Sombol Mokhles
Doctor of Philosophy candidate
Architecture, Urban Design, Urban Planning
Biography
As a PhD candidate at ABP funded by Melbourne University’s Graduate Research Scholarship, Sombol is passionate about alleviating inequalities in tackling climate change.
Her PhD is about “An Evidence-based Approach to Climate Change Experimentation in International City Networks”. She intends to explore manifold factors of climate change actions and learning between similar cities (based on their climate actions) in international city networks to encourage more vulnerable cities to take action.
Sombol received her MPhil Architecture and Urban Studies from the University of Cambridge 2018-2019 and she holds MSc, Urban Design, and BSc, Architecture from Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran. Her MPhil was on the role of place-making in women’s living experience in an informal settlement in Iran from the well-being perspective. Besides being an Omid-Cambridge Trust scholar, she was awarded Queens’ College studentship and Kettle’s Yard Travel Award to undertake her research. To elaborate on women’s different geographies of place in informal settlements, she relied on her experience as an urban designer in regeneration plans in Iran.
Having a background in architecture and urban design with professional experience on national and local projects in Iran, she is interested in qualitative and quantitative data-driven research to integrate design, policy, socio-cultural context, and multi-level governance responses to climate change.
Thesis
An Evidence-based Approach to Climate Actions in International City Networks
Quantitative data-driven city comparison has been highlighted in urban climate governance for providing evidence to facilitate networking between cities and scaling climate actions, both in research and practice. However, most of the quantitative data-driven comparison efforts recommend networking between cities and scaling climate actions based on a limited set of quantifiable attributes (mainly related to climate change). Thus, out of their scope is cities’ networking, and socio-cultural and political context of cities, which has been studied by social scientists, mainly through qualitative approaches.
Since, it is argued that cities’ case studies can reflect cities’ socio-cultural and political context, a few studies rely on extracting case studies from search engines such as web of science. These case studies of climate actions are then analysed for systematic learning to scale climate actions between cities. Nonetheless, cities’ records of climate actions in city networks are rarely analysed to inform recommendations for networking. More specifically, no studies were found on comparing cities based on their reported mitigation actions in city networks. Thus, as quantitative data-driven studies mainly rely on available data on cities’ environmental attributes or case studies from search engines, their focus is more on large cities with available data. These efforts do not reflect the complexity of networking for tackling climate change and provide an imbalanced picture of cities’ comparison, missing small and medium size cities.
This research intends address these limits and extend quantitative data-driven city comparison efforts from the perspective of climate actions in city networks. It intends to do so by incorporating the contribution of social scientists in illuminating different aspect of networking between cities and scaling climate actions. Two different approaches are undertaken for a quantitative data-driven city comparison for networking between cities and scaling climate actions, based on: 1- comprehensive understanding of drivers of climate actions in city networks, 2- cities’ records of reported mitigation actions in city networks.