Energising Peer-to-peer Urban Futures – Challenges for Urban Governance

Against the backdrop of increasingly fragmented and poly-centric urban climate governance, this article examines the establishment of city climate ‘commissions’ as an experimental means of addressing the challenge of climate change at the city-scale. In doing so it addresses the question: What constitutes diversity in voices and perspectives when trying to represent the city as a place for climate action? To answer this question, the article presents an analysis of the Edinburgh Climate Commission’s establishment, drawing on participatory ethnographic research carried out by a researcher embedded within the project team. The account of how this new mode of urban governance was both conceptualised and then put into practice offers a new institutional angle to the literature on urban ‘experimentation.’ Through our reflective analysis we argue that aspirations to ensure pre-defined ‘key’ industries (high carbon emitters) are accounted for in commissioner recruitment, and an over-emphasis on capturing discernible ‘impacts’ in the short term (by involving organisations already pro-active in sustainable development) hindered an opportunity to embrace new perspectives on urban futures and harness the innovative potential of cities to engage with the multifaceted nature of the climate challenge. Furthermore, new insight into the relationship between local authorities and other ‘place-based’ agents of change opens up important questions regarding how to balance the attainment of legitimacy within the political status quo, and the prospect of a new radical politics for urban transformation.

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Jam and Justice: Co-producing Urban Governance for Social Innovation, ESRC & Mistra Urban Futures

Impact ◽

10.21820/23987073.2019.1.34 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 2019 (1) ◽

pp. 34-40

Author(s):

Beth Perry ◽

Bert Russell ◽

Catherine Durose ◽

Liz Richardson ◽

Alex Whinnom

Keyword(s):

Urban Governance ◽

Social Innovation ◽

Urban Futures

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Conditioning experimentation: The struggle for place-based discretion in shaping urban infrastructures

Environment and Planning C Politics and Space ◽

10.1177/2399654418765480 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 36 (8) ◽

pp. 1480-1498 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Mike Hodson ◽

James Evans ◽

Gabriele Schliwa

Keyword(s):

Urban Governance ◽

Social Practices ◽

Sustainable Transport ◽

National Interests ◽

Infrastructure Systems ◽

Social Challenges ◽

What Works ◽

Urban Futures ◽

Urban Contexts

Re-shaping infrastructure systems and social practices within urban contexts has been promoted as a critical way to address a range of contemporary economic, environmental and social challenges. Though there are many attempts to re-imagine more sustainable urban contexts the challenge remains how to achieve such change. In this context, urban experiments have emerged as a way to stage purposive infrastructure interventions and learn what works in practice. The paper integrates literatures on urban governance and urban socio-technical experiments to extend analytical understanding of urban experimentation. Through a case study of ‘sustainable transport’ experimentation in Greater Manchester, we argue that place-based priorities that inform action on sustainable urban futures are conditioned by non-place-based, particularly national, interests. Our paper makes two key contributions. First, we illustrate how the (narrow) national conditioning of place-based priorities translates in to experimentation in episodic ways that are highly contextual. We detail how national priorities, stipulations and funding are mediated and translated at the urban scale where they set conditions for the range of interventions that are feasible in a particular context. The interventions that follow are then materially embedded in place through experimentation with processes of governing and constituting capacity. Second, we argue that the learning generated through these processes of experimentation is only weakly communicated back to conditioning institutions. The result is that there is strong conditioning of experimentation but weak experimentation with conditions. The paper illustrates how the potential of experimentation is conditioned and thus it brings to the fore the need to understand experimentation politically.

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‘Embodiments of the invention’: Patents and urban diagrammatics in the smart city

Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies ◽

10.1177/1354856520941801 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 26 (4) ◽

pp. 751-774

Author(s):

Aaron Shapiro

Keyword(s):

Smart City ◽

Autonomous Vehicles ◽

Urban Governance ◽

Spatial Form ◽

Notification System ◽

Technology Firms ◽

Incentive Structures ◽

Urban Futures ◽

Technical Capacity ◽

And Control

How do technology firms compete to colonize the urban future? This article theorizes technology patents as a medium of urban futuring. Patents secure legal exclusion by disclosing an idea or invention. However, the incentive structures behind patents are ambiguous. Patent holders must articulate inventions with enough technical specificity to warrant a property claim while remaining strategically imprecise enough to capture unanticipated future uses. I build on the Foucaultian theory of the diagram to discuss patents' interplay of disclosure and secrecy as a strategic anticipatory practice for colonizing urban futures. Whereas modern urban governance operated on spatial form to discipline citizens, smart city technology patents reflect a splintering of technical capacity and control. In the empirical section, I analyze three patent-diagrams: the first for a Wi-Fi-enabled advertising system, the second for a notification system for autonomous vehicles, and the third for an algorithmic predictive policing platform. These examples show that at a fundamental level, smart city technologies are less discrete inventions than claims to the capacity to influence human–machinic interactions. The article concludes with a reflection on how critical urbanists can learn from technology patents to advance more democratic and publicly oriented visions for the city.

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TRANSFORMATION TO SUSTAINABLE AND RESILIENT URBAN FUTURES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

ISPRS Annals of Photogrammetry Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ◽

10.5194/isprs-annals-vi-3-w1-2020-43-2020 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol VI-3/W1-2020 ◽

pp. 43-50

Author(s):

F. Lord

Keyword(s):

Southeast Asia ◽

Urban Governance ◽

Urban Resilience ◽

Crisis Events ◽

The Social ◽

Fast Pace ◽

Urban Futures ◽

National Governments ◽

Implementation Gaps ◽

Environmental Infrastructure

Abstract. The fast pace of urbanisation in Southeast Asia has undermined the sustainability of the social, economic and environmental infrastructure of many cities across the region. Urban resilience in Southeast Asian cities is being further impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. While cities and national governments across the region have developed policies, strategies and programs to re-orient their cities towards more sustainable and resilient development pathways, many cities continue to struggle with the uncontrolled nature of urban development and compounding impacts of crisis events. This article provides an overview of major trends and challenges with urbanisation in Southeast Asia, focusing in particular on Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as the regional, national and sub-national policies and strategies established to address these trends and challenges. Given the current policy implementation gaps and ongoing challenges of urbanisation in Cambodia and Vietnam, the article makes the case for trans-disciplinary research to understand the potential for strengthening urban governance capacities for urban sustainability transformations.

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The social innovation–(re)politicisation nexus: Unlocking the political in actually existing smart city campaigns? The case of SmartCity Cologne, Germany

Urban Studies ◽

10.1177/0042098019869820 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 57 (4) ◽

pp. 894-915 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Stephen Leitheiser ◽

Alexander Follmann

Keyword(s):

Smart City ◽

Urban Governance ◽

Social Innovation ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Top Down ◽

The Social ◽

Governance Practices ◽

Urban Futures ◽

Definition Of ◽

Urban Commons

As a prominent and performative discourse, The Smart City has the potential to shape urban futures. Yet, its mostly top-down implementation and dominantly technocratic definition of problems raises critiques of The Smart City as the latest version of a series of post-political and neoliberal visions of urban governance. However, as smart cities are implemented into ‘actually existing’ strategies locally, they are always negotiated and translated into place-specific contexts. Beyond critiquing the powerful discourse of The Smart City, the social innovation–(re)politicisation nexus (SIRN) spells out a framework for contesting and co-producing radically transformative smart city visions and politics as they take shape on the ground. Linking the empirical case study of the ‘top-down’ implementation of SmartCity Cologne, Germany, to current ‘bottom-up’ discourses on reclaiming the urban commons, we show how ‘true’ and ‘real’ social innovation must go hand-in-hand with a re-politicisation of hegemonic logics and discursive framings. In doing so, this paper makes theoretical and empirical contributions to public and academic discourse on which governance practices, methods and policies could contribute to radical transformations towards a ‘truly’ smart and sustainable urban future.

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The ideological alignment of smart urbanism in Singapore: Critical reflections on a political paradox

Urban Studies ◽

10.1177/0042098017746528 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 55 (4) ◽

pp. 679-701 ◽

Cited By ~ 32

Author(s):

Lily Kong ◽

Orlando Woods

Keyword(s):

Urban Governance ◽

Political Responsibility ◽

Role Of Government ◽

Political Effects ◽

Urban Futures ◽

Smart Governance ◽

And Control ◽

And Diffusion ◽

Smart Urbanism

Over the past decade, much has been written about the potential of smart urbanism to bring about various and lasting forms of betterment. The embedding of digital technologies within urban infrastructures has been well documented, and the efficiencies of smart models of urban governance and management have been lauded. More recently, however, the discourse has been labelled ‘hegemonic’, and accused of developing a view of smart technology that is blinkered by its failure to critique its socio-political effects. By focusing on the case of Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ initiative, this paper embraces the paradoxes at the heart of smart urbanism and, in doing so, interrogates the tension between ideology and praxis, efficiency and control, access and choice, and smart governance and smart citizenship. It also demonstrates how such tensions are (re)produced through ‘fourthspace’ – the digitally enabled spaces of urbanism that are co-created, and that contribute to an expansion and diffusion of social and political responsibility. It ends by suggesting how such spaces have the potential to radically transform not just the urban environment, but also the role of government and citizens in designing urban futures.

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Experten aus Erfahrung

PADUA ◽

10.1024/1861-6186/a000295 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 65-71 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jörg Haslbeck

Keyword(s):

Soziale Unterstützung ◽

Peer To Peer

Zusammenfassung. In der Gesundheitsversorgung von Menschen, die mit chronischen Krankheiten leben, wird soziale Unterstützung durch «peers» immer bedeutsamer, d. h. durch Personen, die aufgrund ähnlicher Krankheits- und Alltagserfahrungen in einer vergleichbaren Lebenssituation sind. Welche Potenziale, Chancen sowie Grenzen hat «peer-to-peer healthcare» im Kontext von Selbstmanagementförderung? Der Beitrag diskutiert dies anhand von Erfahrungen mit dem Stanford Kursprogramm «Gesund und aktiv leben».

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