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In recent years, the Smart City has become a very popular concept amongst policy makers and urban planners. In a nutshell, the Smart City refers to projects and planning strategies that aim to join up new forms of inclusive and lowcarbon economic growth based on the knowledge economy through the deployment of information and communication technologies. However, at the same time as new urban Smart interventions are being designed and applied, insufficient attention has been paid to how these strategies are inserted into the wider political economy and, in particular, the political ecology of urban transformation. Therefore, in this paper we critically explore the implementation of the Smart City, tracing how the 'environment' and environmental concerns have become an organising principle in Barcelona's Smart City strategy. Through an urban political ecology prism we aim to critically reflect upon the contradictions of the actually existing Smart City in Barcelona and how Smart discourses and practices might be intentionally or unintentionally mobilised in ways that serve to depoliticise urban redevelopment and environmental management. The paper stresses the need to repoliticise the debates on the Smart City and put citizens back at the centre of the urban debate.

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In this paper, we develop a novel interpretation of the internal relationship between value, rent and finance, thereby enabling a new reading of the process of financialisation. As we argue, responding to the important question of how best to conceptualise the relationship between value and finance necessitates an understanding of the internal relations with a third moment, that of rent. We therefore develop a triadic understanding of these three interrelated moments. Crucially, we demonstrate that fictitious capital now actively pursues forms of rent, deepening the interrelationship between value, rent and finance. We conclude with a critical review of the literature on the financialisation of water, showing how the conceptual framework we develop sheds light upon the relations out of which water infrastructure has been financialised, as well as suggesting strategic entry points for its contestation.

Against the trend prevalent during the 1990s and 2000s, large-

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Abstract:Since the past few years, the smart city paradigm has been influencing sustainable urban water resources management. Smart metering schemes for end users have become an important strategy for water utilities to have an in-depth and fine-grained knowledge about urban water use. Beyond reducing certain labor costs, such as those related to manual meter reading, such detailed and continuous flow of information is said to enhance network efficiency and improve water planning by having more detailed demand patterns and forecasts. Research focusing on those initiatives has been very prolific in countries such as Australia. However, less academic attention has been paid to the development of smart metering in other geographies. This paper focuses on smart water metering in Spain and, more particularly, documents and reflects on the experience of the city of Alicante (southeastern Spain), a pioneer case of massive deployment of remote reading of water meters at the household level and for large urban customers. Through data and interviews with water managers from the water utility, we shed light on the costs and early benefits, as well as the potentialities and (unexpected) problems of this technology to contribute to more sustainable urban water cycles.