Agnieszka Rzenca (p)

Eda Hafizoglu

More and more often, the leading topic of public debate is no longer economic growth, but the health of residents, better quality of the urban environment and adaptation to climate change. The carbon footprint and, more broadly, the ecological footprint of cities, both Polish and European, continues to grow and is much higher than the capacity of the urban environment and their resilience to increasing pressures (https://www.c40.org/why_cities). A key challenge for urban communities in the 21st century is to reduce CO2 emissions, a greenhouse gas (Levy, 2010), causing far-reaching global consequences of climate change, which are, however, felt the most locally (effects of heat waves, torrential rains, smog). As a result, cities and their inhabitants are becoming important actors in building climate neutrality at the local scale. In addition, the importance of the responsibility of all users of the environment for its quality and for ensuring the conditions for a "good life" and treating the city as a common good is increasing (Ostrom 1990; Jacobs 2014).
Among the principles of urban development policy, the role of 'the dissemination of public participation, understood as the participation of city and functional area residents in defining and solving local problems and making key decisions' is highlighted (New Leipzig Charter, 2019; Landry 2013). A relatively new tool for the democratisation of urban policy is citizens' panels, where residents work out a common position on issues relevant to themselves in a deliberative process. The citizens' panel allows for an individualised approach and enables the development and testing of flexible and innovative tools, solutions or alternative legislation in a real urban context.
In Poland, more and more cities are organising citizens’ climate panels. The main aim of the presentation will therefore be to review the practices of Polish cities and to identify the recommendations developed in the context of climate policy making. The example of Łódź, a post-industrial city, organising a citizens' panel (November 2022-May 2023) to answer the question "How to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions in Łódź by 55% by 2030?" will be presented in particular depth.

Sol Maria Halleck Vega (p), Roberto Patuelli, George van Voorn, Els Weinans

Agnieszka Rzenca

Economic crises are a recurrent phenomenon. Preventing a shock from developing into a crisis is an ability of obvious interest. The latter could be done by increasing the resilience of a system. The quantification of resilience is, however, not straightforward. An empirical assessment can be in defining transitions, especially the type of abrupt shifts that can be observed between various ecological states. As long as no abrupt changes are observed, the system apparently is still resilient. In economic studies there is work on detecting transition points particularly in the finance and banking literature (e.g. Diks et al., 2019). In the ecological literature, these transition points are referred to as tipping points or regime shifts, generally referring to a critical threshold at which a trigger can induce a self-propagating shift to a contrasting state. This may be detected by early warning signals for impending transitions, with the intent of preventing it from actually happening. Indicating whether a system is losing resilience is thus a fundamental goal of research on critical transitions (Weinans et al., 2021). Indicators for detecting transitions are usually autocorrelation and variance measures from time series, and multivariate indicators based on principal components analysis. There has also been growing interest in the spatial dimension, i.e. spatial early warning signals, using metrics such as spatial autocorrelation (Kefi et al., 2014). It has been shown theoretically and empirically that, especially if there is significant connectivity and spatial heterogeneity, spatial autocorrelation can be a better indicator of an impending shift than solely time series based indicators. In this paper, we investigate the suitability of ecological spatiotemporal indicators on economic data for an assessment of the resilience of an economic system. The data covers regional (NUTS-3) quarterly and monthly unemployment for France, Spain and Switzerland. This offers an interesting range of spatial and temporal dimensions (cf. Mayor and Patuelli, 2015).


Diks, C., Hommes, C. and Wang, J. 2019. Critical slowing down as an early warning signal for financial crises? Empirical Economics, 57, 1201–1228.

Kefi, S., Guttal, V., Brock, W. et al. 2014. Early warning signals of ecological transitions: Methods for spatial patterns. PLoS ONE 9(3).

Mayor, M. and R. Patuelli. 2015. Spatial panel data forecasting over different horizons, cross-sectional and temporal dimensions. Revue d'Economie Régionale et Urbaine, No.1/2, 149-177.

Weinans, E., Quax, R., van Nes, E.H. et al. 2021. Evaluating the performance of multivariate indicators of resilience loss. Scientific Reports, 11, 9148.

Karina Simone Sass (p), Adelaide Cassia Nardocci

Sol Maria Halleck Vega

One of the main criticisms of using composite indicators for assessing the vulnerability or resilience of a system to natural hazard is the lack of robustness check and validation of the indicadors. Are the less resilient or more vulnerable places to a certain hazard more impacted by it? We will try to answer this question by investigating the relation of resilience to drought of Brazilian municipalities and the changes in its crop productivity. We will do a two step analysis. In the first step, we are going to use data from the agricultural census of the Brazilian Bureau of Statistic (IBGE) to calculate an index of drought resilience for the years 2006 and 2017 for the municipalities in Brazil that produce the basic food and are exposed to droughts. In the second step, we are going to evaluate the relation between resilience to drought and the changes in crop productivity of beans, rice, corn, cassava and milk (the basic food in Brazilian food system). By these analyses, we can identify if the resilience to drought changes in the period of analysis, the components responsible for the changes, and if such changes are reflected in the production of basic foods.

Eda Hafizoglu (p), Gulden Oruc

Karina Simone Sass

Public open spaces have various microclimatic conditions with the spatial differences created by the varied landscape elements they contain. These conditions cause people to feel thermally comfortable or stressed and significantly affect users' comfort. Designing microclimate-sensitive public open spaces that support user comfort, requires both subjective and objective measurements to accommodate users’ numerous perceptions of thermal comfort. However, studies still lack site-specific data and are limited in number, especially in Turkey, despite an increasing interest in the subject worldwide over the past 20 years. This study aims to define the summer outdoor thermal comfort conditions and thermal perception categories in Taksim Square and Gezi Park, located in Istanbul, a hot-humid city, with an urban heat problem. In this context, microclimatic monitoring and more than 400 surveys with pedestrians were simultaneously realized between 30 July-2 August 2022 from 10:00 to 18:00 in selected 4 locations. Air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction were measured for microclimatic monitoring. Personal information including gender, height/weight, age, clothing and activity level was gathered from the participants through a questionnaire survey, and participants rated their thermal sensation, acceptability, preference and general comfort situation using the ASHRAE and McIntyre scales. Microclimatic and environmental data were analyzed using the RayMan software to calculate mean radiant temperature, an important parameter for outdoor thermal comfort. For thermal comfort calculations, the PET index (Physiological Equivalent Temperature) was chosen for this study, and PET values were calculated through RayMan for each participant. A regression line was used to determine neutral and preferred PET ranges based on questionnaire responses. Lastly, PET values were compared temporally and spatially, and a thermal perception scale was created for the summer period of the study area. The study findings show that public open spaces have different microclimatic conditions and these conditions are perceived differently by pedestrians. The study highlights the need to determine outdoor thermal conditions on a site-specific basis. Additionally, it is the first study in Istanbul to include both objective and subjective evaluations simultaneously. Moreover, questioning the thermal comfort conditions of open spaces on a micro scale will enable the creation of site-specific sustainable urban policies, and will enable the creation of cities that are more resistant to climate change and heat waves, which are urban problems of today and the future.