Flows in formation: The global-urban networks of climate change adaptation

As climate change threats to urban centres become more alarming, cities are proposing ambitious plans to adapt to climate impacts. These plans are increasingly subsumed within urban development projects, and embedded in global flows of capital and networks of environmental governance and planning. And yet, scholarship on urban adaptation has tended to approach the city as an analytically bounded territory, neglecting interconnections across space and processes of globalisation, urbanisation, and geopolitics. This paper extends theories of relational geographies to explore the emerging conditions of urban adaptation in the context of climate change and globalised urban development. Focusing on the global links of Dutch water expertise, and tracing relationships within and between Rotterdam, New York, and Jakarta, it illustrates the formation of global-urban networks – the multiscalar, multilevel connections through which capital, knowledge, and influence flow. It probes the ways in which these networks emerge to mobilise ideas and influence across geographical scales and political boundaries, driven and defined by interrelated factors including economic relationships, historically defined situational relationships, and interface conditions including narratives of culture and environmental urgency. The paper introduces the concept of ‘network formation’ to see and understand such interconnected, relational processes. It explains the spatial and temporal interconnections within and across sites, and the relationships between urban spatial projects and broader political economies and ecologies. The paper asserts the importance of conceptualising the relationships and interfaces of increasingly mobile and interconnected urban environmental futures.