Themes

Welcome to the 1st USS conference!

Urbanization is an irreversible trend across the world. As concentrators of people and activities cities are at the forefront of experiencing the effects of climate change. The principal challenge is how to minimize growing vulnerabilities while enabling far-reaching and equitable climate action for sustained and sustainable development. The pace and scale of urbanization in China over the past forty years have been unprecedented. The way China continues to urbanize will greatly affect the country’s success in becoming a “moderately prosperous society”, mitigating the adverse effects of climate change and responding to the effects. How can China continue to benefit from urbanization while avoiding some of the common negative effects of urbanization, minimizing environmental damage, promoting urban residents’ health, and making Chinese cities reliant on the effects of climate change?

This intensive one-week school explores sustainable urban development sustainability from several perspectives with a particular focus on problems posed by the effects of climate change on cities. This inaugural winter school is aimed at graduate students and early-career scholars in China interested in equitable, sustainable, and climate-resilient urban development and the challenges and opportunities that it poses for Chinese society. Sustainable urban development and urban adaptation to climate change are relatively new research domains and research agendas are still being designed that integrate accumulated insights from the various disciplines that have studied cities and urbanization and advance new topics of inquiry. The School will introduce students to these emerging research areas.

The School’s lectures and discussions will address how urbanization contributes to socioeconomic development, questions about urban sustainability (what is it? How is it studied? How is it measured?), how solutions intended to facilitate adaptation to the effects of climate change on cities needs to be woven into urban development policies, the design of nature-based solutions as adaptation responses and the challenges posed by decarbonizing the supply of energy to citie.