IPCC and the City: The Need to Transition from Ideology to Climate Justice

Introduction

Every five to ten years, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) takes on the heroic task of compiling the current state of knowledge concerning climate change and how the world should respond to it. The exhaustive review, which appears in the body’s periodic Assessment Report (AR), discusses the sources and projections of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and associated climate change, as well as options for mitigating and adapting to such change. The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) has been published, in sections, since 2021. ¹ This article looks at the mitigation and adaptation reports, especially the sections that pertain to urban areas.

In response to previous criticism on the lack of explicit focus on the urban dimension, since AR4, various sections of the AR have focused specifically on cities and land use planning. Much of the discussion on cities appears in the section Mitigation of Climate Change, specifically the chapter on Urban Systems and Other Settlements (Lwasa et al. 2022), and Spatial Planning, and the section, Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, specifically the chapter on Cities, Settlements, and Key Infrastructure (Dodman et al. 2022).

The crux of this commentary is this: that the well-intentioned authors of the AR fail to characterize the city as what it most fundamentally is, which is a constellation of relations that create and recreate urban life in the everyday. The report misses what makes climate change mitigation and adaptation most challenging, chief among these is the intimate relationship between carbon and urban life in its utter complexity. By substituting a mock-up of the city, abstracting away what makes it a city and putting in its place various models (especially casting it, first, as a form and, second, as an input–output machine), the report puts forward what is essentially an ideology more than a depiction of actual cities.

The second aim of this commentary is to point out how the ideological nature of the AR alienates communities, such as found in the global South, and fails to speak to their context. Some biases are inherent in the planning discipline itself, such as the ideological treatment of form as some sort of universal catch-all for the urban condition. A set of universal claims about the Western/Northern city, which is used as a reference point, imposes a monocultural urban ethic upon urban life.

What this does is misrecognize a foremost challenge which is, going beyond the report’s framing of the city as an engine of climate change emissions, the radical change that climate change mitigation will have on the web of relationships that make up a city. The AR is the voice of the privileged subject imposing a cultural worldview, passed off as an acultural treatment of the city. By excluding the voice of the global South, the AR ignores the foremost concern, that is: how can the cities of the developing world possibly take on the tremendous burden of decarbonization?

Mitigation

Chapter 8 of the Mitigation section is titled “Urban Systems and Other Settlements” (Lwasa et al. 2022). The discussion revolves around how the design, operation, and governance of the city affect its carbon footprint. AR6 continues where AR5 leaves off, evoking the focus on urban form:

The starting point for that chapter [AR-5] was how the spatial organization of urban settlements affects greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and how urban form and infrastructure could facilitate mitigation of climate change. A main finding in AR5 was that urban form shapes urban energy consumption and GHG emissions. (Lwasa et al. 2022, 8).

AR6 builds on the last statement, as it lays out a representation of the city that does no justice to the real conditions of urban life around the world.

Thus spoke Zarathustra: “I come again eternally . . . to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things” (Z, LVII). In the AR, the planner evokes the idea of city form, a transcendent property akin to Plato’s eternal forms, like the genetic code of the city which determines its identity in ineluctable fashion.

What is a city when you abstract away society, culture, and the never-ending work carried out by its constellation of relationships? In the universe created by the report, the city is simply form. And these forms recur, repeated in city after city, and the planner becomes the Zarathustrian sage speaking of their eternal recurrence. To understand the city as ideal geometry is, first, to abstract away the lived experience (including the tensions, hopes, victories, and struggles) that makes the city what it is and, second, to mask the underlying ideology that disguises itself in the name of form.

These abstractions into form carry out a kind of erasure of existing communities, devalorizing their culture, place, and neighborhood (Holston 1998). This is part of what we might refer to as social rendering, which is the use of disciplinary mechanisms of measurement and control that suppress expression of the existing community in favor of the reimagined (Lejano and González 2017; Sachs Olsen 2021).

The report evokes the eternal recurrence of these forms, expressed in the language of intersectional density, population centrality, connectivity, urban infill, and others, that embody the ideological. In this case, the ideology is wrapped up in the ideal of the anglophilic/American city, and the patterns are well known to students of city planning. It evokes New Urbanism, which extends this ideology, with templates of forms and styles associated with the archetypal American small town, as well as TOD (transit-oriented development), which has become a standard blueprint for American urban redevelopment. Imposing these templates upon cities that are nothing like Chicago or Los Angeles, much of what does not fit is just relegated to “informality” (Lwasa et al. 2022, 8-72). But, as Pulido suggests, discourse cannot privilege without subjugating (Pulido 2015).

The abstraction of city into forms (density, morphology) is an ideological act. One sees this plainly when we consider how two cities, Los Angeles and Delhi, with comparable densities, are nothing like each other with respect to carbon emissions, with LA at 14.6 tons per capita and Delhi at 2.6. ² Density in one place means something completely different from another. And, so, what does it mean to abstract the city into density and form? It is the ideological act of erasure of the real communities to be reimagined according to idealized cultural forms. This is less a sin of the IPCC than the planning community, in general. Is density good or bad? In and of itself, it is neither, especially when it means high-value rents and resource use in one setting and inadequate infrastructure and services in another.

Per capita annual incomes in Delhi and Los Angeles are US$4,771 and US$35,261, respectively (Statista Research Department 2021; U.S. Census Bureau 2019). This suggests, in the case of Delhi, millions of people living on a knife’s edge, barely making ends meet. In such a setting, what more can a populace give in terms of reducing its per capita carbon budget, and how much would any efforts at carbon reduction and adaptation push millions off the fine balance of subsistence? Projected to be the world’s most populous city by 2028 (United Nations 2018), Delhi is being subjected to a densification that is nothing like the modernist abstractions of the AR, where we do not see real cities and real people.

The evocation of conventional or ideal forms, however, neutrally presented, always erases the “other.” For example, Lejano and González (2017) describe how form-based codes used in new developments foster not just the primacy of certain forms but social genotypes as well, illustrating how such erasure alienates existing Latino neighborhoods in Southern California. Typified forms are cultural leitmotifs used to colonize the other. Similarly, the typification of form in the AR is a type of erasure of the kinds of urban spaces found in many non-American cities. Consider the myriad types of favela in Brazil, which reproduce urban life through their complexity, and consider their absence in ideas of the good city. A report that elevates colonialist forms as a universal condition ignores the reality that informality characterizes much of the new growth in world cities.

There is, in the arid technical language of the AR, embedded ideology. For example, “Most future urban population growth will occur in developing countries, where per capita emissions are currently low but expected to increase with the construction and use of new infrastructure and the built environment, and changes in incomes and lifestyles” (Lwasa et al. 2022, 8-4) and

New and emerging cities have unparalleled potential to become low or net zero emissions urban areas while achieving high quality of life by creating compact, co-located, and walkable urban areas with mixed land use and TOD, that also preserve existing green and blue assets. (Lwasa et al. 2022, 8-91)

In other words, whatever radical changes are to occur in city form are left for the developing world to carry out. This is more consequential than it sounds. Consider the modern city, with its reinforced concrete towers, thoroughfares, massive inflows of consumer goods—all built on the basis of GHG emissions. Many developing world cities have yet to achieve adequate levels of necessary infrastructure, housing, and transportation. And it is at this point that these cities are asked to reconsider their development. The AR, through its typifying forms, hints at massive changes (that are never quite tangible): how would people in struggling cities in the developing world actually survive such a radical transition?

It is in the cities in the developing world, where these radical shifts in urban growth and form are being alluded to. It is in the daily rounds of millions of people that these radical changes are being proposed. The AR does not broach the idea (and perhaps its authors scarcely considered it) that, in the turn toward a decarbonized city, millions of urban poor can get further disenfranchised in the process.

The AR’s modernist discourse avoids exploration of the ethical dimensions of mitigation—most of all, that the poor in non-Annex I nations suffer the impacts of climate change disproportionately, while the rich in Annex I should bear most of the blame for it and, ethically, should shoulder the greatest burden for climate change mitigation (Gore 2020). Adaptation, too, can impose social costs on the poor, and adaptive management is often a policy instrument for the wealthy: “From Boston to Dhaka, resources earmarked for climate-adaptation are concentrated in wealthy districts and the risks are exacerbated elsewhere” (Wachsmuth, Cohen, and Angelo 2016, 392). ³

The AR does not emerge from neutral analytics that come from nowhere. These are imposed from a cultural hegemony.

In the movie, The Matrix, a mysterious stranger leads the protagonist, Neo, to the discovery that the city of his reality is, in fact, a simulation. In the AR, the city is reduced to a carbon input–output machine. The city, in its soul, its blood-and-guts reality, is transmuted into the single-dimensional world of the carbon matrix. The input–output matrix is the simulacrum of the city. In its simplicity is its violence. But what, a humanist might say, about culture, social cohesion, freedoms and rights, trials and aspirations, and all else that give cities life?

What does it mean to abstract away the complexity of the city, beginning with the social and cultural? It is alienating to lived community. Recall Jane Jacobs describing how the reductionist rendering of the city in terms of throughput and zoning threatened to erase vital neighborhoods and culture like her beloved Greenwich Village (Jacobs 1969). Reduction of the social ecology of a city into an input–output carbon machine threatens to do the same, which is to forget that thriving communities of people, place, and things have organized life in ways that an exogenous shock (like a carbon tax or other sweeping mitigation measure) threatens to undo.

The report fails to engage in the meaning of the city, which means to ignore the meaning of carbon within it. Carbon means a city and a lifestyle wrapped up around it, not just the carbon that fills the concrete, casts the iron, and imbues the wood that fill in the urban form. And it is the most marginalized in the city that are perhaps most intimately tied to carbon—sourcing wood or charcoal for cooking, driving two-cylinder tuktuks for a living, or recycling plastics. For example, over 80 percent of urban households in sub-Saharan Africa use charcoal for cooking (Zulu and Richardson 2013). Transportation can take up a significant share of the household budget—for example, in Kampala, 50 percent of the urban poor’s disposable income (The World Bank 2013).

The city is about culture and relationality, but the report would have none of this. In the bloodless accounting of the input–output matrix, carbon is everything.

With aggressive and immediate 46 mitigation policies to limit global warming below 1.5°C by the end of the century, including high levels of electrification, energy and material efficiency, renewable energy preferences, and socio-behavioural responses, urban GHG emissions could approach net zero and reach a maximum of 3 GtCO2-eq in 2050. (Lwasa et al. 2022, 8-4)

But to change a city based on such a radical abstraction of it is to threaten to undo its very life, which is wrapped up in carbon from beginning to end.

Carbon is the universal denominator. The logical (neoliberal) solution, of course, is to turn carbon into a currency. Pricing carbon has the potential to be regressive (Grainger and Kolstad 2010; Morris and Munnings 2013)—first, to those cities struggling to attain some measure of development and, second, to the marginalized within these cities (Barbier 2014; Hussein, Hertel, and Golub 2013). In many situations, it is lower income families that spend a greater share of their income on energy (e.g., Pizer and Sexton 2019). But the AR elides away the potential violence to the world’s marginalized, putting a pretty bow on mitigation using terms like leapfrog development (although it is hard to think of a city in a lower GDP [gross domestic product] nation that has actually achieved this so far this century).

AR6 does propose that changes to city form and infrastructure can potentially aid the urban poor, especially in providing lower cost sources of energy and turning them away from biomass but, as elsewhere, this is stated more as an article of faith than a reckoning of reality. It improves upon AR5 by at least mentioning the Sustainable Development Goals (Lwasa et al. 2020, 8-20), especially that of reducing poverty and inequality, as associated goals of mitigation and adaptation. But it never asks questions important to the global South, such as: just when the developing world is on the cusp of development, how can it continue raising living standards while making the presumably massive investments needed for mitigation and adaptation? What great adjustments will be required to wean cities away from carbon, and will the urban poor survive these transitions? In other words, just as the AR emphasizes the carbon footprint of society, it ignores the social footprint of carbon (or, more to the point, of decarbonization).

There is an efficacy question here, as well, in that we need to analyze and measure the ways and degrees to which carbon is integrated into people’s everyday lives and, the real cost to people of decoupling from carbon. Moving from ideology means incorporating the real and varied experience of people in the city and using this to inform our interventions. When we measure things (such as density), it is often a step removed from how people experience carbon in their everyday lives.

Ideology is embedded in the carbon emission projections, reifying the subordinate status of the global South. Even the more sanguine projections that form the bases of these forecasts assume per capita incomes for developing countries in Asia that are almost six times less than those of the developed nations. ⁴

Adaptation

Another section of the AR discusses “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” with a sub-section (Chapter 6) devoted to urban areas (Dodman et al. 2022). The discussion of adaptation gives one the impression of conveying ideas that one already knew before reading the AR. The reason, we believe is, first, the propositions made do not go beyond the realm of the categorical, leaving out the experience and voice of the global South in favor of a privileged modernist discourse.

Second, the logic of the chapter can be tautological. The exercise is that of constructing a conceptual model and making observations within it. What is needed, the AR intones, for the city to withstand an exogenous shock like climate change is to build the resilient city. As resilience is conventionally understood as the ability of a system to function and thrive despite an exogenous shock, there is something circular about this reasoning.

The AR could have been (should have been) an attempt to begin imagining how climate change would affect different cities in the world and, second, give cities (managers, communities) a real sense of the enormity of what is being required of them. The earliest of the AR6 reports to come out, “The Physical Science Basis,” summarizes what the research says about the nature and magnitude of climate change. It gives us a sense of what the future might look like. The section on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” could have attempted to do something similar, by summarizing what we think the impacts to different cities would really be like and how radical the changes might be to adapt to them. But as thorough the physical science elements have addressed changes to climate, there is little in the way of projecting impacts to actual cities, and actual lives, on the ground. For example, will it make some parts of their residential areas unlivable and require relocation? How will decarbonization affect people barely subsisting in the city? But, instead, it provides sweeping generalizations that do not make any more tangible the uncertain futures and choices confronting cities. We already know that sea level rise will require some sort of coastal defenses and shift in the use of coastal land, but how severe might it be for different cities, and how radical might these changes be? Will the large capital investment needed increase local and national indebtedness, and how much? By remaining in the categorical, the AR merely repeats conventional wisdom, citing volumes of journal articles in the process. The AR reinforces cities’ tendency to under-adapt because IPCC predictions have yet to be translated into terms immediate and tangible to local planners (Butler, Deyle, and Mutnansky 2016).

The AR needs to aid city planners and civic groups to begin imagining the possible futures that confront their cities.

What is needed is for communities to be able to model and forecast the interactions among the relevant ecological, built, political, and social systems in the places where they are, both now and in the future, and generate sufficient political support to facilitate action. (Susskind and Kim 2022, 2)

And this must include attempts to make more tangible the burdens that proposals for mitigation and adaptation might bring to cities in the developing world and, within them, the urban poor.

One of the most glaring omissions of the AR is any acknowledgment that adaptation as envisioned is, as far as one can tell, impossible for developing nations. There is, almost casually, mention that, “Globally it is estimated that as much as US$94tn of investment is required between 2016 and 2040 to replace, upgrade and extend the world’s physical infrastructure . . .” (Dodman et al. 2022, 6-63), without reflecting on what this means for the global South. Nowhere, in the AR, is the question being asked about whether this degree of capital investment for adaptation is something that can further burden developing nations and further impoverish the world’s poor. When the AR does evoke the social, it does so as a palliative—for example, evoking an idealized model such as Adaptive Social Protection, which is defined as

a resilience-building approach by combining elements of social protection, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, so as to break the cycle of poverty and vulnerability of household by investing in their capacity to prepare for, cope with, and adapt to all types of shocks [that will somehow be delivered by] development organizations, national provisions and market charities. (Dodman et al. 2022, 6-51)

Nowhere in the AR is discussion of trenchant questions such as: can and should the global South possibly adapt, in the massive scale described by the AR, as a response to a condition (anthropogenic climate change) largely caused by other nations? When the human dimensions are evoked in the AR, they are idealized technological panaceas located within an ideological construct:

Critical capacity gaps exist at city and community levels that hinder adaptation . . . These can be addressed through enhanced locally accountable decision-making with sufficient access to science, technology and local knowledge to support widespread application of adaptation solutions. (Dodman et al. 2022, 6-4)

In many parts of the world, including cities in the developing world (and perhaps cities in high-GDP countries as well, such as New York City), whatever efforts are being taken can be driven by rentseeking—that is, developers and politicians hoping to initiate new capital improvement projects. The problem with this, of course, is that these projects target objectives other than adaptation and can fail to achieve the latter. It promotes “‘resilient’ projects that merely re-package development-as-usual” (Anguelovski et al. 2016). The AR does not begin to discuss the gap between the near-term decision-making conducted by city officials and investors and the longer time horizons of climate-related planning. And what does adaptation really entail? In cities like Rio de Janeiro, it might lead to destruction of entire favelas on the coast or foothills and displacement of these communities. It might mean ruin to some property owners and an overhaul of risk insurance systems. Adaptation occurs in the realpolitik of conflict-ridden cities. ⁵

The AR mentions intersectionality but, by staying within the ideological, does not translate the concept into social realities. These analyses neglect the sociological at their peril. For example, Hong Kong has benefited from public health and other measures and presently enjoys the highest life expectancies, for women and men, in the world. This demographic trend is happening at the same time as profound social change: changing attitudes, skyrocketing rents, and changing economic pressures have shrunk the average household size to around three persons (Census and Statistics Department [CSD] 2020). Surveys indicate that around 99 percent of the elderly now live in an elderly-only household, and around 58 percent live absolutely alone (CSD 2016), mostly in high-rise apartment towers near the coast. As was seen in the experience of the Red Hook homes in New York City, during Superstorm Sandy, this kind of isolation brings many older persons at risk for extreme weather, which intersects with other vulnerabilities (Kan and Lejano 2021; Lou and Ng 2012).

But why does the AR remain in the discussion of the categorical, content to generalize instead of critically analyze? Many reasons, perhaps, including the absence of researchers trained in critical analysis, who can probe the cultural and sociological dimensions of the city. Another reason is that the AR’s treatment of the city remains in the ideological, imposing upon the real cities of the world an abstract idealization of good city form and idealized system states evoked by the term resilience. There is no contestation within an abstract, autopoietic system, which is what ideology is (Lejano and Nero 2020). Ideological talk does not deal with the realities of context but, instead, maps the minds of the subject onto the space of the city.

In this abstract space, the authors of the AR can work out a program without acknowledging the potentially enormous burden that adaptation might place on the lesser privileged. This is possible because the AR, as we discuss below, reflects the discourse of the Northern/Western subject speaking to and about the objectified South. Missing is the voice of the latter (and when it is heard, is regarded as a lesser voice). The AR is an ideological treatise and, instead of reckoning with the real questions concerning climate change mitigation and underdevelopment, it gives only pious articles of faith:

Sustainable and low-carbon urban development that integrates issues of equity, inclusivity, and affordability while safeguarding urban livelihoods, providing access to basic services, lowering energy bills, addressing energy poverty, and improving public health, can also improve the distributional effects of existing and future urbanization. (Lwasa et al. 2022, 8-94)

The adaptation report has a new section on implications of the global experience with COVID-19 and connections to resilience and adaptation. But it does not discuss one of the more relevant lessons learned during the pandemic, such as the great difficulties experienced by developing nations to procure MRNA vaccines. Why? One omission is that producer nations, most notably the U.S., essentially hoarded the supply of MRNA vaccines in their first year of mass production. ⁶ This has implications for climate change mitigation and adaptation—consider the vague promise of significant transfers of green technology and capital (for mitigation and adaptation) to the developing nations, which has yet to occur. If the experience with vaccines offers any lesson for the global South, it is that one cannot rely on such transfers to happen (at least, not without strings attached, such as massive indebtedness).

There are bright spots in the adaptation report, such as the relevant discussion of how planning for disaster risk reduction provides a foundation for climate adaptation planning and its recognition of more inclusive types of planning. But, as we discuss below, these are narratives told in the voice of the privileged subject speaking for the “other.”

Conclusion: City as Co-production

The imposition of notions of good city form upon real cities ignores the reality of the city, which is that life in it, and its form as experienced in the everyday, is a co-production involving agents of the state, private sector, and community. Planning theorists describe co-production as involving empowerment of communities to engage in the planning and enacting of urban places and, second, the inclusion of voices from the Global South in planning discourse (Watson 2014).

The AR recognizes the concept of co-production but, ironically, illustrates how seldom it is employed. We ponder about the voices not heard in the AR: voices that represent the socio-cultural, the South, the marginalized, and the sub-altern. The urbanist sections of the AR are a colonialist discourse that, in its rarified depictions of good city form, maps onto the city the ideology of the privileged urbanists, mapping the planner’s mind more than the actual city (Lejano 2008).

The bodies that authored the two sections analyzed herein reflect the power dynamics behind climate action—almost 90 percent of them having received their graduate training in developed nations, and about 70 percent working in organizations and universities in these countries (i.e., the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD]). But is this not reflective of planning academia itself, with its long-standing privileging of the white, anglocentric, liberal-Western? Academia today is all about citing the same people ad nauseam. Planning, some say, has devolved into the reinforcement of ideological knowledge-claims (e.g., Gunder and Hillier 2016). But, as it is with dialectics, the interesting part begins when we cut through them and strain to hear all the voices unheard.

The urban elements of the AR are not unreasonable. At the very least, they are quite a good (but selective) literature review. We say, selective, because sustainability (and planning) discourse invariably promotes the voice of white privilege. (With apologies to Jacobs, Mumford, et al., just think of the authors we have been taught to cite and cannot hope to publish without citing.) But if planning is to succeed in translating climate change science into practice, it must “place a spotlight on practitioners, advocates, and scholars from the global South and their practice-based strategies” (Carolini 2020). Instead, we hear mostly the voice of privilege, which is an ideological discourse that espouses technology (“green roofs and green walls”) not justice and only elegizes about the latter to assuage the privileged’s guilt.

Postscript: A while back, one of the authors was in the outskirts of the city of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, at a massive refugee settlement where close to a million members of the Rohingya community encamped after fleeing ethnic violence in Myanmar. People were talking about how the dangers of tropical cyclones would get worse with climate change. The author started to talk about carbon footprints, resilience, adaptation, then stopped. Standing there in front of the gathered refugees, he was struck by the thought of the unimaginable pain and deprivation they had endured. Who was he to be preaching carbon footprints and sustainability? So he listened, and he heard things you would not hear at an IPCC colloquium. People spoke about surviving through the strength of family and neighbor, living by the grace of Allah. They spoke about love. At first blush, these words strike one as facile, irrelevant to the things we need to focus on. (Imagine the planner listening to this, nodding supportively, “thank you for sharing . . . now, let’s get back to the issue of density.”) If these words have no place in an AR, then perhaps it is the IPCC that has alienated itself.

The AR is an impressive (and massive) academic undertaking. The IPCC is responding, in the way its experts know how, to a crisis that threatens life as we know it. But it does so in ways that can alienate, acting as an instrument for further marginalization of the most vulnerable. The report is an ideological speech-act, alienating not just in its words but in its prosody, in its talking-to and speaking-for. The AR reinforces the world of the prime and the sub-altern, and the privileged subject always speaks for the other (Spivak 2003). If refugees could speak within the halls of the IPCC, what would they say?