Project: Greening Cosmopolitan Urbanism
Project drawing with green urban initiatives, "Future of Nordhavn", Copenhagen
ERC (European Research Council) has awarded 2.5 million Euro to a large international research project on climate change and cosmopolitan sociology. The project runs from 2013 to 2017 and is managed from Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich by acclaimed professor of sociology, Ulrich Beck. Anders Blok, assistant professor at the Department of Sociology, is involved with the project as “work package leader” and is responsible for investigating the climate policy initiatives of world cities.
Urban climate policy initiatives
Anders Blok will explore which urban climate policy initiatives are emerging in multiple European and Asian cities (such as Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Beijing and Seoul) and how city planners and politicians in these cities work together across borders in transnational networks.
Research will be conducted via a combination of document analysis, research interviews and fieldwork in selected world cities.
World cities are crucial for the climate agenda
-The aim for my part of the project is primarily to investigate the hypothesis that large-scale world cities constitute a central arena – in some ways more central than the nation-state – for developing, implementing and spreading new and ambitious climate policies on a global scale, says Anders Blok.
World cities are thus central to the overall ERC project focus on whether and how European and Asian societies will manage to transition onto more climate-friendly and sustainable trajectories.
Financing
The project is financed by an Advanced Grant, which is part of the elite research programme at the European council (ERC), established by the European commission. The grand in particular aims to promote research of the highest quality with an interdisciplinary focus.