This article studies local enactments of "smart" in and through visions of six smart district development projects. We show that smart cities' framings of the future are inevitably diverse, emerging from local assemblages consisting of a wide array of heterogeneous elements that translate global imaginaries of the smart city to meet local specificities, needs and agendas. We demonstrate that visions may describe the process of district planning and design, the materiality of the envisioned district and the governance of the district; and that smart visions may play three distinct rolesthey may act as mobilizers, instrumentally (i.e. as tools to achieve specific sociotechnical goals) and to exclude alternatives. Knowledge forms a key constituent of smart visions, and acts to include some while excluding others. We therefore suggest that further research should focus on the political and controversial construction and use of knowledge in visioning processes.
and quality of life, the concerns of protestors resonate with critical urban scholars studying the political economies beneath smart cities (for an overview of this debate see e.g. Kitchin (2019a)). In recent years, the latter has shifted from a critical unpacking of existing smart urbanism initiatives towards the question of how more 'genuinely humanizing' (cf. Kitchin 2019b) or inclusive and emancipatory (cf. Joss et al. 2017) smart cities can be realized 'from the ground up' (cf. Saunders and Baeck 2015). While we sympathize with the latter move, we argue that controversies such as the Sidewalk Toronto controversy are symptomatic for a deeper and often hidden challenge that underpins smart urban initiatives, namely the limited understanding of how deliberative spaces can meaningfully help navigate knowledge politics: the power of, and over, the production, circulation and use of data, information and insightful knowledge about urban complexity.This Frontiers paper therefore presents a set of observations about existing deliberations on smart city knowledge politics that emerged from our case studies in European cities. Based thereon, we propose a set of research questions about deliberative spaces for smart knowledge politics that may foster inclusive and sustainable urban transformation. de Hoop et al. Urban Transformations (2022) 4:6
Degrowth has become a recognised paradigm for identifying and critiquing systemic unsustainability rooted in the capitalist, growth-compelled economy. Increasingly, degrowth is discussed in relation to specific economic sectors such as the agri-food system. This paper builds on the foundational work of Gerber (2020) and Nelson and Edwards (2021). While both publications take a rather specific analytical or disciplinary focus—the former specifically connects critical agrarian studies and degrowth, the latter explores the contributions of the recent volume ‘Food for degrowth’—this paper takes stock of the emerging body of literature on degrowth and agri-food systems more broadly. It proposes research avenues that deepen, expand and diversify degrowth research on agri-food systems in four areas: (i) degrowth conceptualisations; (ii) theorisation of transformations towards sustainability; (iii) the political economy of degrowth agri-food systems; and (iv) rurality and degrowth. Together, these avenues devote due attention to a variety of agents (ranging from translocal networks to non-humans), spaces (e.g. the rural), theories (e.g. sustainability transitions and transformations towards sustainability) and policies (of the agricultural sector and beyond) that thus far have received limited attention within the degrowth literature. The critical social science perspective on degrowth agri-food systems, which is advanced in this paper, illuminates that the present unsustainability and injustice of hegemonic agri-food systems are not merely a problem of that sector alone, but rather are ingrained in the social imaginaries of how economies and societies should work as well as in the political–economic structures that uphold and reproduce these imaginaries.
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