CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Just Urban Transitions Geographies of Inequalities and Governance Pathways to Sustainable Futures

 

 

Co-convenors: David Kostenwein (ETH Zurich), Katrin Hofer (ETH Zurich), Fiona Anciano (University of the Western Cape), Christina Culwick Fatti (University of the Western Cape). 

This is a call for abstracts for an organised session proposal at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference (1– 4 September 2026 in London) on the theme of Geographies of Inequalities: Toward Just Places. If selected, the session will bring together contributions that critically examine “just urban transitions” in theory and practice. Please note: this is part of an organised session proposal that we will submit collectively; acceptance depends on the conference review process. 

Urban sustainability transitions are urgent, uneven, and deeply political (Goh, 2021; Gonçalves et al., 2025). As cities are increasingly reframed from sites of environmental degradation to key arenas for climate mitigation and adaptation (Parnell, 2016), governments and communities face profound challenges in balancing ecological limits with socio-spatial justice and the creation of liveable urban futures (Kaufmann et al., 2024). These challenges are particularly acute in cities shaped by entrenched inequality, informality, and infrastructural precarity, where climate crises intersect with longer histories of colonial dispossession and uneven development. 

This session invites papers that critically engage with the concept and practice of Just Urban Transitions. While the term “just transition” emerged from labour struggles linked to energy transitions (McCauley & Heffron, 2018), a growing body of scholarship calls for a more expansive urban lens that foregrounds the full range of resources, services, and opportunities required for urban life, including water, sanitation, housing, mobility, and land (Hughes & Hoffmann, 2020; Maboye et al., 2025). 

We seek empirically grounded and conceptually rich contributions that examine how just urban transitions are co-produced, governed, contested and lived across diverse urban contexts. Particular attention is given to the governance dilemmas and “complex trade-offs” (van Aswegen & Matamanda, 2025) that emerge as climate mitigation and adaptation efforts intersect with existing forms of precarity and privilege. We are especially interested in how decision-making draws on both political and technical forms of knowledge across multiple levels and actors, and how this shapes access to basic services and urban opportunities. 

We centre cities, particularly in the Global South, as complex, dynamic spaces where governance is enacted through state and non-state actors, and where crises of energy, water, housing, employment and mobility are deeply entangled. 

 

Possible themes include (but are not limited to): 

• Governance And Multi-Scalar Coordination: Examining how just urban transitions are shaped by interactions across local, municipal, national, and transnational scales, including efforts to break siloed policy frameworks and align environmental objectives with socio-spatial justice. 
• Justice In Climate Adaptation And Mitigation: Exploring inequalities in exposure, protection, and access to adaptation resources, as well as the contestation and negotiation of trade-offs in climate-responsive urban development. 
• Everyday practices, informality, and hybrid infrastructures: Investigating how residents, communities, and small-scale actors navigate, adapt to, or reshape fragmented and hybrid systems of service provision in contexts of urban precarity, including approaches to hybrid urban governance. 
• Methodological innovations for studying just urban transitions: Including ethnographic, participatory, comparative, and mixed-method approaches that foreground lived experience, power relations, and the politics of knowledge production. 
• Metrics, imaginaries, and pathways to sustainable futures: Rethinking how success is measured beyond technical outputs (such as units delivered or emissions reduced), to include social acceptance, equity, and long-term viability. 

 

We expect 15-minute in-person presentations, with ample time for discussion. Please submit an abstract (max. 250 words) by Friday, 20 February 2026.

 

Email Submissions to

David Kostenwein – kostenwein@ethz.ch

Katrin Hofer – kathofer@ethz.ch

Fiona Anciano –FAnciano@uwc.ac.za

Christina Culwick Fatti – cculwickfatti@uwc.ac.za