Climate Justice in the City

Almost every day, we hear and see disturbing evidence of a growing climate crisis, and more often than not, the poor and marginalized suffer the most from hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, and flooding that grow increasingly more extreme. Climate Justice in the City spotlights the fight for climate justice mobilizing from the ground up in cities of the Global South, centering community environmental activism and local movements.

With contributions from practitioners, artists, and scholars in environmental science, geography, economics, political science, art history, architecture, and sustainable design, this edited volume examines people's basic life needs and livelihoods where the climate crisis is most keenly experienced: from water scarcity to electricity outages, from shrinking greenspaces to constraints on mobility, from heat islands to faulty building design. Its essays focus on major Global South cities, such as Accra, Delhi, Cairo, Beijing and Buenos Aires, as well as pockets of the "South" in the North, such as New York City. These cities are marked by sharp inequalities in the social and environmental impacts of uneven urban development, which are aggravated by the climate crisis. Yet these cities also house initiatives at the forefront of climate-just solutions—ranging from street protests and social media campaigns, mutual-aid food kitchens and solidarity brigades, citizen-protected neighborhood parks, heat-reducing architecture interventions, bicycle-based urban mobility for women vendors, participatory climate plans, and Afro-Indigenous muralism.

Offering an in-depth, accessible, and comparative analysis that draws on extended engagements with a diverse group of activists and scholars, Climate Justice in the City is a call to action for all, highlighting not only structural inequalities but also the solutions and community-based initiatives being mobilized from the ground up.