Repowering Cities

The conceptualization and execution of Repowering Cities are terrific, and provides readers with a deep understanding of why, how, and to what effect cities have mobilized to mitigate the effects of climate change.â•Michael J. Rich, Emory University, coauthor of Collaborative Governance for Urban Revitalization

City governments are rapidly becoming society's problem solvers. As Sara Hughes shows, nowhere is this more evident than in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto, where the cities' governments are taking on the challenge of addressing climate change.

Repowering Cities focuses on the specific issue of reducing urban greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and develops a new framework for distinguishing analytically and empirically the policy agendas city governments develop for reducing GHG emissions, the governing strategies they use to implement these agendas, and the direct and catalytic means by which they contribute to climate change mitigation. Hughes uses her framework to assess the successes and failures experienced in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto as those agenda-setting cities have addressed climate change. She then identifies strategies for moving from incremental to transformative change by pinpointing governing strategies able to mobilize the needed resources and actors, build participatory institutions, create capacity for climate-smart governance, and broaden coalitions for urban climate change policy.

Sara Hughes is Assistant Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. She is co-editor of Climate Change and Cities. Follow her on X @sara_hughes_TO.

Sara Hughes offers a valuable lesson that climate change mitigation is no simple task. There is no template. Every city will face its own mix of challenges and must create its own policies. We can take from this volume the reality that it is not only later than we think, but that change is going to be harder than we imagine.

With perhaps a decade to avert the worst consequences of climate change, is urban climate action a lost cause? Far from it, according to Sara Hughes, whose book provides a cross-case comparison of how three major North American cities—New York, Los Angeles and Toronto—have striven to mitigate climate change. Theoretically, Hughes's approach is a valuable contribution to the environmental policy and urban politics literatures, which have relied primarily on institutional, regime theory, and interest-group pluralism explanations for why cities commit to sustainability policies

I think specialist and non-specialist readers will enjoy this engaging and accessible book. For practitioners, who are often presented with case studies or best practices that highlight the policy options, it can help to equip them with an understanding of how they might pursue such an initiative in their own city. It provides clear examples that cities around the world can replicate immediately – whether they are already leading on climate change mitigation or seeking to catch up.

As Sara Hughes's Repowering Cities rightly points out,... much of the research on city climate efforts focuses on the adoption of greenhouse gas reduction goals. Hughes is interested in an even more pressing question: once goals are adopted, how do cities move forward with the complicated process of governing emissions? To answer this question, she offers an excellent synthesis of years of scholarship on cities and climate change, then builds on it with her own study of New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. In doing so, Repowering Cities offers a useful illumination of the political challenges of achieving city climate goals.

Michael J. Rich, Emory University, coauthor of Collaborative Governance for Urban Revitalization:

The conceptualization and execution of Repowering Cities are terrific, and provides readers with a deep understanding of why, how, and to what effect cities have mobilized to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Richardson Dilworth, Drexel University, author of The Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy:

Sara Hughes's Repowering Cities fills a crucial niche in thriving academic discussions on climate change at the city level. Her fine-grained analysis is fantastic. This is a valuable book in any course about planning for climate change.