TY  - JOUR
A1  - Sander, Hendrik
A1  - Weißermel, Sören
T1  - Urban Heat Transition in Berlin: Corporate Strategies, Political Conflicts, and Just Solutions
T2  - Urban Planning
N2  - In the field of urban climate policy, heat production and demand are key sectors for achieving a sustainable city. Heat production has to shift from fossil to renewable energies, and the heat demand of most buildings has to be reduced significantly via building retrofits. However, analyses of heat transition still lack its contextualization within entangled urban politico-economic processes and materialities and require critical socio-theoretical examination. Asking about the embeddedness of heat transition within social relations and its implications for social justice issues, this article discusses the challenges and opportunities of heat transition, taking Berlin as an example. It uses an urban political ecology perspective to analyze the materialities of Berlin’s heating-housing nexus, its politico-economic context, implications for relations of inequality and power, and its contested strategies. The empirical analysis identifies major disputes about the future trajectory of heat production and about the distribution of retrofit costs. Using our conceptual approach, we discuss these empirical findings against the idea of a more just heat transition. For this purpose, we discuss three policy proposals regarding cost distribution, urban heat planning, and remunicipalization of heat utilities. We argue that this conceptual approach provides huge benefits for debates around heat transition and, more generally, energy justice and just transitions.
KW  - Berlin
KW  - Stadtplanung
KW  - Ökologie
KW  - energy justice
KW  - energy retrofitting
KW  - green gentrification
KW  - low-carbon policy
KW  - urban political ecology
KW  - OA-Publikationsfonds2023
Y1  - 2023
UR  - https://e-pub.uni-weimar.de/opus4/frontdoor/index/index/docId/6384
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20230524-63845
UR  - https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/6178
VL  - 2023
IS  - Volume 8, No 1
SP  - 361
EP  - 371
PB  - Cogitatio Press
CY  - Lissabon
ER  -