Smart and Sustainable Cities?

Pipedreams, Practicalities and Possibilities

James Evans, Andrew Karvonen, Chris Martin, Andres Luque-Ayala, Kes McCormick, Rob Raven, Yuliya Voytenko Palgan, James Evans, Andrew Karvonen, Chris Martin, Andres Luque-Ayala, Kes McCormick, Rob Raven, Yuliya Voytenko Palgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000295061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

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.

Thinking critically about smart city experimentation: entrepreneurialism and responsibilization in urban living labs

Anthony M. Levenda

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of smart technologies, big data, and analytics is being increasingly used to address urban socio-environmental problems such as climate change mitigation and carbon control. Electricity systems in particular are being reconfigured with smart technologies to help integrate renewable generation, enhance energy efficiency, implement new forms of pricing, increase control and automation, and improve reliability. Many of these interventions are experimental, requiring real-world testing before wider diffusion. This testing often takes place in “urban living labs,” integrating urban residents as key actors in experimentation with goals for broader sustainability transitions. In this paper, I investigate one such urban living lab focused on smart grid research and demonstration in a residential neighbourhood in Austin, Texas. I develop a framework based in governmentality studies to critically interrogate urban experimentation. Findings suggest that the focus of experimentation devolves urban imperatives into individual responsibilities for socio-environmental change. Managing carbon emissions through energy efficiency, renewable energy, and conservation is promoted as a form of self-management, wherein households reconfigure everyday activities and/or adopt new technologies. At the same, sociotechnical interventions are shaped by technology companies, researchers, and policy-makers marking a central feature of contemporary urban entrepreneurialism. This skews the potential of active co-production, and instead relies on the delegation of responsibility for action to a constrained assemblage of smart technologies and smart users.

1. Introduction

Cities across the planet have increasingly experimented with various socio-technical and policy interventions in order to respond to calls for sustainability and climate mitigation (Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013a). New technological interventions ranging from smart homes to urban control rooms have been marketed as solutions to help address these environmental challenges. More broadly, “smart cities” technologies have been positioned as opportunities to improve urban environments and stimulate economic development (Höjer and Wangel 2015; IBM 2015). However, these overlapping urban imperatives do not come without problematics and complications. As numerous scholars have noted, the entrepreneurial, economic-growth agendas of sustainable and smart cities approaches often undercut the ecological promises of urban experiments resulting in a gap between visions and reality (Buck and While 2015; Colding and Barthel 2017; Cugurullo 2017; Rosol, Béal, and Mössner 2017). A parallel area of critical scholarship has shown how climate change and sustainability interventions, especially facilitated by new smart technologies, tends to reduce questions of responsibility for solving environmental problems down to individual’s choices and behaviours (Brand 2007; Braun 2014; Gabrys 2014; Moloney and Strengers 2014; Peattie 2010; Soneryd and Uggla 2015; Vanolo 2013; Wakefield and Braun 2014). This paper contributes to these debates by arguing for closer attention to the connections between these two literatures – entrepreneurialism and responsibilization, respectively – in order to critically study smart and sustainable city experiments. My central argument is three-fold: (1) urban experimentation offers opportunities for entrepreneurial forms of governance, at the scale of the individual and the city, to take hold through smart and sustainable cities agendas; (2) the transformative potential of smart and sustainable cities agendas is undercut by a focus on governing individual consumption instead of systemic change; and (3) these techno-fix agendas often produce inequities that are overshadowed in public discourse by the spectacle of sustainability and smartness.

This argument is supported through a case study of the development of a smart and sustainable neighbourhood in Austin, Texas. I frame this development project in Austin’s Mueller neighbourhood as a particular form of urban experimentation, what scholars have called “urban living laboratories” (Bulkeley, Castan Broto, and Maassen 2014; Caprotti and Cowley 2016; Cardullo, Kitchin, and Di Feliciantonio 2017; Evans et al. 2015; Evans, Karvonen, and Raven 2016; Karvonen and van Heur 2014; Voytenko et al. 2016). The concept behind this urban living lab (ULL) was the integration of smart home and smart grid technologies to test their performance (defined variously as efficiency, economic benefits, or lower environmental impacts), and to understand how households utilised these technologies and responded to a variety of experimental interventions.

“Smart grid” is a broad descriptor for information and communication technologies integrated into the electric grid (from generation to transmission and distribution to the end-use consumption). These technologies offer greater control, two-way communication, and more frequent data collection promising a variety of benefits including better grid reliability and resiliency, and potentially, a variety of end-user (or household) benefits (Buchholz and Styczynski 2014). Similarly, smart homes is a descriptor for a variety of household technologies that include remote electronic control and management of smart appliances (ranging from refrigerators to washing machines) that take advantage of real-time data collection and communication (Balta-Ozkan et al. 2013). Much like many cases of urban experimentation (Evans and Karvonen 2014; Moloney and Horne 2015; Voytenko et al. 2016), Austin’s ULL focused on the promises of smart technologies for realising low-carbon transitions and sustainable water management. The ULL project was a collaboration between the City of Austin, a large development company, a non-profit research organisation, a large non-profit environmental organisation, and the University of Texas (UT) with goals to test and demonstrate smart grid infrastructure coupled with smart home technologies and renewable energy generation in “real-world” settings. While the promises of this mode of urban experimentation are considerable, the politics shaping Austin’s ULL resulted in a project fuelled by interests in economic growth over radical sustainability.

The data used to construct this case study was collected between March 2014 and May 2016. Primary sources of data included 26 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with government officials, researchers, and representatives of non-profit groups and development companies involved in the project, and observation at various technology showcases, public meetings, and conferences in Austin. Secondary data, including plans and policy documents, news and media, and archival materials, were analyzed through content and discourse analysis. All sources of data were inductively coded to produce themes, then interpreted with theoretical concepts based in governmentality studies and urban governance literatures. While case-studies have intrinsic limitations, the purpose of this paper is to elaborate a conceptual framework that can be expanded, refuted, or supported in further studies of sustainable and smart urban development. This single case study is representative of a broader, diverse and situated phenomenon at the convergence of smart and sustainable cities agendas that I utilise to provide a way of “thinking critically” about urban experimentation.

In the next section, I lay out the theoretical framing for “thinking critically” about urban experimentation which builds from Foucauldian governmentality theory together with geographers work on neoliberal urban governance. I provide a critical view of urban experimentation in order to reclaim a socially just and environmentally sustainable formulation. Then, I turn to the case of Austin, Texas, and show how these logics manifest in a smart and sustainable city project. The case shows how local and state government strategies for economic growth leverage urban experiments to attract technology firms and capital while simultaneously enacting a version of entrepreneurial urbanism that poses as panacea for social and ecological problems. At the same time, the case shows how urban experiments involve socio-technical changes that co-produce norms of conduct for resource consumption enrolled in larger shifts in urban governance, but do not evolve from input from the community itself. In the conclusion, I further elaborate on the possibilities and pitfalls of smart and sustainable urban experimentation for more ecologically and socially just futures.

2. “Thinking critically” about urban experiments

As cities seek to test-out new smart city and sustainability policies, scholars have conceptualised this phenomenon as a mode of governance, a mode of knowledge production and learning, and a form of strategic urban development broadly called urban experimentation (Bulkeley, Castán Broto, and Edwards 2014; Caprotti and Cowley 2016; Evans, Karvonen, and Raven 2016; Evans 2016). The logic of experimentation is, quite simply put, to test-out new urban technologies (including smart grids and autonomous vehicles), policies, and partnerships between industry, government, non-profits, and universities (Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013a; Karvonen and van Heur 2014; McLean, Bulkeley, and Crang 2015). The potential of experimentation is that it will enable learning from interventions in specific urban contexts that enable control and observation of changes over time (Evans 2011; Evans and Karvonen 2014). Knowledge production and diffusion regarding innovative urban policies and accompanying economic stimulus is a central motivation.

While urban experiments are incremental and fragmented projects (although often framed by holistic master plans that suggest controlled and systematic development), they shape local policy and the urban environment itself (Caprotti and Cowley 2016; Cugurullo 2017; Evans 2016). Experiments, more generally, are “purposive and strategic but explicitly seek to capture new forms of learning or experience… they are interventions to try out new ideas and methods in the context of future uncertainties serving to understand how interventions work in practice, in new contexts where they are thought of as innovative” (Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013a, 93). They offer the “means through which discourses and visions concerning the future of cities are rendered practical, and governable” (Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013b, 367). Experiments, thus, are also public engagements that aim to persuade audiences, in this case, as to how effective or worthwhile a smart and sustainable city agenda may be. Following this argument, urban experiments are essential elements in constructing political power behind smart and sustainable city projects. While powerful opportunities to introduce alternative logics and models for sustainable urban development, smart and sustainable city experiments too often focus on economic growth and individual responsibility, benefitting well-off households and technology companies that seek profits without concern for social outcomes.

Adding to this existing literature on urban experimentation, this paper presents a critical framework for analyzing urban experiments through a Foucauldian lens of governmentality. The framework asks three questions: (1) What are the dominant motivations for urban experimentation and who stands to benefit? (2) How does urban experimentation shape approaches to sustainability and justice? (3) How do urban experiments engage communities/citizens, and with what implications?

These three questions offer an opportunity for critique and reflexivity in urban experimentation. As experiments grow as a defining feature of urban (environmental) governance, they translate ideas and visions into reality through projects and policies that shape how urban development is conducted. Under neoliberal regimes of urban governance, however, ideas of sustainability become associated with technological fixes often in the form of calculative devices for managing individual resource consumption (such as real-time energy and water monitoring, carbon audits, etc.) that promise to facilitate ecologically sound urban development (Braun 2014). Furthermore, the power of experimentation comes not only from the experience of a single place. Experiments shape the perception of possible urban futures and future action. Experiments can thus be understood as places wherein knowledge claims are deemed credible and authoritative, having broader impacts on agendas for governing cities.

This framework employs a governmentality lens to answer the three questions posed above, responding to three interconnected elements of governmentality analyses: (1) rationalities, (2) techniques, and (3) subjectivities. Governmental rationalities are systems of thinking about the practice of government (who can govern, what governing itself is, and what or who is governed) as a way of making that activity itself practicable (Gordon 1991; Lemke 2001, 2002). Rationalities are formed around problematizations. Foucault was specifically concerned with the problematization of population, for example, and how population created a political necessity and possibility for governmental thought: how to manage and govern populations within a certain territory (Foucault 2009). In the case of smart and sustainable city experimentation, the city and citizens are problematised as unsustainable, inefficient, and in need of economic development. Here, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Smart and sustainable cities? Pipedreams, practicalities and possibilities
• 1 Thinking critically about smart city experimentation: entrepreneurialism and responsibilization in urban living labs
• 2 The promise of smart grids
• 3 Smart meter data and equitable energy transitions – can cities play a role?
• 4 Stretching “smart”: advancing health and well-being through the smart city agenda
• 5 Urban sharing in smart cities: the cases of Berlin and London
• 6 Smart and eco-cities in India and China
• Index