Shaping Urban Infrastructures

Intermediaries and the Governance of Socio-Technical Networks

Simon Guy, Simon Marvin, Will Medd, Timothy Moss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136539497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Cities can only exist because of the highly developed systems which underlie them, ensuring that energy, clean water, etc. are moved efficiently from producer to user, and that waste is removed. The urgent need to make the way that these services are provided more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable means that these systems are in a state of transition; from centralized to decentralized energy; from passive to smart infrastructure; from toll-free to road pricing. Such transitions are widely studied in the context of the influence of service providers, users, and regulators.

Until now, however, relatively little attention has been given to the growing role of intermediaries in these systems. These consist of institutions and organizations acting in-between production and consumption, for example; NGOs who develop green energy labelling schemes in collaboration with producers and regulators to guide the user; consultants who advise businesses on how to save resources; and travel agents who match users with providers. Such intermediaries are in a position to shape the direction that technological transitions take, and ultimately the sustainability of urban networks.

This book presents the first authoritative collection of research and analysis of the intermediaries that underpin the transitions that are taking place within urban infrastructures, showing how intermediaries emerge, the role that they play in key sectors - including energy, water, waste and building - and what impact they have on the governance of urban socio-technical networks.

1
Intermediaries and the Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructures: An Introduction

Timothy Moss, Simon Guy, Simon Marvin and Will Medd

Introduction

Modern cities exist and function because of the highly developed systems which underlie them, ensuring that electricity, gas, heating, clean water and so on are moved efficiently from provider to user, and that waste is removed. Technical networks are the bedrock of urban development, physically and metaphorically. The services they provide are a precondition for basic standards of living, economic growth and environmental protection in and beyond the city. Comprising not just physical artefacts, such as power plants or sewers, but also organizational structures, institutional arrangements and socio-cultural meanings, these urban infrastructures represent complex socio-technical systems serving multiple purposes. Once established, they generally possess a high degree of path dependency; that is, by virtue of their physical embeddedness in urban (sub-)structures and their reliance on powerful regulatory and economic interests, they tend to be resistant to change. Since the 1980s, however, urban infrastructures have come under increasing pressures to adapt. Firstly, the political economy of socio-technical systems has diversified hugely following trends towards the liberalization, privatization and commercialization of utility services. Secondly, the socio-technical configuration of urban infrastructures is altering subtly but distinctly with the emergence of new, smart technologies, capable of providing more efficient services tailored to specific locations or user-groups. Thirdly, stricter and more ambitious environmental regulation in industrialized countries is providing a powerful driver for more resource-efficient and low-pollution forms of service provision and use. Overall, these forces for change are challenging the conventional logic of ‘build and supply’, and generating new ways of making utility services more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable.

Who, though, is instrumental behind the current transition of these socio-technical systems? Who is shaping the urban infrastructures of the future? The issue of agency behind the reconfiguration of urban infrastructures is central to this book. Ongoing and past transitions to socio-technical systems are widely studied in terms of the influence of service providers, users and regulators. The focus of attention is generally on the utilities, adapting to privatization or liberalization, on the economic and environmental regulators, setting new institutional frameworks, or (to a lesser extent) on the consumers and changing patterns of resource use. By contrast, very little attention has yet been paid to those actors working in-between this triad of provider, regulator and user. As any case study of urban infrastructures in transition will reveal, such processes are rarely populated exclusively by utilities, consumers and regulators; they are socially, organizationally and politically much more complex. The recent shifts in the way urban infrastructures are organized, by making utility markets more differentiated and utility services increasingly diverse, are creating openings for the emergence of new actors and the reordering of existing relations. Of particular interest are those actors who characteristically work in-between the other actors and across different realms of action, in particular between production and consumption. These ‘intermediaries’ are the focus of this book. Examples include non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who develop green energy labelling schemes in collaboration with producers and regulators to guide the user, consultants who advise businesses on how to save resources, and travel agents who match users with providers. It is postulated that such intermediaries play an important, but hitherto neglected, role in reshaping the relations between production and consumption relating to urban infrastructures. Potentially, it is argued, they can influence the direction that technological transitions take, the sustainability of urban technical networks and the governance of these systems.

This book presents the first authoritative collection of empirical and conceptual research on intermediaries and processes of intermediation relating to urban infrastructures. The book's purpose is to investigate how far and in what ways intermediaries have a transformative influence on socio-technical networks. The key policy and research interest lies in ascertaining whether intermediaries can effect systemic change to urban infrastructures, in particular in the interest of advancing more sustainable modes of production and consumption. At the same time, the transformative capacity of intermediaries cannot be taken for granted. The flip side of the book's purpose is to reveal also how intermediaries can stall change, in their own interest, thereby contributing to system obduracy. In this way, the focus on intermediaries provides a critical context for wider societal learning about forms of agency behind socio-technical change. The importance of place is central to this endeavour: our particular interest lies in exploring how intermediaries are altering the relationship between socio-technical networks and the localities they serve.

This introductory chapter sets out the rationale for studying intermediaries as a window on the shifting governance of urban infrastructures. It first elaborates the nature of transition to socio-technical networks today, focusing on the relationship between production and consumption in urban contexts. It then introduces and explains the concept of intermediaries as used throughout the book. From this it derives the principal research objectives and questions guiding all the chapters. The chapter concludes by outlining the structure of the book and the role of each section in contributing to the book's objectives.

Urban infrastructures in transition

Since the mid-1990s there has been a surge of academic and policy interest in the reconfiguration of urban infrastructure systems (Coutard, 1999; Graham and Marvin 2001; Guy et al, 2001; Coutard, 2005). Studies of liberalization and privatization have plotted shifts in the balance of power, and the relationships between utility companies, state regulators and consumers (Newbery, 1999; Finger and Allouche, 2002; Page and Bakker, 2005). Research on technological innovation has explained the influence of state-led regulatory or financial incentives on technology uptake (Jamison and Rohracher, 2002). Work on changing consumption patterns has directed attention to shifts in actor roles and relations (Southerton et al, 2004; Summerton, 2004). Transition research, in particular, has emerged as a dominant frame of reference for much work in this field. Building on insight from innovation studies, social studies of science and technology, and policy analysis, research on technological transitions and transition management analyses long-term systemic transformations to socio-technical systems (Geels, 2004; Kemp and Loorbach, 2005). Transitions research investigates not only the dynamics of socio-technical change, such as emerging new technological innovation systems (Johnson and Jacobsson, 2001; Bergek et al, 2008; Markard and Truffer, 2008), but also, significantly, opportunities for shaping socio-technical change, in particular deliberate interventions designed to direct socio-technical systems along more sustainable pathways (Rip and Kemp, 1998; Elzen et al, 2004; Geels, 2005; Smith et al, 2005; Grin, 2008).

Where transition research falls short is in considering the importance of place in this analytical framework. How socio-technical change is shaped by – and itself shapes – the city or region where it occurs is a crucial aspect absent from much transition research. Exploring how technological transitions and urban transitions shape each other is a core issue of ongoing research in this field.

Our book contributes to this debate by highlighting the role of the city and the region in technological transitions, as mediated by intermediary organizations. It builds on conclusions drawn from earlier collaborative research by the editors on the nature of ongoing transitions to urban infrastructures in Europe (Guy et al, 2001), several of which emphasized the importance of place. There we argued the need to understand better, firstly, how social and technical systems interact in a specific local context; secondly, how resource provision and use involves interaction across multiple, overlapping spatial scales; and, thirdly, how sustainable urban and regional futures are highly contested. From this we concluded:

The research challenge is to map the multiple constructions of the sustainable city, to understand the changing social contexts that produce them and to build an understanding of the multiple logics emerging to reorder social relations, resource flows and urban form (Guy et al, 2001, p205).

If transition research has tended to overlook the constitutive functions of place to socio-technical transitions, studies of resource use by infrastructure systems has in the past tended to distinguish too sharply between processes of production and consumption. Much existing work has focused on either the production side (e.g. the impact of liberalization on service providers) or the consumption side (e.g. the roles of users as active agents in the management of networks) following quite distinct logics. However, as historical and comparative research demonstrates, attempts to constitute different organizational arrangements (e.g. privatization, liberalization) and technical solutions (e.g. metering) on the supply side are closely entwined with the identities and practices of users (Guy and Marvin, 1996; Rohracher, 2003; Southerton et al, 2004; Trentmann, 2006). The focus of attention in research and policy is typically around important tensions in the relationship between utility companies, consumer needs and regulation processes (see Summerton, 1994; Bakker, 2003; Mohajeri et al, 2004; Swyngedouw, 2004).

Our earlier work also highlighted the existence and interaction of different logics of utility services, sustained by an increasingly rich proliferation of actors engaging in water and energy governance (Guy et al, 2001). It provided three important reasons for the need to look across and beyond the classic triad of provider/user/regulator when exploring ways of making utility services more sustainable. Firstly, we need to develop a better understanding of the relationship between these three actor groups. This applies in particular to the structures, modes and politics of their interaction and critical areas of contestation. Secondly, we need to consider the emergence of new actors and new functions in the wake of ongoing change to socio-technical systems. Processes of commercialization, ecological modernization and the reconfiguration of the state, inter alia, are opening up the governance of urban infrastructures to different types of organizations operating in a variety of arenas. Thirdly, the interfaces between actors of urban infrastructure and the physical, social and cultural contexts within which they work are proving a promising line of investigation for revealing important, new features of how these systems are organized today (see Swyngedouw, 2004; Kaika, 2005). The current book addresses one type of emergent actor commonly found at the nexus between production and consumption: the intermediary. How these intermediaries are reshaping urban infrastructures and what consequences they can have for practices of production and consumption are central issues addressed in the forthcoming chapters. First, though, we need to explain what we mean by the term ‘intermediary’.

Intermediaries, intermediation and the relational nature of socio-technical change

One basic definition defines an intermediary as ‘an intermediate agent or agency; a go-between or mediator’ (Dictionary.com, accessed on 20 April 2010). What intermediaries do, then, is work in-between, make connections, and enable a relationship between different persons or things. The term ‘intermediaries’ is used increasingly to describe organizations operating in-between other actor groups, but there exists no common conceptual understanding or even an agreed definition of what intermediaries are. For example, reviewing how the concept of intermediaries is applied by different disciplines, we find the term used in relation to the following: ‘social intermediaries’ blurring the distinction between economy and society (Piore, 2001); ‘cultural intermediaries’ changing relations of mediation between culture and economy (Cronin, 2004); ‘market intermediaries’ within the context of shifting relations between production and consumption (Randles et al, 2003); ‘systemic intermediaries’ enabling the emergence of new modes of systems innovation (van Lente et al, 2003); ‘labour intermediaries’ addressing labour market restructuring (Kazis, 1998); ‘knowledge intermediaries’ within the new knowledge economy (Iles and Yolles, 2002); ‘welfare intermediaries’ enabling joined-up working in social welfare (Allen, 2003); ‘planning intermediaries’ facilitating the coordination of public-private initiatives in town centre management (Paddison, 2003); and debates on intermediation, re-intermediation and dis-intermediation in relation to ‘financial intermediaries’ (Allen and Santomero, 1998), ‘commercial intermediaries’ (Brousseau, 2002) and ‘information intermediaries’ (Ehrlich and Cash, 1999).

Looking across this literature, we find the concept of the intermediary is used to describe quite different sets of actors. Such actors can be individuals, organizations, networks, institutions, processes or even technologies. Their distinguishing feature as an intermediary is not their organizational structure. It is the work that an actor, of whatever form, performs that constitutes it as an intermediary. What makes it an intermediary is where it ‘sits’: for example, between welfare services, professionals and clients (Allen, 2003); between production and consumption (Randles et al, 2003), culture and economy (Cronin, 2004), or the economy and society at large (Piore, 2001); or between private, public and third sectors (Paddison, 2003; van Lente et al, 2003). This literature reveals, therefore, a common interest in a particular set of actors who are positioned in-between other actors, institutions, processes or interests. There is, however, rarely any conceptual interrogation of the concept of ‘intermediary’, or of the implications that different understandings of intermediary organization and intermediary work might have for transforming the relationship between different actors (see Lawless, 2001; Kohl, 2003; Phillipson et al, 2004; Atherton, 2006). Where reviews of intermediaries do take place, they tend to be situated within a particular domain of research (e.g. Howells, 2006, on innovation) without wider critical reflection.

The book builds on this relational understanding of intermediaries. Accordingly, intermediaries are defined by the relations within which they are situated, rather than by a particular organizational characteristic or form. This basic conceptualization serves the purposes of the book in several ways. Firstly, it resonates powerfully with our interest in the relational nature of urban infrastructures in transition. How actors work across boundaries of socio-technical systems – whether geographical, organizational, sectoral or cultural – is central to our interest in intermediaries. Examples covered in this book include working in-between different sets of social interests, in-between different natural, institutional and economic geographies, and in-between technological and social contexts. Secondly, defining intermediaries by their function rather than their structure enables us to include in the analysis actors of highly different organizational status. The chapters of this book address actors such as NGOs, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) or consultants, as well as the social networks more commonly associated with intermediation. Thirdly, we can thereby include in our analysis the work of actors that are not deliberately created as an intermediary, but which perform an intermediary function nevertheless. Rather than restricting the analysis to bridge-builders, mediators and facilitators, we also include brokers, educators, lobbyists, gatekeepers and image-makers in our understanding ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• About the Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Intermediaries and the Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructures: An Introduction
• Part I: Conceptual Framework: Governance, Transitions and Cities
• Part II: Intermediaries in Network Transitions
• Part III: Intermediaries and Scalar Transitions
• Index