovative governance infrastructures to address problems through coordinated efforts (Vella et al., 2016) In the search for solutions beyond growth, such coordinated efforts have been seen as the panacea for “good planning” in the face of the crisis.
In this paper, I am interested in questioning this assumption by examining how climate adaptation stakeholders in Metro Boston collaborate to advance an adaptation agenda that could innovate adaptation planning toward development models beyond growth.
Metro Boston has been the breeding ground for adaptation initiatives that, while highly collaborative in nature, never deeply questioned an overall agenda still focused on physical development and economic growth. Adaptation projects are often either not implemented or fail to be adaptive when adaptation agendas take priority (Markus & Savini, 2016), the fiscalization of land use has contributed to non-adaptive coastal development, despite extensive research warning about the severe impacts of rising sea levels (Shi & Varuzzo, 2020), and, finally, the risks most concerning to socially vulnerable individuals, particularly along racial lines, are frequently overlooked in mainstream resilience strategies (Martin, 2015).
The paper discusses how governance infrastructures shape themselves around power clusters, which prevent collaborating actors from achieving innovative planning agendas and coalitions and keep advancing initiatives driven by a growth rationale. Breaching power clusters’ long-term coalitions is key in determining diverse and more effective collaborative conditions among urban actors and, hence, advancing new models of urban development beyond growth.
Bibliography
Markus, M., & Savini, F. (2016). The implementation deficits of adaptation and mitigation: green buildings and water security in Amsterdam and Boston. Planning Theory and Practice, 17(4), 497–515. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2016.1210666
Martin, S. A. (2015). A framework to understand the relationship between social factors that reduce resilience in cities: Application to the City of Boston. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 12, 53–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2014.12.001
Shi, L., & Varuzzo, A. M. (2020). Surging seas, rising fiscal stress: Exploring municipal fiscal vulnerability to climate change. Cities, 100, 102658. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102658
Vella, K., Butler, W. H., Sipe, N., Chapin, T., & Murley, J. (2016). Voluntary Collaboration for Adaptive Governance: The Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 36(3), 363–376. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X16659700
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
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