Enabling the City is a collaborative book that focuses on how interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary processes of knowledge production may contribute to urban transformation at a local level in the 21st century, striking a balance between enthusiastic support for such transformational potential and a cautious note regarding the persistent challenges to the ethos as well as the practice of inter and transdisciplinarity. The rich stories reflect different research and local practice cultures, exploring issues such as ageing, community, health and dementia, public space, energy, mobility cultures, heritage, housing, re-use, and renewal, as well as more universal questions about urban sustainability and climate change, and perhaps most importantly, education. Against this backdrop, aspirations for the 21st century are related to the international, national, and local agendas expressed in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and in the New Urban Agenda (NUA), raising fundamental questions of how to enable development. We highlight aspects of transformative learning and ways of knowing, critical to any collaborative and participatory process.

The challenge of housing is increasingly recognised in international policy discussions in connection to the processes of migration, climate change, and economic globalisation. This book addresses the challenges of housing and emerging solutions along the lines of three major dynamics: migration, climate change, and neo-liberalism. It explores the outcomes of neo-liberal "enabling" ideas, responses to extreme climate events with different housing approaches, and how the dynamics of migration reshape the urban housing provision in a changing world. The aim is to contextualise the theoretical discourses by reflecting on the case study context of the eleven papers published in this book. With forewords by Raquel Rolnik (University Sao Paulo) and Mohammed El Sioufi (UN-Habitat).