Urban Climatology Applied to Urban Planning: A Postwar Knowledge Circulation Failure

Abstract

Abstract

Transforming adaptation. Authoritative knowledge for climate change governance

“…In practice, the use of scientific knowledge in adaptation decisions has been showed to be problematic. For example, despite the commonsensical logic that making better climate predictions available for policy makers in water management or urban planning is useful, empirical studies show that this knowledge often fails to make an impact on the policy practice of urban planning or water management (Eliasson, 2000;Hebbert & Mackillop, 2013;Rayner, Lach & Ingram, 2005). According to Kirchhoff, Lemos, and Dessai (2013, p. 394) the pace of the uptake of climate knowledge in decision making is slow.…”

“…For example, despite the commonsensical logic that making better climate predictions available for policy makers is useful, empirical studies show that this knowledge may very well fail to make an impact on the policy practice of, say, urban planning and design (Eliasson, 2000;Hebbert & Mackillop, 2013), water resources management (Rayner et al, 2005), or coastal management (Tribbia & Moser, 2008). Suggested reasons for this failure are various.…”

“…Systematic scholarly work on the urban climate dates back to the writings of Londoner Luke Howard in the early part of the nineteenth century. Remarkably, however, the use of knowledge from the discipline of urban meteorology in the design of urban settlements is considered to be a failure (Eliasson, 2000;Hebbert & Jankovic, 2013;Hebbert & Mackillop, 2013;Kleerekoper, Van Esch & Salcedo, 2012;Lenzholzer & Brown, 2013). Despite the urban climate research community's abundant ambitions to support the policy process with its expertise, productive science-policy relations did not institutionalise except for some notable examples in Germany and South East Asia.…”

“…These debates evolve in a direct relation with the governance of heat risks, an emerging policy field in Europe in the wake of the 2003 and 2006 heat waves which resulted in peaks in morbidity and mortality, and a sharp controversy across the continent (Boezeman, Ganzevoort, Lier & Louwers, 2014;Kovats & Hajat, 2008;Lass, Haas, Hinkel & Jaeger, 2011). The central question in these debates is whether and how urban warming should be a legitimate object for governance, and, if so, whether it should be a matter of social cohesion policy (Klinenberg, 2003;Poumadère, Mays, Le Mer & Blong, 2005), town planning (Hebbert & Mackillop, 2013), public health (Kovats & Hajat, 2008), or any other field of collective organisation. Hence, as what Corburn (2009) terms 'localisation', the transformation of global environmental change into meaning for local affairs goes hand in hand with a process of simultaneously stabilising both epistemic and political legitimacy for particular ways of local knowing and dealing with global climate change (Jasanoff, 2010a).…”

Linking urban climate classification with an urban energy and water budget model: Multi-site and multi-seasonal evaluation

“…There is now a clear need to overcome this knowledge gap so as to allow greater integration of urban climate knowledge with the planning and policy communities (Mills et al, 2010;Ching, 2013;Hebbert and Mackillop, 2013;Heaphy, 2015). For instance, a comparison of 33 models by Grimmond et al (2010) highlighted the large number (145) of input parameters required by the group of models considered.…”