Robert Cowley

Towards the ‘ubiquitous eco-city’: An analysis of the internationalisation of eco-city policy and practice

The global mainstreaming of urban sustainability policy, since the early 2000s, points to a new phenomenon: the ‘ubiquitous eco-city’. Its key features – based on the analysis of a census of 178 initiatives – include: the significant, global proliferation of eco-city initiatives; increased international knowledge transfer activities involving both public and private actors; the centrality of ‘carbon discourse’ guiding concepts, policy and practice; the marrying of ‘green’ with ‘smart’ technological systems; and a focus on achieving environmental innovation through economic growth. Among the implications is the need to moderate the ‘ubiquitous eco-city’ paradigm with strong local contextualisation and social sustainability measures.

The New Urban Agenda: key opportunities and challenges for policy and practice

The UN-HABITAT III conference held in Quito in late 2016 enshrined the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) with an exclusively urban focus. SDG 11, as it became known, aims to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable through a range of metrics, indicators, and evaluation systems. It also became part of a post-Quito ‘New Urban Agenda’ that is still taking shape. This paper raises questions around the potential for reductionism in this new agenda, and argues for the reflexive need to be aware of the types of urban space that are potentially sidelined by the new trends in global urban policy.

Interrogating urban experiments

ABSTRACT The notion of the “urban experiment” has become increasingly prevalent and popular as a guiding concept and trope used by both scholars and policymakers, as well as by corporate actors with a stake in the future of the city. In this paper, we critically engage with this emerging focus on “urban experiments”, and with its articulation through the associated concepts of “living labs”, “future labs”, “urban labs” and the like. A critical engagement with the notion of urban experimentation is now not only useful, but a necessity: we introduce seven specific areas that need critical attention when considering urban experiments: these are focused on normativity, crisis discourses, the definition of “experimental subjects”, boundaries and boundedness, historical precedents, “dark” experiments and non-human experimental agency.

Eco-city indicators: governance challenges

According to the most recent (2011) global census of eco-city initiatives, there are currently 178 eco-city initiatives under development, representing a significant mainstreaming of urban sustainability in the last decade. As the number of eco-city initiatives grows, so the question of how to define eco-city indicators and establish standards becomes more pressing. While there are many sustainability standards and certification schemes available for use at building level (e.g. LEED, BREEAM), similar sustainability assessment and endorsement frameworks for the urban level have only recently begun to emerge. This article surveys the current situation by: (i) proposing a conceptual model of urban sustainability indicators from a governance perspective; (ii) presenting the findings of a comparative analysis of the use of urban sustainability indicators in nine eco-city initiatives; and (iii) outlining key challenges for the future development of international urban sustainability standards. It argues that the current situation is marked by a considerable diversity of practice and governance functions, and an ongoing tension between place-specificity and universal applicability as goals of urban sustainability.

The smart city and its publics: insights from across six UK cities

In response to policy-makers’ increasing claims to prioritise ‘people’ in smart city development, we explore the publicness of emerging practices across six UK cities: Bristol, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Milton Keynes, and Peterborough. Local smart city programmes are analysed as techno-public assemblages invoking variegated modalities of publicness. Our findings challenge the dystopian speculative critiques of the smart city, while nevertheless indicating the dominance of ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘service user’ modes of the public. We highlight the risk of bifurcation within smart city assemblages, such that the ‘civic’ and ‘political’ roles of the public become siloed into less obdurate strands of programmatic activity.

Forum : resilience & design

Abstract This forum aims to encourage theorists of resilience to engage more closely with different aspects of design theory and practice. The introduction outlines a series of largely unacknowledged parallels between resilience and design, relating to the valorisation of processes over states, the loss of faith in ‘planning’, the ambivalent status of boundaries and interfaces, and open-ended political possibilities. Four short reflections then follow on various design-related topics: the significance of the ‘wicked problem’ in contemporary urban planning and design, and the urbanisation of responsibility; design’s potential to repoliticise and engender new forms of responsibility; the significance of the digital interface and the condition of everyday life in the ‘unplanned’ post-colonial city. Readers are invited to build on or refute the explicit and implicit links made between resilience and design in the various forum contributions.

Smart city as anti-planning in the UK

Critical commentaries have often treated the smart city as a potentially problematic ‘top down’ tendency within policy-making and urban planning, which appears to serve the interests of already powerful corporate and political actors. This article, however, positions the smart city as significant in its implicit rejection of the strong normativity of traditional technologies of planning, in favour of an ontology of efficiency and emergence. It explores a series of prominent UK smart city initiatives (in Bristol, Manchester and Milton Keynes) as bundles of experimental local practices, drawing on the literature pointing to a growing valorisation of the ‘experimental’ over strong policy commitments in urban governance. It departs from this literature, however, by reading contemporary ‘smart experiments’ through Shapin and Schafer’s work on the emergence of 17th-century science, to advance a transhistorical understanding of experimentation as oriented towards societal reordering. From this perspective, the UK smart city merits attention primarily as an indicator of a wider set of shifts in approaches to governance. Its pragmatic orientation sits uneasily alongside ambitions to ‘standardise’ smart and sustainable urban development; and raises questions about the conscious overlap between the stated practical ambitions of smart city initiatives and pre-existing environmental and social policies.

Future cities: renarrating human agency

The media coverage of Hurricane Harvey’s impact on the city of Houston in August 2017 reveals an ‘Anthropocenic’ sensibility, which tends to deny our ability to solve pressing environmental and social problems through strong and direct human action. This sensibility is reflected at city level in new forms of governance, exemplified here with reference to resilience, smart urbanism, and design-thinking. These have in common a cautious, inductive logic of change; their limited imaginations of space and time imply a dispersed sense of human agency. But if these new rationalities are unlikely to yield convincing solutions to problems such as Hurricane Harvey, perhaps there is a need to rethink the dominant framing of the Anthropocene, which underpins them.