Suburban climate adaptation governance: assumptions and imaginaries affecting peripheral municipalities

Abstract

The world is rapidly suburbanising and, as recognised in numerous academic and policy documents, suburbs are not only environmentally unsustainable but also particularly vulnerable to climate change. This same literature and policy discourse suggests the solution to making suburbs more sustainable and adaptable is densification and investing in infrastructural green growth. Meanwhile, alternative approaches in critical suburban literature suggest that densification might create negative externalities, and instead propose the transformation of infrastructures' management and ownership to support an innovative and autochthonous path for suburbs' climate adaptation. Yet limited empirical knowledge exists on what adaptation strategies are being implemented across peripheral municipalities where suburbs are more prevalent. A comparative analysis is presented of three peripheral municipalities in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on their adaptation strategies for water and sanitation. This shows how mainstream assumptions about suburbs and imaginaries of adaptation influence their strategies, as well as how the specific characteristics in the peripheral municipalities allow or hamper more innovative approaches. Three factors emerge as more important in allowing innovation and autochthonous solutions: the level of suburbanisation, the management model for municipal infrastructures, and their political context (including proximity of local government with higher-tier bodies and government composition). PRACTICE RELEVANCEPeripheral municipalities around the world, with a predominant suburban character, are considered the most unsustainable form of urbanisation and the areas in cities that are most at risk to climate change. This research demonstrates the importance of policymakers' imaginaries for advancing less formal and de facto (as well as formal) innovative adaptation strategies in peripheral municipalities. While the production of formal adaptation strategies by capital cities' governments is growing, less formal, more intuitive and de facto strategies dominate any adaptation efforts in peripheral municipalities, where suburbs are prevalent. Opportunities for innovation in adaptation strategies and challenging existing assumptions reside in influencing the underlying policy assumptions and imaginaries that peripheral municipalities' policymakers currently hold.