Project Details
Projekt
Exploring and Assessing Sustainable Transition in Chinese and German urban areas
Applicant
Professor Dr. Manfred Fischedick
Subject Area
Economic Policy, Applied Economics
Political Science
City Planning, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
Political Science
City Planning, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
Term
from 2018 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 391956384
Today more than 50% of the Chinese population lives in urban areas. In Germany, urban areas accommodate almost 75 % of its population. In both countries, cities have largely contributed to economic development, wealth and personal prosperity, which also has led to various environmental degradations and associated health problems. To address these global and local challenges, both countries have committed to foster a sustainable urban transition. The project aims to analyse urban transition pathways with a special focus on energy, transport, and buildings and their inter-linkages and to support the assessment of the transition pathways in both Chinese and German cities, to understand similarities and differences of sustainable urban transition pathways in both countries, and to provide evidence-based policy recommendations for sustainable urban transition in both countries.To achieve these objectives, the proposed project will first enrich analytical approaches of sustainable urban transitions by: -Explicitly addressing the inter-linkages and synergies between sustainable solutions of different urban sectors and the interactions between geographical scales;-Developing methods of monitoring and assessing transition pathways;-Improving econometric modelling approaches in the context of sustainable urban transition;-Exploring the effective combination of quantitative modelling and sustainability transition analysis; With the enriched analytical approaches, the project aims to analyse and assess sustainable urban transition pathways in Chinese and German cities by:-Conducting qualitative case studies of specific (cross-)sectoral social-technical innovations in energy, transport, and buildings in Chinese and German cities. Four innovations of high political and societal relevance are selected: photovoltaic application in cities, integration of regional renewable energy to city heat supply, buildings shifting from energy intensive consumers to smart prosumers, and E-vehicles and its linkages with energy and building sector; -Assessing the impacts of urban socio-economic development and specific low carbon development paths on energy consumption and on environmental pollutions as well as the nexus of energy, air quality, and urban socio-economic development; -Developing a monitoring framework for sustainable urban transitions and validate it in case study cities. -Developing methodological approaches to integrate urban metabolism analysis into qualitative transition analysis and validate the approaches in case study cities. We will draw on the interdisciplinary research strengths of our Sino-German collaboration incorporating, in China, the Beijing Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University and Energy Research Institute National Development and Reform Committee, and, in Germany, the Wuppertal Institute. Key stakeholders will also be involved in the research processes in order to enhance the relevance and impacts of the project.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
China
Partner Organisation
National Natural Science Foundation of China
