Climate projections indicate that persistent high temperatures and related heat stress will become a common experience in the future, across Africa. It is, therefore, important to understand challenges that might result from increasing extreme heat conditions, and how humans within urban centres can adapt. In this article, we provide a review that considers the experience of poor urban residents with extreme temperatures and adaptation strategies in relation to low-income, informal urban contexts in Africa. Our analysis is carried out across four focus countries: Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt. Only cursory insights exist in the context of informal settlements. We found that heat stress remains an overlooked topic in comparison to other climate change adaptation needs. Evidence shows that adaptation strategies varied and differed in framing, scale, and applied methods across the contexts. Adaptation strategies dominantly examine a broad variety of alternative building measures and, to a lesser degree, greening/nature-based strategies. It is important to highlight heat stress as a cross-cutting, focal topic in urban research in relation to informal settlements and generally broaden the spectrum. It is worthwhile to pay special attention to strategic actions and research designs that foresee win–win and co-beneficial options for local urban communities.

Urban experimentation is increasingly seen as a means to facilitate (social) innovation and to promote sustainability transitions. However, whether and how novel approaches developed in local experiments get adopted and contribute to changes in the municipal planning practice has been insufficiently investigated and theorized. This article develops a conceptual framework to study the ‘innovation potential’ of urban experiments for urban planning. By deciphering the factors, actors, and processes that influence how urban experiments impact or innovate planning practices, we offer a novel perspective on what should be considered in their analysis, design and implementation and suggest avenues for future research.

Research on community resilience has historically focused strongly on the local features of communities which in support of and display resilient behaviour in times of stress and in the face of a range of shocks. However, the argument presented in this paper is that both prior organisation — often within the realm of public space belonging to a community — and connectivity beyond the locality which reaches the international level, need to be taken into consideration as significant aspects of community resilience. Last but not least, organisation across spatial levels provides a new understanding of the role of public space. For instance, organised communities in Asia facilitate remedial responses to multiple risks that their local environment poses such as poor living conditions, neglected public spaces and the threat posed by natural or climate-change related disasters. These communities are self-organised and rooted locally which aids in creating alliances and supporting recovery actions led by the local authorities: all of which serve to lessen the gravity of these challenges. Public space often provides the opportunity for prior organisation. These collective actions are simultaneously place-based and embedded in transnational networks such as ‘Shack/Slum Dwellers International’ (SDI) or the ‘Asian Coalition for Housing Rights’ (ACHR). This account does not aspire to justify a shift of responsibilities from the state to collective actors. Instead, it seeks to contribute to an emerging analytical framework on translocal social resilience.

Reallabore sind ein recht junges Forschungsformat. Die Betreiber der bestehenden Reallabore in Baden-Württemberg (BaWü-Labs) nutzen ihre Erkenntnisse und geben neun Empfehlungen für die Fortführung von Reallaboren.