Urban Climate Order in the Arab Region: Sustainability, Justice, and Uneven Urban Transformation

Cities are increasingly expected to reorganize governance, planning, infrastructure, and everyday life in response to climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and widening inequality. However, much scholarship on climate urbanism still treats these processes primarily through the lens of sustainability transition, emphasizing policy uptake, resilience, and institutional innovation. This paper argues that such approaches are incomplete because climate urbanism is not only a technical or policy response to environmental change; it is also a struggle over urban order. Climate change reorgan-izes what cities value, what they build, whose vulnerabilities become visible, and how protection, risk, and legitimacy are distributed across urban life. To capture this, the paper introduces the concept of urban climate order, understood as the material and normative organization of urban life around climate-related priorities, including mit-igation, adaptation, energy transition, and justice. The Arab region provides the basis for developing this argument. Across its 22 countries, climate change unfolds within conditions shaped by authoritarian governance, displacement, infrastructural fragility, rapid urbanization, deep inequality, and recurrent conflict. Under these conditions, climate urbanism does not simply appear as a delayed sustainability transition; it takes distinctive, uneven, and politically embedded forms. The paper therefore develops a provisional typology of three forms of urban climate order in the Arab region: con-flict-displaced order, branded-technocratic order, and defensive-pragmatic order. These forms reveal the limits of transition-centered accounts and show that climate urbanism in the region is fragmented, selective, and inseparable from broader struggles over power, survival, and justice. The paper argues that the Arab region should be treated not as a peripheral case in climate urbanism, but as a critical site from which urban sustainability theory itself can be rethought.