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This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book illustrates how urban innovation is being negotiated and interpreted in a wide range of contexts, while also raising more fundamental questions about the rapidly evolving relationship between society and information and communication technologies (ICT). It describes how smart urba
Smart urbanisation is neither universal, apolitical nor straightforward. Many advocates of smart urbanisation suggest that the fully connected and digitalised future is just around the corner. Negotiations over technological choices, financial models, the role of technical experts and related issues resonate with today's smart cities debates. Contemporary smart city interventions continue to be pa
Cities are messy, planning is messy. Things do not come together as nicely as we would like; they do not necessarily add up. It is one thing to say that cities are multifaceted and complex and quite another to engage with and study this complexity and make sense of it. STS provides a way to interpret and engage with urban messiness without oversimplifying and missing out on the essence of cities.
The existing housing stock in the UK will make a significant contribution to national carbon emissions for many decades to come. Existing houses present a significant challenge to systemic upgrades because they are influenced by a disparate set of regulations, incentives, and stakeholders. Unlike the new build industry, there is no single set of standards to regulate and steer the energy performan
This chapter focuses specifically on urban locales due to the multitude of ways that environmental territories are being realised in cities around the world. It defines the pathways approach and how it is useful for interpreting and making sense of the multiple ways that the environment is territorialised today. The chapter describes several alternative pathways of environmental territorialisation
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents a typology of experimentation distinguishing between niche experiments, social experiments, transition experiments, grassroots experiments and sustainability experiments, and proposes an encompassing definition of experimentation. It highlights the connections between greenin
It is now more than two decades since Jane Summerton published her landmark book District Heating Comes to Town about the successful development of a district heating system in an ‘ordinary’ town in Sweden. It was published when sociotechnical studies of urban technical systems were still relatively rare, and arrived during a fertile period of intellectual development that was striving to connect
Nature is a central component of the twenty-first-century city. Beyond parks and open spaces, urban nature is implicated in strategies of economic development, climate change mitigation and adaptation, public art, biodiversity enhancement, local food production, health and livability, social justice, community identity, and more.1 This “pluralization” of urban nature has come about in the last four
When Jean-Francois Mayet was elected mayor of the French city of Châteauroux in 2001, he inherited a mass transit system that was functional but under-used by residents. The city, located about halfway between Paris and Bordeaux, had collective aims that were similar to other medium-sized cities in Europe: to reduce the city’s ecological footprint while improving the local economy and fostering a
The dominant role of technology in contemporary societies requires the public to rely on individuals with specialized knowledge to invent, design, manufacture, and maintain increasingly complex artifacts and networks. As Stilgoe et al. ( 2006 : 16) note, “Our everyday lives are played out through a series of technological and expert relationships.” In spite of the increasing reliance on technologi
Creating a more sustainable society is increasingly an urban challenge (Pincetl 2010). Upwards of 50 per cent of the world’s population currently dwell in cities, and this figure is forecast to rise dramatically over the coming decades (Grimm et al. 2008). Cities both concentrate the activities that produce carbon emissions, and suffer disproportionately from their negative impacts such as air pol
The dominant role of technology in contemporary societies requires the public to rely on individuals with specialized knowledge to invent, design, manufacture and maintain increasingly complex artifacts and networks. As Stilgoe et al. (2006: 16) note, “Our everyday lives are played out through a series of technological and expert relationships.” In spite of the increasing reliance on technologies
This paper introduces Match Theory, an Optimality-Theoretic approach to the syntax–phonology interface proposed by Selkirk (2011). The theory states that a family of Match constraints favor syntax–prosody isomorphism, but that these can be outranked by constraints on prosodic wellformedness and/or information structure, resulting in certain principled mismatches. We compare Match Theory to previou
A method was developed for the simultaneous demonstration of two specific cellular constituents. Cryostat sections of formaldehyde fixed tissue from retinae treated with ((3)H)-5-hydroxytryptamine were subjected to immunohistochemistry and subsequent autoradiography. The method takes advantage of the very efficient and specific uptake mechanism that many types of neurons possess which makes it pos
Increasing energy efficiency within the industrial sector is one of the main approaches in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. The production and processing of aluminium is energy and greenhouse gas intensive. To make well‐founded decisions regarding energy efficiency and greenhouse gas mitigating investments, it is necessary to have relevant key performance indicators and information
