Energy efficiency left behind? Policy assemblages in Sweden’s most climate-smart city

ABSTRACT

Smart city experiments have the potential to reshape urban climate change governance. Smart city initiatives have been supported by international technology companies and the European Union for many years and continue to be promoted by national and municipal governments. In relation to sustainability and climate change, such initiatives promise more efficient use of resources through the use of information and communications technology in energy infrastructure. Experiments with smart city technologies such as urban smart grids have shown the potential to restructure relationships between energy utilities, energy users and other actors by reconfiguring the dynamics of energy supply and demand. But do urban experiments lead to institutional change? The aim of the article is to provide a better understanding of how smart city experiments reshape the urban governance of building energy use. Hyllie, a new city district in Malmö, Sweden, was home to two smart city experiments that contributed to the institutionalization of urban smart grid technology. However, the analysis of Hyllie’s policy assemblages shows that this institutional change could redefine sustainability at the expense of energy efficiency.     

Urban experimentation & sustainability transitions

ABSTRACT

This special issue deals with various research questions regarding the impact of urban experimentation on transitions towards sustainability in different industries and sectors. Cities have been identified to play a vital role for sustainability transitions. Not only are they places with an increased urgency for change, but they also bring about many current sustainability initiatives and interventions. This special issue focuses on investigating the relationship between urban experimentation and institutional change. The articles shed light on various characteristics of urban environments that influence experimentation and potentially lead to institutional change and thus elaborate on some of the distinct mechanisms through which urban experimentation can lead to broader systemic changes.     

Urban Policy Mobilities: The Case of Turin as a Smart City

This article analyses urban policy mobilities taking into consideration the idea of the smart city, which is currently a sort of leitmotif used in many cities within the framework of discourses on urban development. More specifically, this article offers an analysis concerning the circulation and implementation of the idea of the smart city in Turin, Italy. It investigates the actors, processes and networks involved in the mobilization and reproduction of the idea, as well as the mechanisms, concerning the embedding of the smart city discourse in the institutional fabric of the city of Turin, Italy. It also emphasizes how urban policy mobility can develop even without processes of “imitation” and “adaptation” of best practices from other cities.     

Institutional Arrangements and the Morphology of Residential Development in the Netherlands,Flanders and North Rhine-Westphalia

Abstract

This article aims to highlight the mechanisms through which institutional arrangements influence the morphology of residential development. By comparing the Netherlands, Flanders and North Rhine-Westphalia, which have quite similar socio-economic and landscape characteristics, it investigates how differences in national institutional environments have contributed to differences in the urban morphology of residential areas. This article fits within a broader institutional “turn” in planning research. While most of these studies focus on how institutions affect the behaviour of actors in the process of planning and development, this article focuses on the physical outcomes of these processes. The institutional analysis of physical outcomes suggests that urban morphology is not only linked to planning systems—the subject of this special issue—but also to housing cultures and property regimes.     

Smart specialization and institutional context: the role of institutional discovery,change and leapfrogging

ABSTRACT

Recent years have witnessed much experimentation with smart specialization strategies (RIS3) and entrepreneurial discovery processes (EDPs) in European regions. The EDP can be seen as an opportunity to address institutional questions. Because institutional patterns can explain why some policies are eventually successful while others are not, looking at the institutional context of regional economies can increase the effectiveness of regional policy. This article argues that the EDP functions as a framework to discover institutional patterns specific to a regional economy, and to define policies either consistent with existing institutions or aiming at institutional change. The article proposes a conceptual framework to understand and analyze the two institution-related roles of the EDP, first as an institutional discovery process and second as an institutional change process. The article builds on empirical case studies in two regions (Lower Austria, Austria and South Tyrol, Italy) and two small countries (Slovenia and Croatia). The case studies focus on how these regions or countries organized the EDP that eventually led to the formulation of their RIS3, and on the institutional dynamics of the EDP in discovering and changing institutions. The article concludes with policy implications that contribute to the debate on post-2020 EU Cohesion Policy.     

Emerging challenges of an urban creative economy: reflections on the governance of creative clusters in Taipei City

ABSTRACT

Retaining the global mobile creative class has been considered a crucial strategy for driving creative economic development in inner cities. However, implementing the global creative city strategy overemphasizes the significance of amenity-based creative economic landscapes over institutional collaborations in contributing to the situated governance dynamics of creative clusters. Drawing on insights from an evolutionary perspective, this paper scrutinizes the extent to which creative city strategies foster the situated development of creative clusters based on a case study of Taipei. The paper argues that developing the urban creative economy requires a context-specific understanding of the urbanization process, and should involve an institutional collaboration to articulate the socio-spatial co-evolution between the diversified dynamics of creative clusters and urban form. This paper advocates reflexive thinking on neoliberal city strategies to develop a conjunctive, diverse and substantial creative policy to support alternative paths of creative city development.     

Urban low carbon transitions: institution-building and prospects for interventions in social practice

ABSTRACT

As we witness increasing numbers and range of low carbon experiments, attention inevitably turns to how they are sustained and whether they can generate more systemic change in carbon-related consumption. This paper responds to the ‘spatial turn’ in socio-technical transitions, and the ‘practice turn’ in social theory to consider the role of intermediary organizations in potential shifts from experiments to institutional arrangements favouring transitions.

Through the example of Climate Change Alliances in Victoria, Australia, the paper examines how such intermediary organizations seek to experiment and in so doing contribute towards institution building. With a focus on the interstitial spaces between local authorities, regional firms, agencies, and state governments we speculate on the prospects for systemic change given the resources, positioning and social strategies of the Alliances as intermediary institution builders.     

A theatre of machines: Automata circuses and digital bread in the smart city of Toronto

In this paper, the policies, projects, and promises of “smart” initiatives at the City of Toronto are evaluated, as they manifest through a technological convergence between local government services and an increased focus on citizen services through data-driven mediums. Through direct participant observation and formal interviews, a robust understanding of the internal institutional dynamics, the perspectives citizens in the “smart city,” and the operational disconnects in governance, policy, and practice has been gained. Our case study on the City of Toronto provides an account of how and from where these smart motivations for increasing a data-driven engagement with the public have arisen over the past several years. In doing so, we identify key characteristics that both enable and hinder the existing smart city in the forms of access to open data, the use of increased computational methods, and the engagement of public services through digital space as requirements for the future of participatory governance. We argue that instituting appropriate policies and engaging citizens to co-design and participate in the planning processes are essential to ensuring an inclusive, modern, and open smart city.     

Cartography and Urban Planning: The City Plan of Barcelona by Miquel Garriga i Roca (1856–1862)

ABSTRACT

Due to the passing of Spanish laws that promoted the creation of urban cartography and the need to redevelop an overcrowded city, the Barcelona City Council commissioned the architect Miquel Garriga i Roca in 1856 to create a municipal plan. During the following six years he compiled what is known as the Plan of Barcelona, a collection of cartographical documents that depicts with unprecedented levels of detail how Barcelona appeared right after the demolition of the city walls. This paper explains how and why the maps were commissioned, how they were made, and the resultant cartographical output.     

How ‘creative’ is remembering? Culture-led regeneration and the politics of memory in Bogota,Colombia

ABSTRACT

Recently, Colombia’s post-conflict transition has experienced strong international attention. In Bogota, commemorative politics of the conflict insert themselves in complex processes of place branding: employing culture to rescale the city image from unsafe and violent to culturally vibrant. However, how to reckon with the country’s violent past in the culture-led renaissance of Bogota? Based on the author’s four-month of in-depth qualitative fieldwork on the main street Avenida 26 – at the center of both branding strategies and politics of memory – this paper shows the failure of institutional efforts to promote a brand of Bogota as a ‘City of Memory’. Socio-political divisions over the interpretations of the country’s past result in multi-scalar conflictive negotiations between politics and practices on the street: they reveal the tight link between memory, social justice, and urban segregation while denouncing the exclusionary visions of citizenship bared in political efforts to display memory as a territorial mark.     

Fostering and planning urban regeneration: the governance of cultural districts in Copenhagen

Policy-makers and urban planners struggle to find the right formula to implement urban regeneration processes based on cultural assets, often focusing on the desired outcomes, but rarely questioning how the policy process can shape them. This paper examines different governance models for the implementation and organization of cultural districts, and evaluates how they can affect their actual realization by investigating three cases in Copenhagen, Denmark. The deindustrialization of Copenhagen left many of the city’s harbour areas disused and in turn provided the opportunity to develop three new cultural districts in the city centre. The paper contributes to the literature on cultural districts by matching specificities and contingencies attached to a particular urban area with the governance model adopted for its development. The paper claims that temporal experimentation has to be included in cultural planning and a mix of bottom-up and top-down approaches is more desirable than both a totally unregulated initiative and a real estate-driven development and a totally unregulated initiative, as it ensures that initiatives remain financially viable and that the creative workers and companies retain a certain control of the area development, and in turn counteracts gentrification.     

Cities and climate change – examining advantages and challenges of urban climate change experiments

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to the literature on urban climate change experiments by analysing ascribed advantages and challenges of organizing climate change experiments at the urban scale, and by examining how local actions translate into effect. We here distinguish between effects of experiments in achieving actual sustainability gains (‘goal-oriented objectives’) and instigating broader institutional change (‘process-oriented objectives’). Empirically, we analyse efforts related to energy supply in two Danish urban climate change experiments: The ‘CPH 2025 Climate Plan’ in Copenhagen, and ‘ProjectZero’ in Sønderborg. Our analysis poses considerable question marks over the importance of the advantages ascribed to urban climate change experiments including ‘authority advantages’ and possibilities of ‘engaging and mobilizing stakeholders’.     

The ‘creative township’ in the post-apartheid: globalisation,nation building or gentrification?

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the ambiguities of post-Apartheid public cultural policies in South Africa by focusing on the case of the Red Location Museum and Cultural precinct (RLMCP), a multisectoral project for socio-economic development, based on tourism, art, culture, heritagisation and urban regeneration, implemented in Red Location, one of the oldest townships of Port Elizabeth. In the post-Apartheid period, cultural policies have been employed as catch-all policies that could lead to urban renewal, desegregation and development. The case of the RLMCP drives home how efforts to use art and culture as leverages to transform townships into the core of the creative city and into the prototype of a new form of neighbourhood led to exclusionary representations and patterns; moreover, it is an example of how cultural policies enforce gentrification dynamics at the local level, in the name of restructuring urban governance and rescaling the city to the global dimension.     

‘A NEW SEASON FOR PLANNING’: URBAN GARDENING AS INFORMAL PLANNING IN ROME

This article investigates the relationship between urban gardening and planning by building upon the results of field research on gardening initiatives in the city of Rome, Italy. The work is aimed at suggesting that, while often associated in geography and planning literature with urban informality practices (e.g. accidental city or self‐made urbanism), urban gardening actually presents the character of a distinctive form of people's interaction with urban space, here defined as “informal planning”. This includes practices that are intentionally put forward by local dwellers with the intention of urban space planning and organizing public life in the absence of legal definition, guidance and funds provided by public authorities or the private sector. Urban gardening cases in Rome exemplify the emergence of informal planning and show how, by questioning the counterplanning tradition that understands urban gardening as an antagonist spatial practice opposing institutional planning, informal planning can open up collaborative possibilities. A new mode of interaction between citizens' agency and the formal planning initiatives of local administration can lead to creative solutions to address some of the problems associated with the neoliberal transformation of the city space, most notably the decrease in public space and its deterioration.     

Pourquoi seules les villes sont-elles qualifiées d'intelligentes? Un vocabulaire du biais urbain

Since 2010, the term “smart city” has become a buzzword, used in a vague way to denote the increasing integration of information technology into city management processes and to describe the social and community processes they enable. The adjective “smart” is, however, only applied to cities: by implication non-cities (i.e., rural and peripheral regions) are not smart. In this paper we describe how the term “smart city” is used, and show that processes similar to those that make cities smart also occur outside cities. Reserving the term “smart” for cities therefore reflects a bias, similar to the bias that associates creativity and innovation with cities. As geographers we have become aware of our colonial and sexist biases: in this paper we argue that our urban bias is alive and well, and call attention to it.     

Between Boundaries: From Commoning and Guerrilla Gardening to Community Land Trust Development in Liverpool

Emerging in the cracks of the ownership model are alternatives to state/market provision of affordable housing and public/private‐led regeneration of declining urban neighbourhoods, centred on commoning and collective dweller control. This paper explores how the community land trust model can become an effective institutional solution to urban decline in the context of private property relations. It explores a case study of a CLT campaign in Granby, a particularly deprived inner‐city neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. The campaign seeks to collectively acquire empty homes under conditions of austerity, which have opened up the space for grassroots experimentation with guerrilla gardening, proving important for the campaign in gaining political trust and financial support. This paper discusses the potential of the CLT model as a vehicle for democratic stewardship of place and unpacks the contradictions threatening to undermine its political legitimacy.     

‘That street is taking us to home’: young children’s photographs of public spaces

ABSTRACT

Children’s identities constitute and are constituted by the everyday spaces they inhabit. Though there are innumerable accounts of what adults think public spaces like subways and city streets mean to children, fewer recorded accounts exist from young children themselves (Faulkner and Zolkos 2016, “Introduction.” In Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity, ix–xvii. Lexington: Lanham.). In this work I explored 2- – 5-year-old children’s conceptions of public space through the photographs they took and the narratives they told in and around those images. I focused on how children imaged their spaces, how their narrative fragments added layers of story to the images’ contents, and how their photographic performances acted as ‘visual voice’ (Burke 2005, “‘Play in Focus’: Children Researching Their Own Spaces and Places for Play.” Children Youth and Environments 15 (1): 27–53.), highlighting for us how they see themselves and their positions within the larger urban environment. The young children’s photographs depicted their growing autonomy and mobility within an urban context, attunements to non-human forms of the city, and knowledge of what it means to live in their communities.     

On not being Dubai: infrastructures of urban cultural policy in Istanbul & Beirut

ABSTRACT

This paper compares how Istanbul and Beirut both attempt to underline their cultural and developmental uniqueness today in contrast to a metonymic menace – Dubai, standing in for spectacular yet supposedly cultureless Gulf cities. Even amid their own speculative construction frenzies that threaten local heritage, Turkish and Lebanese city-shapers assert theirs are ‘real’ cities because they have ‘civilization’ and ‘history.’ By addressing their own efforts to build, defend, or oppose physical infrastructures related to local urban culture, Istanbullus and Beirutis rely on and reassert strategic, phatic discourses that frequently reference Gulf cities as counterpoint. Analysis focuses on how each city crafts a distinctive urban profile via civilizational appeals to historic senses of culture, inflecting infrastructural developments related to bridging (Istanbul) and bordering (Beirut). Historical truisms are deployed with marked flexibility to showcase these cities as ‘not Dubai.’ This study offers lessons on the particular worlding of Middle Eastern cities and the role of discourses in the material-symbolic infrastructure of implicit urban cultural policy.     

Cultural policies in cities of the ‘global South’: a multi-scalar approach

ABSTRACT

Building on the literature on global cities and on the worlding of cities, the articles in this special issue chart how cities outside Europe and North America try to reinvent and rescale themselves using culture. They suggest that the fabric of urban cultural policy is embedded in multi-scalar power dynamics. First, the contributions in this special issue reveal the importance of circulating standards across borders in structuring narratives about urban history, heritage and identity, in conjunction with local actors’ interests. Second, the diffusion of hegemonic cultural policy models such as the “creative city” leads to logics of exclusion, gentrification, and has been met with resistance, which suggest that these models can be to the detriment of local residents, despite the progressive values they are often claim to promote. Third, this special issue points to the need to rethink the politics of cultural policy mobility and offers conceptual tools such as vernacularization to make sense of the ways in which urban elites navigate, negotiate and take advantage of circulating cultural policy models.