M Hodson

Cities mediating technological transitions: understanding visions, intermediation and consequences

Approaches to technological transitions and their management have generated considerable interest in academic and policy circles in recent years. The development of this body of work may be seen as a response to the complexities, uncertainties and problems which confront many western societies, in organising ‘sustainably’ various aspects of energy, agricultural, water, transport and health systems of production and consumption; problems which are seen as systemic and entwined or embedded in a series of social, economic, political, cultural and technological relationships. For all the light that transitions approaches shine on such processes they say little explicitly about the role of places. In this paper we address this through looking at the way in which London is currently beginning to shape a systemic transition in its energy infrastructure. We outline and discuss key aspects of the roles of strategic intermediary organisations, which have been strategically set up to intervene between technological possibilities and the territorial context of London. We draw on the case of London to highlight an emblematic example of a citys attempt to systemically re-shape its energy infrastructure and the lessons to be drawn from this. We also outline the particularity of London in this respect, the limitations of the transferability of experiences in London and highlight directions for future research in this area.

Mediating Low-Carbon Urban Transitions? Forms of Organization, Knowledge and Action

Increasingly at the scale of cities, strategies and plans to respond to the challenges of climate change and constrained resources are being developed. A range of climate change plans, low-carbon strategies, peak oil preparations and so on have been developed, often with ambitious aspirations. At the same time, new and reconstituted “intermediary” organizational forms are working between the priorities of these plans and the contexts of their “application”. This is the movement between the “what” of the plans, strategies and preparations and the priorities they embody and the “how” of attempts at their accomplishment. Drawing on research in Greater Manchester, in this paper we examine the organizational contexts constituted for such a purpose and ask fundamental questions about whose priorities are being advocated, where and how this is organized and what the implications of this are for forms of urban transition.

The contribution of local experiments and negotiation processes to field-level learning in emerging (niche) technologies. Meta-analysis of 27 new energy projects in Europe

This article examines how local experiments and negotiation processes contribute to social and field-level learning. The analysis is framed within the niche development literature, which offers a framework for analyzing the relation between projects in local contexts and the transfer of local experiences into generally applicable rules. The authors examine 2 case studies drawn from a meta-analysis of 27 new energy projects. The case studies, both pertaining to biogas projects for local municipalities, illustrate the diversity of applications for a technology through processes of local variation and selection. The authors examine the diversity of expectations and the negotiation and alignment of these expectations underlying the diversity of local solutions. Moreover, the authors address how the transfer of lessons from individual local experiments can follow different pathways and yet always require due attention to the social and cultural limits to the transferability of solutions.

Negotiating contested visions and place-specific expectations of the hydrogen economy

Abstract This paper explores the role of the ‘hydrogen economy’ as a guiding vision encompassing multiple contested technological futures, value judgements and problem framings. Hydrogen visions draw upon six overarching and competing narrative themes: power and independence; community empowerment and democratisation; ecotopia; hydrogen as technical fix; inevitability and technical progress; and ‘staying in the race’. In other words the hydrogen economy possesses great interpretive flexibility. This, it is argued, is the key to hydrogens rhetorical power, allowing it to become a space in which divergent interests and agendas are promoted. Turning to issues of scale and place, the case of London is used to document the dynamics of expectations: how the open flexible guiding vision of a hydrogen economy must inevitably be re-invented and grounded in local agendas and contexts if its promise is to become realised.

Old industrial regions, technology, and innovation: tensions of obduracy and transformation

Work on regions and technologically informed innovation has often focused on high-tech regions as exemplars of apparent success in economic development. This paper, by contrast, focuses on understanding how regions transform themselves in respect of pervasive pressures, in relation to old industrial regions. In particular, the possible tensions between pressures for transformation and the potential obduracy of social, cultural, and institutional interrelationships are highlighted by reflection on the broad body of work termed the ‘new regionalism’. Four issues are raised and then are integrated to develop an approach to researching the tensions between pressures for transformation and the obduracy of old industrial regions. The paper examines a case study of the early stages of a particular technologically informed innovation—a hydrogen economy development—in an old industrial ‘region’: Teesside in northeast England. After consideration of this case study I highlight four important issues in the conclusion that are raised during exploration of tensions of obduracy and transformation in an old industrial region.

Re-thinking Sustainable Knowledge-Based Urbanism Through Active Intermediation

This chapter critically examines the challenges for the development of new styles of urbanism that are not only sustainable but also knowledge-based. It is divided into three sections. In section one, dominant and alternative responses to the twin challenges of climate change and the knowledge economy are briefly examined. The chapter argues that existing knowledges and accepted wisdoms need to be unbundled and critically assessed to better understand how dominant models are developed and transferred and with what potential implications for cities and city-regions in different contexts. We argue that an alternative rebundling of a wider set of knowledges at the urban level is needed, to bring different social interests and visions together for a more sustainable urbanism to develop.