Urban Resilience Symposium for Climate Transition: Bridging South-North Narratives on Land and Culture

Although climate change is a global problem, approaches towards urban resilience are varied and uncoordinated between the Global North and South. This gap in approaches therefore calls for urgent action-based, just transitional approaches to create resilient urban environments as outlined in the UN Agenda 2030. It calls for enhanced collaboration and knowledge sharing between stakeholders of change from the Global North and South to establish integrated pathways for global change. Recognizing this crucial need, the Department of Architecture and Planning, NTNU is organizing a one-day symposium, “Urban Resilience for Climate Transition: Bridging South-North Narratives on Land and Culture”. It aims to bring together the department’s collaborative partners from India, South Africa, Italy, Nepal, and Uganda. In doing so, the Symposium will bridge narratives from the Global South and North to explore how land and culture function both as resources and contested domains in an urban setting, and how these resources can be harnessed to enhance urban resilience for climate transition. Global urban challenges are numerous and evolve with changing social, economic, cultural, political, and environmental contexts. The facilitation of just climate transition through urban resilience in the light of these existing challenges begins with the identification of existing resources and values in our urban spaces and further building on them. In this vein, the symposium highlights two key tracks, that encompass several interdependent components of resilience building in urban planning, such as housing, land, property, water, sanitation, health, education, energy, mobility, infrastructure, environmental sustainability, public space, local economy, and livelihoods. The tracks align with the following sub-themes outlined by NFR: - Land use and land use change - Cultural heritage and cultural environments