Promoting sustainable cities through creating social empathy between new urban populations and planners

Lucy Szaboova; W. Neil Adger; Ricardo Safra de Campos; Tasneem Siddiqui; Mohammad Rashed Alam Bhuiyan; Tamim Billah; Mahmudol Hasan  Rocky

doi:10.1038/s42949-024-00189-2

Promoting sustainable cities through creating social empathy between new urban populations and planners

Lucy Szaboova, W. Neil Adger, Ricardo Safra de Campos, Tasneem Siddiqui, Mohammad Rashed Alam Bhuiyan, Tamim Billah, Mahmudol Hasan Rocky

Research Centre for Peace and Security

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Abstract

New migrant populations in rapidly growing cities globally are often socially and politically marginalized, limiting their potential to contribute to the positive transformation of urban futures. Such marginalisation can potentially be overcome through deliberate efforts to build empathy between groups. Here we apply insights on empathic action to planning processes with the aim of diversifying planning processes to provide plural perspectives on risk and sustainability and giving marginalised groups opportunities to shape key decisions. We report on action research to examine whether empathic connection between urban planners and new migrant populations leads to processes that enhance and integrate new voices and perspectives. The intervention involved photo-elicitation interviews, focus groups and perspective exchange workshops over eighteen months of intensive engagement in Chattogram, Bangladesh. The findings demonstrate that empathy for diverse social groups has practical implications for sustainability where individuals have agency and feel empowered to enhance each other’s wellbeing.

Original language	English
Article number	52
Number of pages	9
Journal	npj Urban Sustainability
Volume	4
Issue number	1
Early online date	30 Nov 2024
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-024-00189-2
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 30 Nov 2024

Bibliographical note

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Funding

We are grateful for funding from the UK Economic and Social Research Council and Department for International Development under the Development Frontiers research programme (Grant ES/R002371/1). We thank participants in Chattogram for their time and for sharing their lived experiences with us. We also thank participants at the Safe and Sustainable Cities: Human Security, Migration and Wellbeing workshop in Dhaka, in March 2019, for helpful insights and feedback. We also wish to extend thanks to colleagues who provided feedback at presentations in Exeter, Bonn, Lund, Uppsala, Delhi and Li\u00E8ge. We are grateful to Lulu Pinney for help with the design of Fig. 1. This version remains our sole responsibility. For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to this publication. We are grateful for funding from the UK Economic and Social Research Council and Department for International Development under the Development Frontiers research programme (Grant ES/R002371/1). We thank participants in Chattogram for their time and for sharing their lived experiences with us. We also thank participants at the Safe and Sustainable Cities: Human Security, Migration and Wellbeing workshop in Dhaka, in March 2019, for helpful insights and feedback. We also wish to extend thanks to colleagues who provided feedback at presentations in Exeter, Bonn, Lund, Uppsala, Delhi and Li\u00E8ge. We are grateful to Lulu Pinney for help with the design of Fig. . This version remains our sole responsibility. For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to this publication.

Funders	Funder number
Economic and Social Research Council
Department for International Development	ES/R002371/1

Keywords

Development studies
Geography

Access to Document

10.1038/s42949-024-00189-2Licence: CC BY

Bhuiyan2024VoRFinal published version, 2.13 MBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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Promoting sustainable cities through creating social empathy between new urban populations and planners

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