Adaptation as an overall strategic response to climate change is understood to tackling climate exposure and reducing related risks, hence cater for resiliency of natural and human systems. With regard to urban environments, this research gives special focus to the social spatial aspect, taking the notion of latent heat stress as a cross-cutting starting point to frame integrated adaptation responses to climate change on the neighborhood scale.
Hence, the research is based on four underlying concerns to adaptation, the first dealing with heat stress as a transformative and latent, slow-onset climatic challenge gaining increasing attention in policy making (Field et al. 2014), development, planning (Kraas et al. 2016) and academia (Wamsler 2008). With seemingly less immediate or visible impacts on human settlements, latent heat yet illustrates the convergence of various climatic and non-climatic stressors on urban communities and neighborhoods as socio-spatial systems (Klinenberg 2015). The second concern, with regards to neighborhoods being part of urban social systems, is grasping the qualitative, less technical, side of climate adaptation and planning (Healey 1997, 2003). In addition to challenged physical and spatial assets its impacts potentially exacerbate existing vulnerabilities of its community members (Ambani and Nicholles 2012, Davoudi et al. 2012, Davoudi and Brooks and Mehmood 2009, Dhar and Kirfan 2017, Grothmann and Patt 2003).
Consequently, the third concern is the socio-spatial scale itself, requiring an emphasis on participatory approaches such as a ‘soft path’ that support family-, household-, and community-scale adaptations (see Ayers and Forsyth 2009, Field et al. 2014). With view to tackling these vulnerabilities to achieve resiliency, the thesis aims to explore the qualitative individual and collective understandings to latent challenges as well as to solution-oriented efforts on the neighborhood scale. The fourth concern, respectively, is framing climate adaptation and grasping the interdisciplinary perspective and foresight within planning (Dodman and Mitlin 2013, Satterthwaite et al. 2007, Revi et al. 2014, Dhar and Khirfan 2017, Wamsler and Brink 2014). Moreover, and eventually, it can significantly inform and contribute to this research when discussing an integrated perspective to adaptation planning via reducing vulnerabilities and increasing adaptive capacities linked to latent heat stress. This includes the backdrop of the current urban planning and urban development discourse, herby assuming that in contrast to building protective and preventative adaptive capacities (as in the case of response to rapid-onset events, i.e. disaster), responding to the latency of slow-onset climate impacts such as heat appears to remain overlooked. However, with increasing complexities of urban challenges linked to rising temperatures, various sub-disciplines of planning could benefit from mutually informed and amplified cross-cutting conversations in order to increase their strategic role.
This leads to the summarized postulation that climate adaptation efforts for the scale of sustainable and climate resilient urban neighborhoods require a balance of strategic responses to sensitivities of the built environment as well as to vulnerabilities of its social environment. Hence, this research aims to deliberately apply an increasingly qualitative perspective within (existing approaches of) adaptation planning with contextual notions enriching the underlying rhetorical question of ‘how to act?’, by setting the focus on asking and ‘who acts?’, and ‘why act, or why care to act?’.
This will be done by reviewing and discussing respective community specific approaches in cross-disciplinary theory and practice.
