Ian McShane

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Shedding light on the future of urban spaces, this path-breaking book is a significant contribution to contemporary climate change scholarship. It synthesizes interdisciplinary research with practical policy, putting an emphasis on positive environmental and socially just outcomes and urban regeneration.

Shelter as human security discourses and practices invoke images of safety and survival from the house to the neighbourhood, community-level to the nation state and planetary scale. Often described in terms of emergency, disaster or spontaneous shelter, there is a powerful sense of temporal insecurity with conditions and/or experiences that imply that this will not last. Tents, caravans, trailers, boats, slums, streets, bridges as well as institutional shelters for women, the homeless or refugees, are just some of the forms of shelter that exist in urban contexts. Nature’s shelter also includes rocks, caves, hills, forests and trees. This chapter focuses on reconceptualising shelter within hot city contexts, from the homeless to informal settlements to the planetary scale. Hot cities are not just geographically challenging, but also politically challenging around understandings of urban habitats and ecological communities.

The paradox for hot cities is how to dismantle the root causes of the climate and equity crisis linked to unsustainable growth and colonial extraction, and yet at the same time still work to protect and build modern cities; the most iconic outcome of the very processes that need to be disrupted. A root complex as opposed to singular root pathways offers a broader mosaic of trajectories for regenerative change. This grassroots approach is a pluralistic, cross-sectoral, and transdisciplinary vision of the drivers of change. In this braided intersectional imaginary, alternative futures can be co-created through everyday activism and collective political action. The choice is now around which roots we seek to disrupt or remove, and which ones to nurture and nourish. This chapter addresses the need to rethink urban nature relationships as a root cause of the planetary heat crisis. This is not a return to the past, but recognition that the colonial past is ever present in the future of hot cities and their regions.

Nature is everywhere, deeply embedded in the cultural and political histories of the present and the still yet possible environmental futures. Central are the more-than-human experiences of dispossession, dislocation and perceptions of being fundamentally ‘out of place’ in the city. There is a shared push back against the modernist framing of ‘empty’ or vacant landscapes, towards alternative cosmologies of human and more-than-human (or other-than-human) communities, part of a broader imaginary of ecological constellations and urban collectives. This is about deep time and intersecting temporalities and experiences in the Anthropocene. This chapter focuses on the need for a shift in thinking and practices around urban sustainability to address hot city futures. A shared more-than-human kinship ethic for example, requires finding more imaginative and regenerative ways to change the nature of urban practices for cities and their regions in climate change.

The moral and ethical questions that confront hot cities require attending to the figure of the stray, without retreating to anthropocentric tribalism as the de facto mode for survival. Climate change is creating a wave of refugees both human and non-human that will continue to unsettle hot city futures from the inside and out. The climate emergency has deeply unsettled notions of home and civilisation with the lived precarity, instability and insecurity of the climate emergency. The stray may be the moral outsider whose actions cause intentional or unintentional harm to other species; or a reference to those who have drifted from their normal path due to reasons outside their control, such as life on planet Earth for future generations because of a legacy of urban growth-led habitat loss and extinction. This chapter focuses on what we share as humans and non-humans, recognising differences, but also what is held in common and the ethical implications of this in a rapidly warming world.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Shedding light on the future of urban spaces, this path-breaking book is a significant contribution to contemporary climate change scholarship. It synthesizes interdisciplinary research with practical policy, putting an emphasis on positive environmental and socially just outcomes and urban regeneration.

Re-thinking how we conceptualise technology, policy choice and human agency in a warming world is a critical challenge. The smart energy policy debate is focused on ‘empowering consumers’ to make the best (e.g. rational) use of new technologies and smart tools. Framed in largely utilitarian terms (e.g. tools), the goal is one of using technology to either bypass human behaviour (through ‘set and forget’ automation for example) or change behaviour (through provision of real-time digital data). This has implications for the ways in which smart energy technologies are fundamentally changing the ways we live, and our expectations for energy and other resources in the digital-hybrid city. This chapter focuses on how the complex interactions between people and technology are creating new urban spaces and places, yet many of these are not equitable, ecological, fair or fit for purpose in a rapidly warming world.

Apocalyptic visions of hot cities and their urban regions are now enmeshed in global warming. The climate has changed through fossil fuel intensification and dependence, urban growth, and extractive development. This is no longer the realm of speculative fiction. Within this context the ‘hot city’ is a deeply contested idea and set of practices with not just one, but multiple possibilities and pathways. New narratives are emerging that are re-shaping the ideas and practices of how to dwell and live well in a rapidly warming urban world. Transdisciplinary stories of regenerative change and possibility have a critical role that can help mobilise community, disrupt complacency or generate empathy. This chapter focuses on the need to re-design urban futures to address the shared ecological emergency.

"Hot Cities" published on 11 Aug 2023 by Edward Elgar Publishing.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Shedding light on the future of urban spaces, this path-breaking book is a significant contribution to contemporary climate change scholarship. It synthesizes interdisciplinary research with practical policy, putting an emphasis on positive environmental and socially just outcomes and urban regeneration.