Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Areas

This book series Theory and Practice of Urban Sustainability Transitions is intended to explore the different dynamics, challenges, and breakthroughs in accelerating sustainability transitions in urban areas across the globe. We expect to find as much different and diverse stories, visions, experiments, and creative actors as there are cities: from metropolises to country towns, from inner city districts to suburbs, from developed to developing, from monocultural to diverse, and from hierarchical to egalitarian. But we also expect to find patterns in processes and dynamics of transitions across this diversity. Transition dynamics include locked-in regimes that are challenged by changing contexts, ecological stress and societal pressure for change as well as experiments and innovations in niches driven by entrepreneurial networks, and creative communities and proactive administrators. But also included are resistance by vested interests and sunken costs, uncertainties about the future amongst urban populations, political instabilities, and the erosion of social services and systems of provision. And finally there are the forming of transformative arenas, the development of coalitions for change across different actor groups, the diffusion and adoption of new practices, and exponential growth of sustainable technologies.