Urban development and climate change

The City of Cape Town (CoCT) has begun to integrate climate change into its urban policy-making. This book presents initiatives at the local government level in response to climate change across a range of municipal departments, from environmental resource management and environmental safety to energy management and spatial planning. It shows how these departments have shifted from 'business as usual' and mainstreamed climate change in addressing their development and climate change mandates, and describes the challenges that were encountered in making these shifts. The authors of this book believe that a new way of creating knowledge is needed, one that is socially embedded and involves non-academic actors in the knowledge construction. To this end, municipal officials and academics worked collaboratively in a process of mutual learning to co-produce knowledge and co-write their chapters. This hybrid process, where practitioner experience is coupled with an academic perspective, has produced an 'insider' view of urban development and climate change governance through the lens of theory. The aim of the book is to present the city of Cape Town as a leader in climate change innovations and a model of sustainable urban transition for other cities of the Global South. The analysis of these innovations and the methodology used in producing this book provides 'new' and original practice-based knowledge for policy-making in the transition towards more sustainable cities in the face of climate change.