Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
The conclusion reflects on the two case studies – Helsinki and Manchester – and brings together common themes outlined in the previous chapters. The conclusion then moves to the notion of cruelty of failure, as it emerges in smart city experiments, when failure is normalised through optimism and is built into a promise that was never meant to be delivered. The authors describe in detail the idea of broken geographies and broken temporalities, and argue that in both of them, the environmental harms of digital and smart technologies are imagined as taking place elsewhere – in a different space and in a different time – and as such, are very hard to grasp or confront. The chapter concludes by turning to digital and material ruins that remain after a smart city project is finished, after an experiment is over, after a technology becomes obsolete. In the ruins of broken promises, the authors call for alternatives, such as digital refusal, care, and slow repair.
The concept of smart cities holds environmental promises: that digital technologies will reduce carbon emissions, air pollution and waste, and help address climate change.
Drawing on academic scholarship and two case studies from Manchester and Helsinki, this timely and accessible book examines what happens when these promises are broken, as they prioritise technological innovation rather than environmental care. The book reveals that smart cities’ vision of sustainable digital future obfuscates the environmental harms and social injustices that digitisation inflicts. The framework of “broken promises”, coined by the authors, centres environmental questions in analysing imaginaries and practices of smart cities.
This is a must read for anyone interested in the connections between digital technologies and environment justice.
Chapter 2, researched and written by Liu Xin, examines the smart Kalasatama district as part of the ‘Helsinki Innovation Districts’ project. Liu Xin begins the chapter by describing her encounter with the smart district online and offline, as she explored the area, its history, and its smartification projects, by foot and via various digital screens. The chapter then zooms in on Kalasatama’s environmental promises and describes in detail how the environment is understood through various material and digital imaginaries and practices. The chapter documents what promises are made and analyses the human-digital-environmental relations that are assumed and configured in these promises. The chapter concludes by asking, what is elided in these promises, how do they break, when and where? The main argument of the chapter revolves around multiple and contradicting temporalities that are at work in making Kalasatama a smart district, which both constitutes and captures the brokenness of Kalasatama’s environmental promises.
The introduction presents the book’s main questions and concepts. It starts with the following questions: How do we think about today’s cities as ‘green’ and ‘smart’, from the standpoint of environmental care, as well as from the perspective of global, anti-racist, and environmental justice? How do we approach smart cities’ environmental promises while centring our discussion on their environmental harms? The introduction outlines how the book answers these questions, by presenting the framework of broken promises. The framework moves beyond the gap between a promise and delivery, drawing on Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’, which the authors situate in the context of digital political economy. The chapter details how broken promises need to be examined through smart cities temporalities and geographies and concludes with personal reflections by the authors on how their own research trajectories and experiences have shaped the collaboration which led to this book.
Chapter 3, researched and written by Adi Kuntsman, focuses on Manchester, and begins with the city’s history, often told as a story of pioneering innovation. Against the celebratory narrative that draws a direct link between the industrial revolution, scientific discoveries, and digitisation, the chapter asks: what is omitted, who is excluded, and who/what is left behind when smart city projects are finished? Kuntsman follows Manchester smart city projects through websites, social media, corporate and policy narratives, interviews with members of digital and environmental organisations, and by moving around the city on a bike. The main argument of the chapter is that there is a disconnect between digital and environmental agendas; and that little continuation exists between different initiatives and experiments, creating brokenness and rupture. The chapter concludes with a call to look at ruins and remains, to better understand the hopes and the violence embedded in the broken environmental promises in the city.
Chapter 1 situates the book in relation to literatures on smart cities, digitisation, sustainability, and the environment. The chapter begins by showing that smart city’s visions of holistic efficiency and seamless control are intertwined with histories of extractive capitalism and colonialism. It then outlines how the environmental promises of smart cities are shaped by discourses of ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’, often used interchangeably and in a vague way. Historicising the use of these terms, the authors show how they posit nature in the service of capitalist profit maximisation, and are not driven by environmental care. The final part of the chapter critically evaluates why sustainability is seen as dependent on the digital, ignoring and obfuscating the environmental harms inflicted by digitisation itself. This chapter demonstrates that the failure of smart cities to deliver environmental promises through digitisation cannot be remedied by more data or more advanced technologies if their own environmental impacts are ignored.
