James Evans

Andrew Karvonen

Chris Martin

Rob Raven

Andres Luque-Ayala

Kes McCormick

Yuliya Voytenko Palgan

Smart cities promise to generate economic, social and environmental value through the seamless connection of urban services and infrastructure by digital technologies. However, there is scant evidence of how these activities can enhance social well-being and contribute to just and equitable communities. Smart and Sustainable Cities? Pipedreams, Practicalities and Possibilities provides one of the first examinations of how smart cities relate to environmental and social issues. It addresses the gap between the ambitious visions of smart cities and the actual practices on the ground by focusing on the social and environmental dimensions of real smart city initiatives as well as the possibilities they hold for creating more equitable and progressive cities. Through detailed analyses of case studies in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, India and China, the contributors describe the various ways that social and environmental issues are interpreted and integrated into smart city initiatives and actions. The findings point towards the need for more intentional engagement and collaboration with all urban stakeholders in the design, development and maintenance of smart cities to ensure that everyone benefits from the increasingly digitalised urban environments of the twenty-first century. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Local Environment.

Pipedreams, Practicalities and Possibilities

Smart and Sustainable Cities?

This book explores how the concept or urban experimentation is being used to reshape practices of knowledge production in urban debates about resilience, climate change governance, and socio-technical transitions. With contributions from leading scholars, and case studies from the Global North and South, from small to large scale cities, this book suggests that urban experiments offer novel modes of engagement, governance, and politics that both challenge and complement conventional strategies. The book is organized around three cross-cutting themes. Part I explores the logics of urban experimentation, different approaches, and how and why they are deployed. Part II considers how experiments are being staged within cities, by whom, and with what effects? Part III examines how entire cities or groups of cities are constructed as experiments. This book seeks to contribute a deeper and more socially and politically nuanced understanding of how urban experiments shape cities and drive wider changes in society, providing a framework to examine the phenomenon of urban experimentation in conceptual and empirical detail.

The Experimental City

Rob Raven

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