Global Environment Change and Global Urban Change: Research Opportunity, Research Practices and Research Obligations

Starting with the observation that social science research has had a relatively limited impact on climate change science, we identify the co-incidence of two historically unprecedented global processes - projected critical environmental changes and seemingly unrelenting urban growth – as a research opportunity to create social science knowledges that can make a key intervention in the climate change conversation. Treating these mega-changes as intimately connected social products, we use Jacobs' urban development theory to identify cities as special places for economic, social and political innovations. Thus our ‘urban century' may have the collective creativity necessary to deal with the travails expected of it as ‘crisis century'. The practical research implications of the theory are an eclectic bottom up approach to knowledge production wherein participatory action research and actor network theory are featured. As a final step we consider the possibility of a global radical version of ‘we are all in this together' politics.