Urban Policy and Politics

Urban environments are important to tackle sustainability challenges as societal, environmental, and technological transformations such as climate change, demographic change or digitization accentuate themselves in dense settings. The global sustainable development agenda assigns cities an important global role in achieving a sustainable future. By transforming cities, multiple Sustainable Development Goals can be achieved at the same time, efficiently and at scale. Thus, cities and their policies are essential objects of study if we want to understand how policy-makers and planners can effectively plan for a sustainable future.

Our main research questions in this research field are:

• What kind of policies and plans do cities formulate and implement to plan for global sustainable development?
• How effective are urban sustainable development policies?
• What are the capacities and constraints of cities to effectively plan and react to global sustainability challenges?

Projects in this research field range from urban policy analysis from a theory-​​development and empirical perspective, understanding socioeconomic effects of urban policies in Switzerland to studying citizen’s expectations of participation in South Africa’s urban planning system, understanding urban segregation and investigating how platform urbanism and urban platform workers produce space and resistance.