Cities in Sustainability Transitions: Comparing Helsinki and Istanbul
1
School of Energy Systems, Lappeenranta University of Technology, Saimaankatu 11, 15140 Lahti, Finland
2
Institute of Environmental Sciences, Boğaziçi University, 34342 Bebek/Istanbul, Turkey
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2018, 10(5), 1421; https://doi.org/10.3390/su10051421
Received: 16 February 2018 / Revised: 23 April 2018 / Accepted: 26 April 2018 / Published: 3 May 2018
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Putting Sustainability Transitions into Spatial and Socio-Cultural Context)
Systemic sustainability transitions are manifested as the needed scope to meet sustainability challenges at the local and global scales. While sustainability transitions are ubiquitous, each transition is nested in a specific spatial context. Especially, due to accelerating urbanization, cities are increasingly important agents, but they are also understudied geographical loci of change. Urban transitions are interesting because they operate at both the national and global scales, concentrating people, wealth, and resources. They have both regime and niche elements, as they act as an incubation space for novel experiments, ideas, and alternative social movements. Thus, this paper aims to improve understanding of the geographical context and spatial scales from a multilevel perspective and develop a framework for analytic comparison. Furthermore, the paper draws insights from two empirical cases, namely the cities of Helsinki and Istanbul. Consequently, opportunities and challenges for instigating context-specific sustainability transitions can be identified.
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Keywords:
sustainability transition; urban transition; multi-level perspective; energy efficiency; geo-spatial scales
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MDPI and ACS Style
Kuokkanen, A.; Yazar, M. Cities in Sustainability Transitions: Comparing Helsinki and Istanbul. Sustainability 2018, 10, 1421. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10051421
AMA Style
Kuokkanen A, Yazar M. Cities in Sustainability Transitions: Comparing Helsinki and Istanbul. Sustainability. 2018; 10(5):1421. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10051421
Chicago/Turabian StyleKuokkanen, Anna; Yazar, Mahir. 2018. "Cities in Sustainability Transitions: Comparing Helsinki and Istanbul" Sustainability 10, no. 5: 1421. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10051421
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