UCCRN Urban Design Climate Workshops (UDCWs) integrate and scale-up climate change mitigation and adaptation in cities through knowledge sharing, collaboration, and action planning. These sessions bring together urban designers, urban planners, climatologists, policymakers, stakeholders, and graduate students. Topics of discussion include strengthening urban resilience, improving energy efficiency, and enhancing livelihoods. So far, UDCWs have taken place in Durban, Naples, New York, Paris, Randers, and Rio de Janeiro.
UCCRN Urban Design Climate Workshops are based on the Second Assessment Report on Climate Change and Cities (ARC3.2), published by Cambridge University Press, which was released at the IPCC Cities and Climate Change Conference on March 5-7, 2018. The UDCWs are featured in ARC3.2, Chapter 5 – Urban Planning and Urban Design.
Through the participatory engagement of City Teams, the UCCRN Urban Design Climate Workshops demonstrate energy-efficient and resilient urban planning and urban design.
Compact urban districts can work synergistically with high-performance construction and landscape configuration to create interconnected, protective, and attractive urban areas. Through this program, UCCRN helps cities to promote mitigation, adaptation, resilience, and transformation.
The goal of the UCCRN Urban Design Climate Workshops is to develop implementation actions together that take into account governmental, developmental, socio-economic, and ecological conditions.
Developing these perspectives enables cities to take climate engagement and implementation efforts to the next level. A further goal is to rapidly build capacity across multiple stakeholder groups, including indigenous populations, to implement mitigation, adaptation, resilience, and transformation actions that respond to climate change challenges.