Cities, Urban Property Systems, and Sustainability Transitions: Contested Processes of Institutional Change and the Regulation of Urban Property Development

André Sorensen and Anna-Katharina Brenner
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André Sorensen: Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada
Anna-Katharina Brenner: Institute of Social Ecology, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Schottenfeldgasse 2, 1070 Vienna, Austria

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 15, 1-19

Abstract: Sustainability transitions research has emerged as one of the most influential approaches to conceptualizing the potential and practice of transformative system change to avoid climate catastrophe. Evolving from work on socio-technical systems via Geels’ multi-level perspective (MLP), this conceptual framework has contributed to understanding how complex systems in the contemporary world can be transformed. This paper contributes to the sustainability transitions literature in three main ways. First, the paper develops a conceptual framework focused on the urban property systems which regulate and support urban property, infrastructure and governance that are historically produced, are densely institutionalized, and through which public norms of property and governance are deeply embedded in and continually inscribed in urban space. Second, the paper suggests that urban property systems are continually and vigorously contested and demonstrate different modes of institutional change than those recognized by the existing sustainability transitions literature. Third, the paper illustrates the approach with a case study of the contested governance of property development in Toronto, Ontario, long one of the fastest growing cities in North America. The Toronto case suggests that institutions embedded in urban property systems are consequential and deserve more attention by those concerned with low-carbon transitions.

Keywords: low-carbon transitions; urban socio-technical systems; urban property systems; institutional change mechanisms; green buildings; strategic action fields; infrastructure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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