Category: Journal article

Another article from my thesis has been published:

Parks, D. (2019). Promises and Techno-Politics: Renewable Energy and Malmö’s Vision of a Climate-Smart City. Science as Culture. DOI:10.1080/09505431.2019.1705274

It is available online and will be published as part of a special issue later in 2020.

The article is open access.

Abstract
Malmö aims to become Sweden’s most climate-smart city and Hyllie, its newest city district, is to lead the way. This ambition is front and centre in the 2011 Climate Contract that envisioned Hyllie as a climate-neutral city district. Malmö signed the Climate Contract with Eon, a multinational energy company. But five years after signing the Climate Contract, Malmö and Eon gave up their goal of a making Hyllie climate-neutral by 2020. The Climate Contract resembles other smart city initiatives that many researchers have criticised for promoting technology-centric, corporation-controlled visions of cities. Assemblage urbanism and the sociology of expectations help to analyse the techno-political dynamics between organisations, visions and urban infrastructure. The realisation of a vision is a techno-political process that requires the coordination of multiple groups around multiple promises. At first, it was the Climate Contract that helped Eon and the city administration to coordinate their activities. Subsequently, Eon made a promise to build wind turbines, and that promise then took precedence in the coordination of their activities. But controversies arose with two publics that emerged in opposition to Eon’s promise: neighbours to the site of the proposed wind turbine and the city’s Property Department. Unable to resolve these controversies, Eon and Malmö acknowledged that they lacked the resources need to make Hyllie climate-neutral. They adapted their original promise to the current state of socio-material assemblages, and Hyllie was demoted from a role model for the climate-smart city to a source of lessons learned.

I published an article in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, together with my former colleague Anna Wallsten:

The Struggles of Smart Energy Places: Regulatory Lock-In and the Swedish Electricity Market

The article is open access.

Abstract

Visions of smart energy systems are increasingly influencing energy systems around the world. Many visions entail ideas of more efficient versions of existing large-scale energy systems, where smart grids serve to balance energy consumption and demand over large areas. At the other end of the spectrum are visions of smart energy places that represent a challenge to dominant, large-scale energy systems, based on smart microgrids that facilitate the self-sufficiency of local, decentralized energy systems. Whereas smart energy places do not necessarily aim to create completely isolated microgrids, they generally aim to strengthen the connection between energy consumption and production within delimited spaces. The aim of this article is to better understand how visions of smart energy places are translated into sociomaterial configurations. Smart Grid Gotland and Climate-Smart Hyllie were two Swedish initiatives where notions of place were central to the attempts to reconfigure the local energy system. Several solutions proposed within these smart energy places struggled because of regulatory lock-in to the existing spatial arrangements of the electricity market. There was a mismatch between the larger spatial scales institutionalized in the Swedish electricity market and the smaller scales introduced in these smart energy places. The conflicting spatial arrangements between electricity market and these initiatives suggest that demonstrations of smart energy places require some degree of protection from market regulations. Without this protection, visions of smart energy places might instead result in incremental changes to existing large-scale energy systems.

Another of the articles from my thesis is now published in Geoforum.

From sustainable to smart: Re-branding or re-assembling urban energy infrastructure?

The article is sadly locked behind Elsevier’s paywall because the article is not open access. However, I am happy to share the pre-print version:

From-sustainable-to-smart-pre-print

Abstract

Visions of sustainable cities have increasingly been substituted by the ambition to become a ‘smart city’ in recent years. Ongoing scholarly discussions often focus on how sustainability and ‘smartness’ relate to each other conceptually, to which extent smart city technologies contribute to making cities more sustainable, and calls to prioritise social issues over technology. The questions of how this ‘shift to smart’ has unfolded, and how it has reshaped strategies and interventions to make cities and their energy infrastructures more sustainable, have however been much less investigated. The aim of this article is to zoom in on the dynamics of such a shift from sustainable to smart. The cities of Malmö and Graz have strong profiles as sustainable cities and have both begun to use smart city branding. We build our analysis on argumentative discourse theory and the concept of socio-material assemblages. Along with a discursive shift from sustainable cities to smart cities, we also observe changes in institutions and socio-material practices. We identify appropriation and colonisation as two dynamics that characterise the relations between assemblages of sustainable and smart cities. We conclude that even when smart city discourses are appropriated by actors in existing sustainable city assemblages, the discursive shift might eventually allow smart city assemblages to colonise existing institutions and socio-material practices. But the shift does not take place through explicit controversy between two discourse coalitions, and it therefore remains important to further investigate the conditions that allow for a change in dynamics from appropriation to colonisation.

Please cite the article as: Parks, D., & Rohracher, H. (2019). From sustainable to smart: Re-branding or re-assembling urban energy infrastructure? Geoforum, 100, 51–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.02.012

My first article was published in European Planning Studies: Energy efficiency left behind? Policy assemblages in Sweden’s most climate-smart city.

The article is open-access.

Abstract

Smart city experiments have the potential to reshape urban climate change governance. Smart city initiatives have been supported by international technology companies and the European Union for many years and continue to be promoted by national and municipal governments. In relation to sustainability and climate change, such initiatives promise more efficient use of resources through the use of information and communications technology in energy infrastructure. Experiments with smart city technologies such as urban smart grids have shown the potential to restructure relationships between energy utilities, energy users and other actors by reconfiguring the dynamics of energy supply and demand. But do urban experiments lead to institutional change? The aim of the article is to provide a better understanding of how smart city experiments reshape the urban governance of building energy use. Hyllie, a new city district in Malmö, Sweden, was home to two smart city experiments that contributed to the institutionalization of urban smart grid technology. However, the analysis of Hyllie’s policy assemblages shows that this institutional change could redefine sustainability at the expense of energy efficiency.