and colleges worldwide have quickly moved campus-based classes to virtual spaces due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This article explores the impact of this sudden transition of learning and teaching based on experiences and evidence from six institutions across three countries. Our findings suggest that although online and remote learning was a satisfactory experience for some students, various inequities were involved. Many students lacked appropriate devices for practical work and encountered difficulties in securing suitable housing and workspace. Students were stressed, and faculty were, too, especially those in precarious employment. The lack of fieldwork and access to laboratories created special challenges. We are concerned that the lack of hands-on experience could cause a decline in enrollments and the number of majors in geography over the next few years. This issue must be addressed by making introductory courses as engaging as possible. It is too early to determine the extent to which online and remote learning can replace campus-based, face-toface geography education once the pandemic ends, but the new academic year of 2020-2021 will be revealing. Nevertheless, the COVID-19 crisis has revealed preexisting problems and inequalities that will need our collective effort to address, regardless of the pandemic's trajectory.

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This paper is an attempt to reassess the role of failure in policy mobilities. Empirically, this paper examines the various aftermaths of, and the continuing trans-local connections originating from, the prominent but un-materialized Sino-British Shanghai-Dongtan eco-city-with a particular consideration on its relation with a subsequently realized project-the Sino-Singapore Tianjin eco-city. The findings reveal that despite its apparent failure, Dongtan eco-city established a set of urban planning procedures adopted by many, including those who designed and delivered the Tianjin eco-city. Meanwhile, Dongtan's failure to materialize motivated the Chinese government to pursue collaboration with the Singaporean government over the increased involvement of private Western partners. The intent to avoid association with Dongtan's failure also fostered a new eco-urbanism model based on rebranding the planning practices of Singapore's public housing. Parts of Dongtan eco-city have also lived on through the international circulation of a piece of planning software that was first developed for the failed project. This paper contributes to the policy mobilities literature by challenging its dominant focus on successful exemplars and exploring how a project fails in implementation yet parts of it remain mobile, influential and present in other developments. This paper also advances the understanding of contemporary urban sustainability by revealing how eco-urbanism models are co-produced in this globalizing era between the global North and South, as well as within the global South.

green leap forward? Eco-state restructuring and the Tianjin-Binhai eco-city model. Regional Studies. China has experienced a remarkable explosion of designated eco-cities since the year 2000, with TianjinBinhai becoming the best-practice model. Embedded in broader political economic changes, shifting multi-scalar regimes of environmental governance have shaped this efflorescence. Applying eco-state restructuring, this paper argues that eco-city construction became a new strategic project after the 2000s, driven by central state-driven model cities and assessment initiatives. This also led to a very different kind of 'best practice' eco-city model: Tianjin-Binhai, a China-Singapore collaboration in which greenness is manufactured rather than adapted. Notwithstanding significant implementation problems, Tianjin-Binhai's status as best practice persists, raising questions about what it means to claim eco-city status.

The appeal of revolutionising urban governance through information technologies has prompted cities across the globe to pursue smart city initiatives. The mainstream scholarship on these initiatives has mostly focused on technology and corporate-led urban development, and it also often privileges the experience of cities in the global North. Nevertheless, this mainstream understanding of the smart city may obscure emerging new power dynamics and locally contextualised processes associated with smart urban development, especially in cities at the global periphery. Inspired by post-colonial theories, this article makes the case for ‘provincialising’ smart urbanism by dislodging technology from the centre of analysis, accentuating perspectives of cities outside the locations where the smart city knowledge is traditionally produced and attending to power relationships. In our case study of Taipei, this provincialising approach helps unveil various logics, intentionalities, assemblages and power dynamics through which the smart city is employed as a political strategy to facilitate urban regime transition. We argue that the current non-affiliated Ko administration exploits the veneer of technological superiority and political neutrality of its smart city agenda to set a new growth agenda, form new development coalitions, establish new institutions and incorporate rising populist momentum into policy-making. Focusing on the politics of being smart, our findings illustrate how smart city experiments reshape power dynamics and regime formation through reorganising actors and interest groups, reconfiguring government institutions, reallocating resource distribution and, in the end, bolstering governing legitimacy.