The idea of smart cities has become enormously popular during the past decade. Environmental governance is one issue in which smart city ideas seem to hold potential. However, there is an incredible variety in what it means for a city to be ‘smart’. For some, it involves the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to solve problems; for others, it has more to do with economic growth and city branding. Many social science researchers have criticised the idea of smart cities. They worry that it might allow multinational corporations to take control of municipal governance and lead to an undue focus on technological solutions to societal issues. However, only a few previous studies have examined the influence on urban environmental governance in practice. This thesis investigates the influence of smart city ideas on urban environmental governance through a study of Hyllie, a climate-smart city district in Malmö, Sweden. It applies a theoretical perspective based on science and technology studies and the concept of assemblage. It combines participant-observation of inter-organisational meetings, interviews with professionals and document analysis. This thesis contributes a more comprehensive picture of which actors influence the direction of the climate-smart city—beyond the usual suspects of municipal governments and multinational companies. Still, it shows how ICT-based smart city solutions have taken precedence in urban environmental governance at the expense of energy efficiency and renewable energy.

The idea of smart cities has become enormously popular during the past decade. Environmental governance is one issue in which smart city ideas seem to hold potential. However, there is an incredible variety in what it means for a city to be ‘smart’. For some, it involves the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to solve problems; for others, it has more to do with economic growth and city branding. Many social science researchers have criticised the idea of smart cities. They worry that it might allow multinational corporations to take control of municipal governance and lead to an undue focus on technological solutions to societal issues. However, only a few previous studies have examined the influence on urban environmental governance in practice. This thesis investigates the influence of smart city ideas on urban environmental governance through a study of Hyllie, a climate-smart city district in Malmö, Sweden. It applies a theoretical perspective based on science and technology studies and the concept of assemblage. It combines participant-observation of inter-organisational meetings, interviews with professionals and document analysis. This thesis contributes a more comprehensive picture of which actors influence the direction of the climate-smart city—beyond the usual suspects of municipal governments and multinational companies. Still, it shows how ICT-based smart city solutions have taken precedence in urban environmental governance at the expense of energy efficiency and renewable energy. Smarta städer har blivit oerhört populärt koncept under det senaste decenniet. Miljöstyrning är ett område där smarta städer visar potential. Det finns dock många tolkningar av vad ordet ’smart’ betyder för städer. För vissa handlar det om tillämpning av informations- och kommunikationsteknik (IKT) för att lösa problem, för andra om ekonomisk tillväxt och marknadsföring av städer. Många samhällsvetenskapliga forskare kritiserar föreställningen om den smarta staden. De bekymrar sig över att multinationella företag tillåts ta makt över miljöstyrning och ett alltför stort fokus på teknologiska lösningar för samhällsfrågor. Få tidigare studier har undersökt påverkan på miljöstyrning i praktiken. Avhandlingen utforskar hur föreställningar om smarta städer påverkar miljöstyrning genom en studie av Hyllie, en klimatsmart stadsdel i Malmö. Den tillämpar ett teoretiskt perspektiv som bygger på teknik- och vetenskapsstudier samt begreppet assemblage. I avhandlingen används deltagande-observation av möten mellan olika organisationer, intervjuer med professionella och dokumentanalys. Avhandlingen bidrar med en mer mångsidig bild av vilka aktörer som påverkar utvecklingen av den klimatsmarta staden, utöver kommuner och multinationella företag. Den visar dock även att IKT-lösningar i den smarta staden blir viktigare i städers miljöstyrning på bekostnad av energieffektivitet och förnybar energi.

Living sustainably is not just about preserving the wilderness or keeping nature pristine. The transition to a green economy depends on cities. Economic, technological, and cultural forces are moving people out of rural areas and into urban areas. If we are to avert climate catastrophe, we will need our cities to coexist with nature without destroying it. Urbanization holds the key to long-term sustainability, reducing per capita environmental impacts while improving economic prosperity and social inclusion for current and future generations. The Sustainable City provides a broad and engaging overview of the urban systems of the twenty-first century. It approaches urban sustainability from the perspectives of behavioral change, organizational management, and public policy, looking at case studies of existing legislation, programs, and public-private partnerships that strive to align modern urban life and sustainability. The book synthesizes the disparate strands of sustainable city planning in an approachable and applicable guide that highlights how these issues touch our lives on a daily basis, including the transportation we take, the public health systems that protect us, where our energy comes from, and what becomes of our food waste. This second edition of The Sustainable City dives deeper into the financing of sustainable infrastructure and initiatives and puts additional emphasis on the roles that individual citizens and varied stakeholders can play. It also reviews current trends in urban inequality and discusses whether a model of sustainability that embraces a multidimensional approach to development and a multistakeholder approach to decision making can foster social inclusion. It features many more examples and new international case studies spanning the globe.

This book is intended to help explore the field of smart sustainable cities in its complexity, heterogeneity, and breadth, the many faces of a topical subject of major importance for the future that encompasses so much of modern urban life in an increasingly computerized and urbanized world. Indeed, sustainable urban development is currently at the center of debate in light of several ICT visions becoming achievable and deployable computing paradigms, and shaping the way cities will evolve in the future and thus tackle complex challenges. This book integrates computer science, data science, complexity science, sustainability science, system thinking, and urban planning and design. As such, it contains innovative computer–based and data–analytic research on smart sustainable cities as complex and dynamic systems. It provides applied theoretical contributions fostering a better understanding of such systems and the synergistic relationships between the underlying physical and informational landscapes. It offers contributions pertaining to the ongoing development of computer–based and data science technologies for the processing, analysis, management, modeling, and simulation of big and context data and the associated applicability to urban systems that will advance different aspects of sustainability. This book seeks to explicitly bring together the smart city and sustainable city endeavors, and to focus on big data analytics and context-aware computing specifically. In doing so, it amalgamates the design concepts and planning principles of sustainable urban forms with the novel applications of ICT of ubiquitous computing to primarily advance sustainability. Its strength lies in combining big data and context–aware technologies and their novel applications for the sheer purpose of harnessing and leveraging the disruptive and synergetic effects of ICT on forms of city planning that are required for future forms of sustainable development. This is because the effects of such technologies reinforce one another as to their efforts for transforming urban life in a sustainable way by integrating data–centric and context–aware solutions for enhancing urban systems and facilitating coordination among urban domains. This timely and comprehensive book is aimed at a wide audience across science, academia industry, and policymaking. It provides the necessary material to inform relevant research communities of the state–of–the–art research and the latest development in the area of smart sustainable urban development, as well as a valuable reference for planners, designers, strategists, and ICT experts who are working towards the development and implementation of smart sustainable cities based on big data analytics and context–aware computing.

This book addresses a central dilemma of the urban age: how to make the vast suburban landscapes that ring the globe safe and sustainable in the face of planetary ecological crisis. The authors argue that degrowth, a planned contraction of economic overshoot, is the only feasible principle for suburban renewal. They depart from the anti-suburban sentiment of much environmentalism to show that existing suburbia can be the centre-ground of transition to a new social dispensation based on the principle of self-limitation. The book offers a radical new urban imaginary, that of degrowth suburbia, which can arise Phoenix like from the increasingly stressed cities of the affluent Global North and guide urbanisation in a world at risk. This means dispensing with much contemporary green thinking, including blind faith in electric vehicles and high-density urbanism, and accepting the inevitability and the benefits of planned energy descent. A radical but necessary vision for the times.

Smart Green Cities: is a comprehensive overview of what global cities are doing to become sustainable. Woodrow W. Clark II and Grant Cooke have produced a book that is both practical and visionary. They have examined the infrastructure needs - sustainable development, communications, energy, water, waste, and transportation to develop guidelines, processes and best practices. City leaders are key to mitigating climate change who must plan, design and implement solutions. Smart Green Cities (SGC) offers a global perspective that includes implementing the Green Industrial Revolution the title of their last book. SGC discusses innovative emerging technologies, and the new economics paradigm that move beyond the out-dated neo-classical economics. The authors present examples from around the world including Europe, the U.S, China and the Middle East, which discuss the best green technologies from renewable energy power generation to smart on-site grid development. The extraordinary shift from a rural to an urban world is described; national plans are analyzed; so that future cities will be designed, built and implemented now - not 50 years from now. The struggle for the planet’s survival is being waged by the world’s cities. Clark and Cooke argue that cities are the key to mitigating climate change and reducing toxic greenhouse gas emissions. SGC introduces sustainable technologies; discusses the economics for implementing the solutions; and offers numerous examples to serve as pathways for cities to become smart, green, and thus carbon neutral.

A sustainable city has been defined in many ways. Yet, the most common understanding is a vision of the city that is able to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Central to this vision are two ideas: cities should meet social needs, especially of the poor, and not exceed the ability of the global environment to meet needs. After Sustainable Cities critically reviews what has happened to these priorities and asks whether these social commitments have been abandoned in a period of austerity governance and climate change and replaced by a darker and unfair city. This book provides the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of the new eco-logics reshaping conventional sustainable cities discourse and environmental priorities of cities in both the global north and south. The dominant discourse on sustainable cities, with a commitment to intergenerational equity, social justice and global responsibility, has come under increasing pressure. Under conditions of global ecological change, international financial and economic crisis and austerity governance new eco-logics are entering the urban sustainability lexicon – climate change, green growth, smart growth, resilience and vulnerability, ecological security. This book explores how these new eco-logics reshape our understanding of equity, justice and global responsibility, and how these more technologically and economically driven themes resonate and dissonate with conventional sustainable cities discourse. This book provides a warning that a more technologically driven and narrowly constructed economic agenda is driving ecological policy and weakening previous commitment to social justice and equity. After Sustainable Cities brings together leading researchers to provide a critical examination of these new logics and identity what sort of city is now emerging, as well as consider the longer-term implication on sustainable cities research and policy.