Vanesa Castán Broto
Biographic Data
| ID | 234909 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vanesa Castán Broto |
| GIVEN NAMES | Vanesa Castán |
| FAMILY NAME | Broto |
| SIGNATURE | BROTO V C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3175-9859 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 95 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1260 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 94 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Life bio-graphics: Design-based exploratory research for methodological innovation in urban climate governance research
Individual actions of practitioners and activists are crucial to achieving carbon emission reductions and improving resilience to climate change impacts. However, policy narratives have overlooked people’s complex engagements with climate change in professional settings. Few scholarly accounts of individual experiences of working to address climate change in cities inform climate policy because ethnographic and sociological accounts of climate ch…
Public green space adaptation and real estate market dynamics: The politics of designing resilient and just green spaces
As climate resilience becomes central to urban planning, cities increasingly use urban greening to mitigate climate risks. Integrating nature into urban environments – especially through public green spaces – provides substantial environmental and health benefits. However, these interventions also reshape urban space and property values, often reinforcing socio-spatial inequalities by favouring affluent areas or displacing vulnerable communities.…
Theorisation of environmental justice in Chinese political philosophy
When cities broke into the global stage: 20 Years since the publication of ‘Cities and Climate Change
This short symposium revisits the book Cities and Climate Change by Harriet Bulkeley and Michelle Betsill and its role in establishing cities as central actors in climate change governance. The contributors to this symposium reflect on the research themes and the book’s legacy from their disciplinary perspectives. The first response explores the tensions between the elevation of cities as sites for climate action and the persistent lack of state …
Developing a minifesta for effective academic-activist collaboration in the context of the climate emergency
Justice-oriented climate activism is proliferating. Many scholars aspire to deliver research that supports activism. However, measures of impact for research evaluation and funding purposes place little weight on the use of research by activists. Here we consider how academics and academia might effectively support and enable climate activism. We report outcomes from a series of online deliberative workshops involving both activists and academics…
Harnessing social innovation for a just transition: A case study of tea industrialization in China's era of ecological civilization
Disrupting the imaginaries of urban action to deliver just adaptation
Highlights Urban adaptation relates to how people imagine plausible and desirable urban futures. Adaptation imaginaries refer to collective representations of how society should act and towards which goal in the context of unprecedented climate change impacts. However, the existing narratives of adaptation action tend to entrench actions that may not be beneficial in the long term and may lead to maladaptation and inequities. This is the case, fo…
Developing community energy systems to facilitate Ethiopia's transition to sustainable energy
In Ethiopia, renewable energy offers people an affordable, dependable, and eco-friendly power supply while decreasing the carbon footprint. However, delivering a renewable future for the country requires a massive change in social practices and systems of provision. The slow progress of renewable development is hindering the transition to a cleaner energy future. Over 80 % of people live in rural areas where it is expensive to reach them via grid…
The case for a climate bonus: Waste pickers’ perceptions of climate change in Minas Gerais
While the work of waste pickers advances urban sustainability, there has been little focus on how climate change impacts affect them. This paper reports on a pilot study with 61 waste pickers in Minas Gerais, Brazil to understand their perspectives on climate change impacts and actions. It explores how waste pickers experience climate change impacts at home and at work, their adaptive strategies and the specific actions and actors needed to addre…
Queering Housing Policy: Questioning Urban Planning Assumptions in Namibian Cities
Heteronormative models of the home have permeated housing policies for decades, only adding to economic and spatial inequalities in a landscape of housing injustices. Half of the urban population in Namibia lives in precarious housing conditions. Cities like Windhoek and Walvis Bay are among the most unequal in the world. Such inequalities translate into significant gaps in housing quality, security, and service provision. These inequalities are …
Urban Climate Justice: Theory, Praxis, Resistance
How hegemonic discourses of sustainability influence urban climate action
Sustainability discourses influence the practices of urban climate action by establishing objectives and ways of doing things. Key concepts such as ‘risk’, ‘resilience’ and ‘efficiency’ have been central in the history of sustainability discourses, but their influence has changed over time. The use of these terms is analysed in policy narratives of urban climate action, exploring how they are deployed in policy and practice. A document database (…
The Russian invasion of Ukraine: Implications for politics, territory and governance
10.1080/21622671.2023.2256119
Alliances, allyship and activism: The value of international partnerships for co-producing just cities
This paper provides a distinctive analysis of the value of international intermediation alliances for co-production, based on the way they operate in practice. While much attention is paid to ideal or normative models of co-production, there is less understanding of the complexities that pervade co-production practices in specific contexts or how this shapes outcomes. Despite longstanding critiques and reflection, international partnerships can r…
The anatomy of change in urban infrastructure landscapes: Cooking landscapes in Maputo, Mozambique
Rapid urbanisation and global environmental transformations require rethinking the material and social configurations of cities. The concept of ‘transitions’ has gained traction to guide such processes of infrastructure change towards net-zero, resilient societies both in academic and policy conversations. In this paper, we examine what notions of change are deployed in these debates. Specifically, we argue that transition theory conceptualises c…
Embracing change in infrastructure landscapes
Infrastructure constitutes a key perspective for the analysis of social change. At the same time, infrastructures exemplify the tension between dynamism and permanence. While they facilitate the constant movement of resource and capital flows, they are also characterised by a visible obduracy that makes them impervious to change.This special issue examines how ideas of change and permanence have been explored in infrastructure studies. It focuses…
The governance of energy transitions in Africa: A sketch of plural perspectives
Building on the contributions to the article collection “The Governance of Sustainable Energy Transitions in the Global South “, this editorial offers a sketch for a research agenda on transitions research with a main focus on Africa. Still being ill-defined in its concrete contours, this research agenda engages with the central themes of heterogeneity, politics, and the material basis of energy transitions. In this editorial, we address both pro…
Splintering Urbanism and Climate Breakdown
On the anniversary of the publication of Splintering Urbanism, climate breakdown heralds a new era in public investment in infrastructure. However, current proposals for infrastructure overlook two decades of work in infrastructure studies. For example, both the Green New Deal advanced by activists in the United States and the European Green Deal, proposed by the European Commission, establish a dual logic between investments in centralized syste…
Institutionalisation of urban climate adaptation: Three municipal experiences in Spain
Comparative studies of urban adaptation have evaluated the progress, means and scope of adaptation planning. Practice on the ground shows that the local politics of climate adaptation advance through various strategies to align different interests and spheres of action or disrupt mainstream practices, which translates into a wide range of interventions. This paper focuses on understanding the dynamics and tools that enable the institutionalisatio…
Delivering an off-grid transition to sustainable energy in Ethiopia and Mozambique
Background Off-grid and decentralized energy systems have emerged as an alternative to facilitate energy access and resilience in a flexible, adaptable way, particularly for communities that do not have reliable access to centralized energy networks both in rural and urban areas. Much research to date on community energy systems has focused on their deployment in Europe and North America. This paper advances these debates by looking at how commun…
Th anniversary of Territory, Politics, Governance: Achievements and prospects
Ten years ago, the founding Editor-in-Chief of Territory, Politics, Governance, Professor John Agnew, published an editorial in the inaugural issue of this journal. Launched by the Regional Studies Association, and enabled and supported by fellow editors and the publishing team, the vision of the journal was set out clearly and concisely: ‘The intersection between the three words in the journal’s name defines the central purpose of the journal: t…
The Homogenization of Urban Climate Action Discourses
The diversification of actors in global climate governance may entail risks, but it is also linked to enhanced democratic performance and opportunities for innovation. To what extent has this diversification fostered a parallel multiplication of perspectives in urban climate policy? To answer this question, we analyze the evolution of urban narratives based on 463 international policy documents issued between 1946 and 2020. Our analysis shows tha…
Radical unknowability: An essay on solidarities and multiform urban life
If urban life emerges within a multiplex space, what forms of change are afforded by urban environments? The urban entails a series of relations and detachments that contain popular economies and urban commons. Rather than a system, the urban becomes an amalgamation of multiple forms. Thus, urban change does not follow one-off dramatic interventions, but rather, it results from numerous micro shifts constantly occurring in the urban environment. …
Thinking and writing with care
Urban Transformations to Keep All the Same: The Power of Ivy Discourses
The concept of urban transformations has gathered interest among scholars and policymakers calling for radical change towards sustainability. The discourse represents an entry point to address systemic causes of ecological degradation and social injustice, thereby providing solutions to intractable global challenges. Yet, so far, urban transformations projects have fallen short of delivering significant action in cities. The limited ability of th…
Government by experiment? Global cities and the governing of climate change
In this paper, we argue for an approach that goes beyond an institutional reading of urban climate governance to engage with the ways in which government is accomplished through social and technical practices. Central to the exercise of government in this manner, we argue, are ‘climate change experiments’– purposive interventions in urban socio‐technical systems designed to respond to the imperatives of mitigating and adapting to climate change i…
A survey of urban climate change experiments in 100 cities
Cities are key sites where climate change is being addressed. Previous research has largely overlooked the multiplicity of climate change responses emerging outside formal contexts of decision-making and led by actors other than municipal governments. Moreover, existing research has largely focused on case studies of climate change mitigation in developed economies. The objective of this paper is to uncover the heterogeneous mix of actors, settin…
Urban Governance and the Politics of Climate change
Climate justice and global cities: Mapping the emerging discourses
Spatial adventures in energy studies: An introduction to the special issue
Low-carbon Transitions and the Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructure
Over the past decade, a growing body of research has examined the role of cities in addressing climate change and the institutional and political challenges which they encounter. For the most part, in these accounts, the infrastructure networks, their material fabric, everyday practices and political economies, have remained unexamined. In this paper, it is argued that this is a critical omission and an approach is developed for understanding how…
Maintaining Climate Change Experiments: Urban Political Ecology and the Everyday Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructure
Climate change governance is increasingly being conducted through urban climate change experiments, purposive interventions that seek to reconfigure urban sociotechnical systems to achieve low-carbon and resilient cities. In examining how experiments take effect, we suggest that we need to understand not only how they are made and assembled, but also how they are maintained within specific urban contexts. Drawing on literatures from urban politic…
The Covid-19 pandemic: Territorial, political and governance dimensions of the crisis
As editors of Territory, Politics, Governance, we want first and foremost to express our solidarity with those affected and impacted directly by the COVID-19 pandemic. While none of us is untouched by the current public health crisis, what has unfolded thus far reveals only too clearly the inbuilt inequalities of contemporary capitalist society in terms of mortality, illness and recovery (for a pre-COVID-19 discussion of the United States, see Ca…
Co-benefits, contradictions, and multi-level governance of low-carbon experimentation: Leveraging solar energy for sustainable development in China
Transformative capacity and local action for urban sustainability
There is a consensus about the strategic importance of cities and urban areas for achieving a global transformation towards sustainability. While there is mounting interest in the types of qualities that increase the capacity of urban systems to attain deep transformations, empirical evidence about the extent to which existing institutional and material systems exhibit transformative capacity is lacking. This paper thereby seeks to determine the …
Intersectionality challenges for the co-production of urban services: Notes for a theoretical and methodological agenda
The co-production of urban services, such as water, energy or sanitation, is a vital tool to advance service delivery and to challenge socioeconomic structures that reproduce urban inequalities. This article examines the crossovers between debates on intersectionality and the co-production of urban services. Intersectionality is a critical lens for an engaged critique of the dynamics of exclusion that may challenge service co-production. The pape…
Towards a Postcolonial Perspective on Climate Urbanism
The growing interest in urban areas as sites for climate action has led to new ways of conceiving and planning the urban. As climate actions reshape existing understandings of what cities are or ought to be, they constitute new modalities of what recent scholarship has referred to as 'climate urbanism'. This research has framed climate urbanism as a climate-inflected iteration of neoliberal urban development, geared towards the mobilization of 'g…
Climate urbanism as critical urban theory
As urban actors engage in climate action, their projects – from urban greening to changes in urban energy systems – reshape not just the urban built environment but also the organization of social life. This new climate urbanism invites to reimagine what it means to be urban in a climate-changed world. We propose the articulation of climate urbanism as a critical theory that both exposes the production of further inequalities associated with urba…
Climate governance through partnerships: A study of 150 urban initiatives in China
Contradiction, intervention, and urban low carbon transitions
This paper presents an analysis of contradictions in urban low carbon transitions as engines of change. Following Kojève's reading of contradiction in Hegel's oeuvre, I argue that contradiction is a constitutive feature of low carbon interventions. This is an alternative to conventional readings of contradiction as a provisional encounter of opposites in which one will eventually cancel out the other. I unpack the concept of contra diction in thr…
Environmentalities of urban climate governance in Maputo, Mozambique
Urban Transformations to Keep All the Same: The Power of Ivy Discourses
The concept of urban transformations has gathered interest among scholars and policymakers calling for radical change towards sustainability. The discourse represents an entry point to address systemic causes of ecological degradation and social injustice, thereby providing solutions to intractable global challenges. Yet, so far, urban transformations projects have fallen short of delivering significant action in cities. The limited ability of th…
Energy sovereignty and development planning: The case of Maputo, Mozambique
Energy sovereignty refers to people’s capacity to take decisions about energy planning. It emphasises the role of energy services in everyday life. This refers both to the quality of energy services and the inequalities in service provision. Energy sovereignty supports policy agendas to deliver energy access in local settings. It is an alternative to energy security. Energy security casts energy planning at the national level. In contrast, energy…
Stigma and Attachment: Performance of Identity in an Environmentally Degraded Place
Research examining the relationship between place and identity shows that the experience of places influences a person's process of identification, through which an emotional bond with the place may be developed. However, the implications of this literature for land restoration remain unexplored. This is partially due to a gap in empirical research that explores the performance of identities in environmentally degraded settings. This article exam…
Practising interdisciplinarity in the interplay between disciplines: Experiences of established researchers
Interdependence between Urban Processes and Energy Transitions: The Dimensions of Urban Energy Transitions (Duet) Framework
Social housing and low carbon transitions in Ljubljana, Slovenia
Flows, system boundaries and the politics of urban metabolism: Waste management in Mexico City and Santiago de Chile
Radical unknowability: An essay on solidarities and multiform urban life
If urban life emerges within a multiplex space, what forms of change are afforded by urban environments? The urban entails a series of relations and detachments that contain popular economies and urban commons. Rather than a system, the urban becomes an amalgamation of multiple forms. Thus, urban change does not follow one-off dramatic interventions, but rather, it results from numerous micro shifts constantly occurring in the urban environment. …
A culture‐led approach to understanding energy transitions in China: The correlative epistemology
Transformations of the energy system are unfolding in China at an unprecedented scale and pace. The dynamics of China's energy transitions impact global trends of energy decarbonisation. Transition theories within the Anglophone academic tradition have been used to examine this process, but they tend to misrepresent the social, cultural, and political structures that shape energy transitions in China. This paper proposes a move from an analysis o…
Coal ash and risk: Four social interpretations of a pollution landscape
The purpose of this paper is to examine how cultural and natural components of landscapes interact in the context of environmental change. The paper looks at an example of a ‘pollution landscape’ through the lens of four distinct perspectives on the relationship between landscapes and society derived from the literature. The aim is both to develop a holistic understanding of the interaction of landscape and society in the case study and to explor…
Practising interdisciplinarity in the interplay between disciplines: Experiences of established researchers
The governance of coal ash pollution in post-socialist times: Power and Expectations
The coal energy sector in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) represents both a significant economic hope and a considerable environmental threat for the country. One of the major problems of the coal industry is the disposal of large amounts of coal combustion residues. RECOAL was an EU-supported project (2005–7) whose objective was to develop remediation solutions for coal ash disposal (CAD) sites in BiH. Most of RECOAL's environmental fieldwork was b…
Stigma and Attachment: Performance of Identity in an Environmentally Degraded Place
Research examining the relationship between place and identity shows that the experience of places influences a person's process of identification, through which an emotional bond with the place may be developed. However, the implications of this literature for land restoration remain unexplored. This is partially due to a gap in empirical research that explores the performance of identities in environmentally degraded settings. This article exam…
The Performance of Environmental Science in Research Teams
Scientists' practices rely not only on the discursive production of science but also on routine interactions whereby scientists manage their teams and their publics. The metaphor of the theatre helps explain how researchers perform impressions to different audiences. This metaphor can also help analyse how scientists and researchers cooperate in performance teams in order to manage credibility impressions. How are research teams constructed and m…
Climate Change and Sustainable Development Perspectives in Construction and Planning
Environmental conflicts, research projects and the generation of collective expectations: A case study of a land regeneration project in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Locally based research projects may generate multiple and competing expectations from local actors, particularly when they deal with local issues that are perceived as affecting the local quality of life, such as land regeneration. The sociology of expectations provides an entry point through which the expectations of research projects in the context of an environmental conflict can be investigated. This article analyzes a case study of a project…
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Metabolism
The concept of urban metabolism, referring to the exchange processes that produce the urban environment, has inspired new ways of thinking about how cities can be made sustainable and has also raised criticisms about the specific social and economic arrangements in which some forms of flow are prioritized or marginalized within the city. This article explores how the concept of urban metabolism travels across disciplines, using a comparative anal…
Urban experiments and climate change: Securing zero carbon development in Bangalore
Climate change is an increasingly important issue on urban policy and research agendas. As this agenda gathers pace, this paper argues for an approach that recognises the critical role of climate change experiments in meditating the response to climate change in the city. Drawing on a case study of a green housing development in the outskirts of Bangalore in India—Towards Zero Carbon Development (T-Zed)—the paper follows the emergence of an exper…
A survey of urban climate change experiments in 100 cities
Cities are key sites where climate change is being addressed. Previous research has largely overlooked the multiplicity of climate change responses emerging outside formal contexts of decision-making and led by actors other than municipal governments. Moreover, existing research has largely focused on case studies of climate change mitigation in developed economies. The objective of this paper is to uncover the heterogeneous mix of actors, settin…
Government by experiment? Global cities and the governing of climate change
In this paper, we argue for an approach that goes beyond an institutional reading of urban climate governance to engage with the ways in which government is accomplished through social and technical practices. Central to the exercise of government in this manner, we argue, are ‘climate change experiments’– purposive interventions in urban socio‐technical systems designed to respond to the imperatives of mitigating and adapting to climate change i…
Social housing and low carbon transitions in Ljubljana, Slovenia
Climate justice and global cities: Mapping the emerging discourses
Symbolic Violence and the Politics of Environmental Pollution Science: The Case of Coal Ash Pollution in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Environmental justice movements often contest environmental knowledge by engaging in scientific debates, which implies accepting the predominance of scientific discourses over alternative forms of knowledge. Using Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence, this paper warns that the engagement with hegemonic forms of knowledge production may reproduce, rather than challenge, existing social and environmental inequalities. The argument is developed w…
Maintaining Climate Change Experiments: Urban Political Ecology and the Everyday Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructure
Climate change governance is increasingly being conducted through urban climate change experiments, purposive interventions that seek to reconfigure urban sociotechnical systems to achieve low-carbon and resilient cities. In examining how experiments take effect, we suggest that we need to understand not only how they are made and assembled, but also how they are maintained within specific urban contexts. Drawing on literatures from urban politic…
Employment, environmental pollution and working class life in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina
People's experiences of a polluted space are intimately linked with their relative concerns for quality of life and livelihoods. Thus quality of environment and security of employment are two closely related issues in social conflicts over environmental pollution. Rather than being implicated in a trade-off relationship, environmental quality and job provision are both part of the life of community residents. Bringing together the literature on t…
An Urban Politics of Climate Change: Experimentation and the Governing of Socio-Technical Transitions
"The confluence of global climate change, growing levels of energy consumption and rapid urbanization has led the international policy community to regard urban responses to climate change as 'an urgent agenda' (World Bank 2010). The contribution of cities to rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions coupled with concerns about the vulnerability of urban places and communities to the impacts of climate change have led to a relatively recent and r…
Shaped by Shock: Staff on the Emergency Department 'Shop Floor'
In this article we consider the impact of shock in hospital emergency departments where people seek urgent medical care and access hospital services. We define shock as an unexpected event or set of circumstances, for although emergency departments plan for uncertainty, shock moments are when protocols and procedures fail to meet operational demands. We reveal how, depending on the professional experience and personality of staff, shocks are expe…
Viewpoint: Planning for climate change in the African city
In this viewpoint I argue for a perspective on climate change in African cities that focuses on challenges and also opportunities for action. Delivering climate change adaptation in cities in the first instance requires addressing immediate infrastructure and service provision needs, because increasing climate change resilience in cities also requires improving the delivery of services to all citizens. However, there is a risk that climate change…
Environmentalities of urban climate governance in Maputo, Mozambique
Low-carbon Transitions and the Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructure
Over the past decade, a growing body of research has examined the role of cities in addressing climate change and the institutional and political challenges which they encounter. For the most part, in these accounts, the infrastructure networks, their material fabric, everyday practices and political economies, have remained unexamined. In this paper, it is argued that this is a critical omission and an approach is developed for understanding how…
History, Memory and Everyday Environmentalism. The Case of New Belgrade
The authors study experiences of the urban environment in New Belgrade and argue for an understanding of how environmental movements are mobilised and mediated by urban environments. In particular, they focus on the perceptions that have emerged through historical processes of state-driven urban development and urban appropriation by the population when the state retreated . Today, future visions of the city-to-be intersect with the lived reality…
Participatory urban planning for climate change adaptation in coastal cities: Lessons from a pilot experience in Maputo, Mozambique
Are wildcard events on infrastructure systems opportunities for transformational change
Infrastructure systems face a number of pressing challenges relating to demographics, environment, finance and governance pressures. Furthermore, infrastructure mediates the way in which everyday lives are conducted; their form and function creating a persistence of unsustainable practice and behaviour that cannot be changed even if change is desired. There is a need to find means by which this obduracy can be broken so that new, more sustainable…
Contradiction, intervention, and urban low carbon transitions
This paper presents an analysis of contradictions in urban low carbon transitions as engines of change. Following Kojève's reading of contradiction in Hegel's oeuvre, I argue that contradiction is a constitutive feature of low carbon interventions. This is an alternative to conventional readings of contradiction as a provisional encounter of opposites in which one will eventually cancel out the other. I unpack the concept of contra diction in thr…
Political science (73 works) · Geography (53 works) · Economics (50 works) · Sociology (50 works) · Politics (37 works) · Environmental planning (34 works) · Business (33 works) · Sustainability and Climate Change Governance (30 works) · Climate change (29 works) · Law (29 works)