By 2050, two-thirds of the world's 9-10 billion people will live in cities. In addition to Asia and Africa, this also affects South America, which makes the issue of urbanisation of particular importance to Brazil. Cities are drivers of adverse environmental and climate changes with substantial impacts on citizens.
Nowadays, more than ¾ of the entire energy is consumed in cities and they cause 80% of greenhouse gas emissions. This contributes significantly to climate change, but at the same time, they are particularly affected by the consequences of climate change. 70-80% of the cities are located near the coast, thus they are specifically threatened by sea level rise.
Within the context of the DAAD funded Strategic Partnership we will focus on research topics which address challenges cities are exposed to regarding climate change.
We will involve researchers from different faculties e.g., law, medicine, geography, climatology, economy, mathematics, information systems, engineering, arts, urban planning, geoinformatics, philosophy etc.

Leading questions are:
1. Are cities capable to contribute to Climate protection by implementing specific targeted policies?
2. How can mobility in cities be designed in a sustainable way? Which measures are available to cities in order to adapt to climate change or to respond to more frequent climate-related disasters?
3. How does climate change affect the health of the urban citizens? What are the measures to minimize the climate impact on urban (clean air, adequate housing, green spaces, resilient living environments, adequate sanitation, water supply)?
4. How can the urban population participate in the decision making regarding impact of climate change? How can the general awareness of urban population and decision-makers be increased?
5. How can art and cultural projects contribute to widen environmental awareness and potentially change the perspective of individuals?
6. Which kind of governance is needed to enhance climate-friendly urban development?
Who are the decision makers regarding urban land use, urban development and urban planning legislation? How can they forward urban transformation towards sustainability (local urban governance)? Which are the role, cities play within the fight against climate change?
7. How shall ethical questions of climate justice and climate responsibility be solved? Which role are still playing the effects of colonial history?
Which actors (individuals, regional groups, institutions or other social entities) can be identified in terms of climate responsibility?

Last wwu.usp workshop "Cities, Climate and Social (In)Equality": outlook of the strategic partnership with the University of São Paulo

On 23 and 24 September, the Brazil Centre promoted the last workshop of the Strategic Partnership Project wwu.usp, whose funding by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) ends this year. Under the thematic leadership and moderation of Prof. Dr. Sabine Schlacke, Managing Director of the Institute for Environment and Planning Law (iup) at Münster University (WWU), the event, which was originally planned to take place in May 2021 in São Paulo, was held very successfully online with the support of Prof. Dr. Luciana Oliveira de Royer and Prof. Dr. Luís Fernando Massonetto from the University of São Paulo (USP).

Due to the utter interdisciplinary composition of the programme, the workshop was held on "Cities, Climate and Social (In)Equality", as an extension of the focus topic of the second funding phase "Cities and Climate" of the project, since "The disciplines alone are not enough, they must communicate with each other", as pointed out by Prof. Dr. Samuel Mössner in his keynote lecture. Moreover, this thematic broadening by inserting the aspect of "social inequalities" made it possible, on the one hand, to include other PhD candidates with other research focuses and, on the other, the consideration of a fundamental aspect in the discussions on the topic of “Cities and Climate”, as summed up by Julia Moretti, USP PhD candidate: "The concept of vulnerability is central to address climate change".

The workshop was opened by the Pro-Rector for Internationalization and Knowledge Transfer of the WWU, Prof. Dr. Quante, who, among other things, emphasised the importance of the wwu.usp project for deepening the cooperation between WWU and USP, followed by Prof. Dr. Marcio Lobo Netto, Vice-Provost and Associate Director for Mobility at AUCANI-USP and by Prof. Dr. -Ing. Bernd Hellingrath, wwu.usp project leader and scientific director of the Brazil Centre, who also underlined the great importance of the cooperation between the two universities and the essential role of the wwu.usp project. Read more

Programme of the workshop

Booklet of abstracts

Data Talks: online conversations about public data as part of the wwu.usp project

On 23 September, the first edition of the "Data Talks" series was carried out on the topic "Smart Cities in 2021: advances and challenges", also as part of the programme of the workshop "Cities, Climate and Social (In)Equality". For this first talk – moderated by the Humboldt Fellow at Münster University (WWU) and alumna of the University of São Paulo (USP) Jessica Voigt Quintino Pereira – her host professor Prof. Dr. Nobert Kersting of the Institute of Political Science at Münster University (IfPOL-WWU) and Prof. Dr. Ana Carla Bliacheriene of the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities at the University of São Paulo (EACH-USP) were invited.

In this virtual conversation, the guests and the moderator discussed live on YouTube [en] how successful smart city projects are, in which there is an attempt to incorporate technology into the administration of these cities, to make them more efficient, inclusive and clean. You can find the results of this exciting conversation on YouTube [en], which was also published in podcast format.

The Data Talks event is a series of conversations between experts from Brazil and Germany who will discuss the use of public data in today's society. The Data Talks is an initiative from the Humboldt Scholarship holder Jessica Voigt supported by the Brazil Centre from the University of Münster as part of the digital activities of the strategic partnership project wwu.usp funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

German-Brazilian cooperation intensified -
Workshop 'Cities and Climate', November, 11 and 12, 2019

Together with Professor Sabine Schlacke from the Institute of Environmental and Planning Law of the Faculty of Law, the Brazil Centre has organised a workshop to strengthen the strategic partnership between the two universities of Münster and São Paulo. 35 participants from various disciplines – ranging from political and law sciences, geography, architecture, urban planning to economics - were represented. For two days, not only the expected impact of climate change on cities was discussed but also the possible measures to mitigate or even prevent negative impacts.
The workshop mainly focused on environmental und planning law and urban planning issues. Differences and similarities of climate policy in Europe, Germany and Brazil were highlighted. The workshop resulted in agreements on future joint research projects, which partly can be funded by the wwu.usp strategic partnership. The financial resources are available from the German Academic Exchange Service and the University of Münster. Further information can be found here.

The program of the workshop!

Cities and Climate: new cooperation theme between WWU und USP

"Cities & Climate" was the theme of the interdisciplinary workshop organized by the Brazil Centre of the University of Münster together with the Institute for Advanced Studies" (IEA) of the University of São Paulo (USP) at 26 and 27 March 2018, in São Paulo city.

The workshop is linked to the multiple co-operation activities in the frame of the project wwu.usp, which since 2015 is aimed at establishing a strategic partnership between the WWU and the USP and is supported by the DAAD. The objective of the event was the development of ideas for an extension of the co-operation project to the new research field “Cities & Climate”, which in the first wwu.usp financing phase demonstrated to be a new specially promising work field. Shortly before the realization of the workshop, the DAAD approved the support for another two years of the project extension under this thematic, so that the participants could already plan concrete activities for 2019. 

A total of sixteen researchers of both universities participated at the event. From the side of the WWU, Prof. Dr. Sabine Schlacke (Law), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Bernd Hellingrath (Information Systems) and Matthias Pfeil (Geoinformatics) were present locally, whereas Prof. Dr. Ursula Frohne (Arts History) and Prof. Dr. Monika Stoll (Medicine) participated via videoconference. Besides representatives of the referred disciplines, researchers from USP covering other areas, such as City Planning, Biosciences and Climatology, were also present.

At the first day of the workshop all participants presented their research activities in a plenary session. In the second day they interchanged with their discipline colleagues about common research interests and discussed concrete co-operation possibilities in the thematic field “Cities & Climate”. Afterwards, points of contact extrapolating the disciplinary limits have been also identified and common inter- as well as trans-disciplinary project approaches were discussed.

Governance, social justice, education and digitalization demonstrated to be comprehensive themes during the discussion. According to the participants view, in order to prepare the cities for the climatic changes there are necessary not only approaches of transformation and resilience, but first of all persons centred approaches, which take in view also the right to justice, the access to justice, social interests and education, thus involving the cities population in a new form, e. g. through mobilization, through participative processes or by data collection (for instance via “crowd sensing or “collaborative mapping”).