How can we create a more pluralistic, inclusive approach to urban climate adaptation? How can ill-suited approaches be disrupted?

Current imaginaries (ways to understand and envisage how adaptation should take place) and practices need to be revised to provide social justice and reflect local needs. This special issue focuses on how inappropriate / inadequate urban adaptation imaginaries and practices can be identified and disrupted to provide more inclusive, socially just approaches to urban adaptation. Actions for urban climate adaptation (in physical, social, political, legal dimensions) are needed to break with the status quo, reduce systemic vulnerabilities and increase coping capacities (resilience) to face climate change impacts at scale.

Guest editors: Vanesa Castán Broto, Marta Olazabal & Gina Ziervogel

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, for example, of flood protection barriers that displace natural barriers, such as mangroves, or water distribution networks that supply water by depleting reserves elsewhere. New adaptation imaginaries will facilitate just adaptation and enable radical changes in the relationship between humans and their environment. One step to do so is to disrupt the dominant understandings of adaptation.

This special issue demonstrates the multiple ways in which such disruption can happen. Three areas where disruption can happen are:

• in international political narratives
• the relationship between climate change and urbanisation
• the implementation of action on the ground when action encounters the realities of infrastructure and service delivery.

This special issue argues that the first step in delivering climate change adaptation is to foster new ways of imagining what adaptation is needed and how it should be delivered. This includes a process of:

• understanding the assumptions embedded in dominant imaginaries of urban adaptation
• understanding how urbanisation changes how we imagine urban areas and their resilience
• harnessing existing radical attempts to reimagine adaptation and adaptation practices
• developing examples and experiences of applying urban adaptation alternatives in policy and practices

Table of contents

Disrupting the imaginaries of urban action to deliver just adaptation [editorial]
V. Castán-Broto, M. Olazabal & G. Ziervogel

Suburban climate adaptation governance: assumptions and imaginaries affecting peripheral municipalities
L. Cerrada Morato

Normative future visioning: a critical pedagogy for transformative adaptation
T. Comelli, M. Pelling, M. Hope, J. Ensor, M.E. Filippi, E.Y. Menteşe & J. McCloskey

How hegemonic discourses of sustainability influence urban climate action
V. Castán Broto, L. Westman & P. Huang

Nature for resilience reconfigured: global-to-local translation of frames in Africa
K. Rochell, H. Bulkeley & H. Runhaar

Maintaining a city against nature: climate adaptation in Beira [Mozambique]
J. Schubert

Urban shrinkage as a catalyst for transformative adaptation
L. Mabon, M. Sato & N. Mabon

Equity and justice in urban coastal adaptation planning: new evaluation framework
T. Okamoto & A. Doyon

Disrupt and unlock? The role of actors in urban adaptation path-breaking
J. Teebken

The jobs of climate adaptation
T. Denham, L. Rickards & O. Ajulo