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Accepted Paper:

Challenges in conceptualising urban climate vulnerabilities in the Northeast of Thailand in the age of planetary urbanisation  
Pakamas Thinphanga (Thailand Environment Institute) Buapun Promphakping (Khon Kaen University)

Paper short abstract:

To equitably address climate vulnerabilities in rapidly urbanising areas, there is a pressing need to approach the urban beyond the traditional understandings of cities and better assess the implications of new urban forms and processes of extended urbanisation on inequalities and marginalisation.

Paper long abstract:

Ongoing urbanisation in the Northeast region of Thailand is driven by the development and investment of large-scale transportation networks linking cities, economic corridors, and industrialised Special Economic Zones to the neighbouring countries and China. While transport infrastructure and industrial development is guided by the national policy with an aim to lift the country out of the middle-income trap, there are no long-term strategies for urban development and land use change. The production of urban spaces is co-shaped through land by capital accumulation, speculative investment and processes of socio-environmental transformation that differentiate spatial-structural patterns within and between cities. Cities are sites of uncertainty, contestation and conflicting rationalities contributing to uneven development, informality and inequality. But the emergence of extended urban transformations, the diminishing rural-urban divide and the impact of urbanisation require new ways of understanding emerging urban conditions and political-administrative fragmentation in order to address socio-ecological interactions in cities in the context of climate change. The notion that cities are sites of both resilience and solutions to global environmental problems needs new practical approaches to understand the process and patterns of urbanisation that shape vulnerabilities, susceptibility to risks and coping capacities of local communities. In response to contemporary urban realities, this paper explores how urban environments are shaped, politicised and contested and assesses how urbanisation contributes to increasing climate vulnerabilities of different community groups within cities and across the upper Northeast region, using the concepts of urban political ecology, knowledge infrastructures and political capability.

Panel P24c
Cities, Urbanisation, and the Politics of Urban Infrastructure Systems
  Session 1 Wednesday 6 July, 2022, -