Josefin Wangel

Smart sustainable cities – Exploring ICT solutions for reduced energy use in cities

This article explores the opportunities of using ICT as an enabling technology to reduce energy use in cities. An analytical framework is developed in which a typology of ICT opportunities is combi ...

Smart Sustainable Cities: Definition and Challenges

In this chapter, we investigate the concept of Smart Sustainable Cities. We begin with five major developments of the last decades and show how they can be said to build a basis for the Smart Sustainable Cities concept. We argue that for the concept to have any useful meaning, it needs to be more strictly defined than it has previously been. We suggest such a definition and bring up some of the concept’s more crucial challenges.

Social Practices, Households, and Design in the Smart Grid

Considerable effort is put into the design and development of cleaner and more efficient energy systems. In this paper, we describe the problems arising when these systems are designed from a top-down technological perspective and when much development fails to account for the complex processes involved since people and their practices are key parts of transitioning to new systems. The transition to a smart grid not only demands new technologies, but is also fundamentally dependent on households taking on a role as co-managers of the energy system. The chapter illustrates how the emerging research field of “sustainable interaction design” may play a role in supporting these roles and in shaping sustainable practices.

Compromise and learning when negotiating sustainabilities: the brownfield development of Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm

This article examines the environmental management of Stockholms large brownfield development Hammarby Sjöstad through the concept of negotiating sustainabilities. An Environmental Programme injected exceptional aims into an ongoing, ordinary planning process involving developers, consultants, contractors and other stakeholders. In parallel, a project team was established and given the task of realising aims through governing, networking, negotiation and persuasion. Discourse theory is used to analyse the epistemological disagreement between actors on how to operationalise the aims. Theories on governance networks and meta-governance facilitate the understanding of the project teams role in negotiations. The analysis is divided into two parts: ‘Playing the game’ focuses on the aim contents and how these were negotiated between actors, while ‘… but the game was staged’ highlights how negotiations were conditioned from the outside. The results indicate that negotiations on, for example, development contracts were circumscribed by a prehistory of institutional and interactive positioning, thus leaving only a small imprint on the actual outcome. Negotiations during events unburdened by path dependency affected outcomes more. Staging of the project teams activities was initially strong, but gradually waned. Learning within the team was rapid and gradually resulted in a higher level of aim fulfilment. After 10 years, learning is clearly discernible in other Stockholm developments too, such as the Royal Seaport. International interest, as manifested through study visits to the area, remains high. The main general lessons learned include the need for introducing exceptional aims and project organisations early in the project, and the potentially positive effects of active networking to increase actor collaboration and thus the projects field of options.

Planning for smart sustainable cities: Decisions in the planning process and actor networks

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been ascribed an important role for decreasing energy use and mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in urban areas. Through automation, dem ...

The Limits of the Smart Sustainable City

The ongoing and escalating urbanisation has resulted in a situation where a majority of people worldwide live in cities. Cities stand for a substantial part of the world GDP and are often lifted as possible drivers of sustainable development. However, the city has limitations and vulnerabilities. Cities depend on resources flowing into the city and increasing populations strain their land use. Climate change threatens cities with sea-level rise, heat waves and extreme weather events. Transforming cities into Smart Sustainable Cities by incorporation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is becoming a recurring proposed solution to these limitations and challenges. The two main areas where ICT are envisioned to function for this are i) as part of the citys infrastructure for monitoring, efficiency and automatization of processes, and ii) as an enabler for sharing of both information and goods among citizens, expectedly leading to more sustainable urban lifestyles. However, there are several limits to the realisation of the Smart Sustainable City. Manufacturing, implementation and maintenance of its digital infrastructure hold environmental risks and require human and natural resources. Furthermore, there are issues of increased vulnerability of the city due to increased complexity. Already now, the (global) flows that the city depends upon to thrive, are to a large and increasing extent possible due to - and dependent on - ICTs working without disturbances. Considering the fragility of these systems, both physical and virtual, is the Smart Sustainable City a desirable or even feasible path? We suggest that while ICT may be useful for making cities more sustainable, we need to be heedful so as not to make the city even more vulnerable in the process. We suggest that we should make sure that the ICT systems simply assist the cities, while maintaining analogue backup in case the ICT shuts down; that we should build more resilient ICT systems with higher backward compatibility; and that we should acknowledge increasing complexity as a problem and strive to counteract it.