The smart city is a prominent urban development discourse that has been applied to urban policies and programs around the world. To date, there are limited empirical insights on how smart city policies and programs are leading to institutional change in urban local governance. Recent scholarship has mobilized the notion of institutional logics to unpack how the broader smart city discourse shapes local governance landscapes. We contribute to this scholarship by exploring how institutional logics of the smart city come together in contextspecific configurations. To do so, we draw upon empirical findings from an in-depth qualitative case study of Kochi, one of the first 20 cities to win funding from India's Smart Cities Mission. The study findings show how institutional logics of the smart city shape the structure and functioning of the new organisation - the smart city special purpose vehicle (SPV) - set up to implement smart city projects. A hybridisation of corporate and technocratic logics shapes the governance structure of the SPV as a corporate organisation with a company board staffed by licenced professions hired from the private sector. Tensions among collaboration, innovation, and bureaucratic logics shape and limit the functioning of the SPV as various smart city experiments face resistance from bureaucratic logics of the state government actors involved. A hybridisation of branding and market logics connects the city to global smart city trends and enhances the reputation of Kochi through marketing and boosterism. The study provides new insights on how smart city policies and programmes are resulting in institutional changes at the local level.

Surveys of urban history from ancient times to the present reveal a continuum of collective responses to pandemics ranging from quarantine facilities and monitoring the spread of disease to building new wastewater networks. The contemporary COVID-19 pandemic includes new digital tools and techniques that supplement (and sometimes replace) the existing analogue responses, while raising new ethical issues with respect to privacy. A typology of pandemic responses in cities is created, based on human–building interaction (HBI) principles. This typology can be used to compare and contrast analogue and digital responses relating to distancing, monitoring and sanitising. It provides a summary of a wide range of individual and collective implications of pandemics and demonstrates the indelible connections between pandemics and the built environment. In addition, the typology provides a tool to interpret some of the opportunities and drawbacks of digitalising cities. PRACTICE RELEVANCE The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the enduring co-evolution of cities and disease through history. This study aims to inform future pandemic preparedness by providing a framework for designers, managers and users of public spaces to evaluate the multiple implications of emerging technologies that are integrated within the urban fabric. While the rapid rise of digitalisation to advance urban health agendas continues to raise new questions relating to individual and civic freedoms, HBI qualitatively provides a lens through which to examine the overlapping spatial, ethical, and temporal consequences for humans and the built environment. Urban planning researchers and designers can use HBI principles to humanise the sustainable smart city.

Over the past decade, the smart city has emerged as a central driver of urban development in cities around the world. Enhancing the livability, sustainability, and efficiency of cities through the application of information and communications technology (ICT) will have profound, long-term implications for urban governance (Alawadhi et al. 2012; Barresi and Pultrone 2013; Calvillo, Sá , and Villar 2016; Neirotti et al. 2014). The rise of the smart city nchez-Miralles has also been the subject of numerous critiques due to an overemphasis on technological innovation at the expense of citizenship and democracy (Hollands 2008, 2015; Marvin, Luque-Ayala, and McFarlane 2016; Vanolo 2016). The focus on citizenship in smart urban development is an attempt to move away from the techno-optimist, solutionist agendas promoted and enacted by large technology companies towards urban futures that are defined by those stakeholders who are directly affected by ICT applications. Responding to the lack of emphasis on citizen engagement, smart city advocates increasingly have emphasized participation, justice, and inclusion as additional criteria for urban digitalization processes (Hill 2013; Joss, Cook, and Dayot 2017). However, it is unclear how residents can participate in smart city projects and the types of citizenships that are produced (Kitchin, Cardullo, and Di Feliciantonio 2019; Shelton and Lodato 2019; Vanolo 2014, 2016). This suggests that there are deeper issues of representative and recognition justice to address in digitally mediated cities.

The aim of this chapter is to explore the challenges of fostering citizenship in smart city projects in Europe. We draw upon empirical findings from three European smart cities projects in Stavanger, Stockholm, and Nottingham to understand how citizenship is framed and enacted through urban digitalization projects. Our findings reveal several intrinsic characteristics in smart city projects that circumscribe citizenship. While planners and other urban elites often have a strong and genuine desire to include citizens in these projects, structural and practical constraints often preclude extensive stakeholder engagement. Instead, many smart city activities involve superficial forms of inclusion and engagement that do little to enhance citizenship. This suggests that there are significant barriers to ensure that the digitalization of society can support socially just and politically active societies.

There is a large body of scientific evidence on the climate crisis and flooding in urban areas. Extreme weather events are producing extensive property damage and loss of life and require new modes of flood governance. However, the climate crisis does not stop at the city limits: peri-urban areas have related but distinct flood challenges due to land use change, regulation, perceptions, and capacity to develop collective responses. The aim of the literature review is to synthesize peri-urban flood governance drivers and responses with a particular emphasis on empirical findings from the past decade. The literature review draws on findings from 26 empirical case studies with respect to how and where research is conducted on peri-urban flood governance, the drivers of peri-urban flooding, and the responses by peri-urban stakeholders to address flood risks. A common governance approach involves autonomous adaptation that results in maladaptation - both of which are critiqued as inadequate to address flood risks. The findings reveal a host of specific peri-urban challenges in addressing flooding but also point towards opportunities for new modes of adaptive governance. The article concludes by reflecting on the promise of developing an adaptive governance approach to peri-urban flooding to acknowledge the social and ecological complexities of climate change while opening up possibilities for emergent modes and innovative approaches of collaborative problem-solving.

Urban experiments, living labs and testbeds have emerged as influential approaches to governing cities around the world. Experimental governance allows stakeholders to trial possible futures and to embrace creativity and innovation in the pursuit of sustainability goals. Experiments are often conducted through triple helix partnerships that favour informal and distributed actions. This is a significant departure from traditional urban development processes that are informed by well-defined processes executed by public authorities to ensure the public good and are legitimated by citizens. In this paper, we investigate this tension between experimental governance and public sector legitimacy by focusing on experimental practices in two Swedish municipalities, Stockholm and Gothenburg. We gathered data through a desk-based study, participant observations and semi-structured interviews with municipal actors to investigate the input, throughput and output legitimacy of municipalities in experimental governance. The findings indicate that municipalities emphasise actions and results from experiments, while de-emphasising reflection and attention to democratic procedures and protection of the public good. The focus on legitimacy reveals the fragmented and instrumental practices of experimental governance and a deficit in organizational capacity with potential detrimental impacts on legitimacy.

Experimental governance is increasingly being implemented in cities around the world through laboratories, testbeds, platforms, and innovation districts to address a wide range of complex sustainability challenges. Experiments often involve public-private partnerships and triple helix collaborations with the municipality as a key stakeholder. This stretches the responsibilities of local authorities beyond conventional practices of policymaking and regulation to engage in more applied, collaborative, and recursive forms of planning. In this article, we examine how local authorities are involved in experimental governance and how this is influencing their approach to urban development. We are specifically interested in the multiple strategic functions that municipalities play in experimental governance and the broader implications to existing urban planning practices and norms. We begin the article by developing an analytic framework of the most common strategic functions of municipalities in experimental governance and then apply this framework to Stockholm, a city that has embraced experimental governance as a means to realise its sustainability ambitions. Our findings reveal how the strategic functions of visioning, facilitating, supporting, amplifying, and guarding are producing new opportunities and challenges to urban planning practices in twenty-first century cities.

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 that 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.

Purpose Architectural theorists have a long tradition of acknowledging the centrality of building users to architectural production. This article contributes to the discourse on architecture, actor-network theory (ANT), and users by proposing a typology of user translations ranging from supporting to tinkering to adjusting to resisting. Design/methodology/approach The research utilises an ANT-inspired ethnography of sustainable lighting scripts at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (MIST). It comprises semi-structured interviews with MIST designers and students, and site visits and participant observation to understand how the users interpret the scripts and how they interact and change them on a daily basis. Findings There is a shared understanding that users do not simply receive architectural designs but interpret and change them to suit their preferences. The findings reveal the multiple ways that users interpret and respond to the assumptions of designers and in the process, recast the relations between themselves and their material surroundings. Originality/value The research contributes to acknowledging the centrality of users to architectural design processes and the interpretation of design scripts, addressing the limitation in current literature in demonstrating the diversity of ways that users react to such scripts. The research suggests that user actions have significant implications on long-term building performance. It accordingly points to the need for devising multiple means of user involvement in the design process and allowing greater flexibility in design scripts to improve the alignment with user preferences.

Digitalisation is an increasingly important driver of urban development. The ‘New Urban Science’ is one particular approach to urban digitalisation that promises new ways of knowing and managing cities more effectively. Proponents of the New Urban Science emphasise urban data analytics and modelling as a means to develop novel insights on how cities function. However, there are multiple opportunities to broaden and deepen these practices through collaborations between the natural and social sciences as well as with public authorities, private companies, and civil society. In this article, we summarise the history and critiques of urban science and then call for a New Urban Science that embraces interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to scientific knowledge production and application. We argue that such an expanded version of the New Urban Science can be used to develop urban transformative capacity and achieve ecologically resilient, economically prosperous, and socially robust cities of the twenty-first century.