Exploring the potential for 'urban air quality transition management' in the EU – lessons from the City of Aachen (Germany)

Abstract Air pollution is one of the most important global sustainability and health challenges. In response to this, the European Union (EU) initiated with its Directive 2008/50/EC a new era of (urban) air quality management (UAQM) and introduced air quality plans and short term action plans as major formal planning instruments. However, these efforts still fail to achieve their target. Independently, sustainability transitions research emerged as a major science field, suggesting urban transition management (UTM) as an effective governance and planning approach for steering transformative urban change. Hence, the overall query this paper puts forward is, whether UAQM could be enhanced by UTM? This leads to an empirical and a conceptual question: 1) How transformative is current UAQM, i.e. how does it contribute to a transition process? 2) How could UAQM and UTM be combined to create an ‘urban air quality transition management’? Drawing on a conceptual discussion of both frameworks, an explorative case study of UAQM in the EU and the City of Aachen (Germany) reveals that UAQM and UTM seem to have many similarities at a superficial level, but differ significantly in detail. They are mostly complementary because each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses, so that neither of them could achieve the targeted transition alone. Future research should therefore focus on comparative transformative research in ‘urban air quality transition management labs’ to develop integrated approaches. Policy should both legally facilitate such experiments and deliver sufficient funding for enhanced UAQM in general.