In this chapter, the authors begin by interpreting smart urban development as a mode of urban experimentation where Information & Communication Technology (ICT) is being implemented to fundamentally alter the operation of cities. They focus on the role of university campuses in situating smart urban development. By drawing on literatures on urban laboratories and experimentation as well as uni

The smart city is increasingly described as an emergent and soon to be dominant urban development paradigm. This chapter examines the translation of smart urban development to two British cities with noted environmental agendas: Bristol and Manchester. Both cities exemplify the 'actually existing smart city', with a particular emphasis on the green or environmental aspects of smart technologies. T

Smart cities are enthusiastically promoted around the world by industry and governments alike as a desirable means to achieve urban sustainability. This chapter contributes empirical evidence on how projects reflecting qualities of a Smart City 2.0 model can play out on the ground. It examines two Japanese smart cities addressing the interconnected challenges of an ageing society and preventative

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