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Scale is an emergent theme in current scientific and policy debates on low‐carbon urban transformations. Yet notions of scale employed in such contexts are typically based on linear and hierarchical ontologies, and miss out on the long‐standing development of more nuanced conceptions of scale within Human Geography. This paper aims to advance a relational understanding of scale in the analysis and evaluation of low‐carbon urban initiatives ( LCUI s). We wish to lay the path towards an innately geographical conceptualisation of low‐carbon urban transformations more generally, in which cities are not seen as rigid and passive physical containers for decarbonisation initiatives, but rather as key nodes within vibrant socio‐technical networks operating across multiple material sites. Using a case study of the transnational and translocal REACH (Reduce Energy use And Change Habits) project funded by the European Union as illustration, we argue that low‐carbon urban transformations are immanently constituted of three sets of relational processes across scale, involving (1) politicisation, (2) enrolment and (3) the hybridisation of human and material agencies.

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The compact city has become part of the policy orthodoxy in dealing with climate change and other sustainability challenges, and scholars from a diverse set of disciplines have informed this policy through empirical research. In this paper, we argue that attuning research in this field to key perspectives and concepts in human geography and critical urban studies can help ‘diversify’ understandings of compact urbanism in ways that advance social and ecological justice. We show that the compact city has been conceived primarily through the lens of territorially bounded physical urban form, and thereby many of its social, political, and ecological implications are overlooked. Based on this critique, we propose a renewed agenda for compact urbanism that rearticulates it as a strategy for sustainable transformation by bridging socio-material and relational approaches and engaging the human geographical toolbox. Three entry points for this agenda are highlighted: (1) commoning the compact city; (2) metabolism of compact cities; and (3) antagonism in the compact city.

As the world faces critical challenges in resource and energy sustainability, the importance of transforming the way governance institutions work across scales is increasingly recognized by policy makers, policy advocates and scientists. The scale problem has become a central topic of discussion in different disciplines, but it is one to which the discipline of geography has a particularly important contribution to make. This article argues for geography's relational concept of scale – seeing scales as interconnected arenas produced and constructed by social action, rather than naturally existing, discrete units – and shows some implications this has for how we frame and act on environmental issues. In particular, a relational perspective on scale changes the way we frame the scalar “existence” of environmental problems and how we assign responsibility. This can open new possibilities for analyses and for politics that can be mobilized around these problems.

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