Abstract
Twice now, the United States has withdrawn from the world’s most important international treaty on climate change, the Paris Agreement, and mayors weren’t having it. While national governments stall, cities are passing ambitious climate plans, nonprofits are piloting solutions, and firms are investing in green practices on their own initiative. These efforts are connected in ways that neither urban sociology nor organization studies has fully grasped on its own. Nicole Marwell and Michael McQuarrie once diagnosed a “missing organizational dimension” in urban sociology. My book Cities in Action: Organizations, Institutions, and Urban Climate Strategies takes that diagnosis seriously and follows it to the terrain of climate change. Here are five reasons why these fields belong together.