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.
Cities have long functioned as primary drivers for trade, investment and regional economic development, as well as sites where individuals emerge from their private spaces, connect with each other, form solidarities, politicize themselves and begin to think as a group with distinctive interconnected interests (Hytrek, 2020), to create what Mouffe (1996) calls chains of equivalence. Particularly in the US, cities manage a broad array of offloaded regulatory responsibilities and socio-economic risks and are important geographical targets and institutional laboratories for a variety of neoliberal market-based policy experiments (Peck et al, 2009: 58). These range from place marketing, enterprise zones, property redevelopment schemes and local tax abatements to workfare policies and new strategies of social control, along with a host of other institutional modifications within the local governmental apparatus. Even as US cities increasingly function as sites for neoliberal strategies and for securing order and control of marginalized populations, they remain incubators of and platforms for counterhegemonic movements. Yet the politicizing effects of cities are not uniform across space, with new movements emerging in some unlikely cities, those without histories of progressive activism.
In this chapter, I analyse one such case, Long Beach, CA, where a long history of conservative politics was dramatically and quickly reversed by the unexpected gelling of a historically fragmented labour and community sector into a viable progressive movement. To understand the rapid turnaround, the analysis draws upon the secondary city literature that examines the mechanisms through which smaller regional (secondary) cities are able to ‘punch above their weight’ and achieve economic performance unique for their size.
The varied contributions to this book confirm the value of employing a relational analysis to understand the conditions and prospects of secondary cities across a wide range of urban contexts. While a welcome and growing body of research has moved beyond ‘global winners’ to focus on ‘small cities’, ‘shrinking cities’ and ‘legacy cities’, it is essential to highlight the connections between different cities if we are to avoid an overly fragmented accounting of contemporary urban conditions. In Ward’s (2010: 477) terms, following Tilly (1984), this work constitutes a form of ‘individualizing comparison’ focused on exploring the relationship between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ cities within the context of post-crisis urban redevelopment in the Global North. In line with Massey’s (2007) insights (and, we hope, avoiding the essentializing tendencies that Ward (2010) critiques), we suggest that taking a relational approach to this investigation of multiple cases can help us to see how the ‘failings’, struggles and policy dilemmas faced by secondary cities are often intimately tied to the ‘successes’ of larger, dominant cities. Such cities have often been construed (especially in the US) as ‘left-behind’ places (Hendrickson et al, 2018) that should look to superstar cities to identify their own paths forward. Conversely, more dynamic secondary cities have at times been celebrated for their niche identities and associated economic success. Counter to this kind of decontextualized emphasis on the policy choices and internal strengths or shortcomings of particular secondary cities, the approach taken here highlights instead the extent to which the trajectories of these cities need to be understood as already reflecting a history of interactions with their more dominant neighbours.
The Australian urban system has been shaped by its historical origins: separate periods of colonization and dependent development within the British Empire (Arnold et al, 1993; Schreuder and Ward, 2010). Six very separate colonial centres were established over the course of the 19th century as England occupied the country – Sydney as the capital of New South Wales (NSW) was created as a convict camp in 1788, as was Hobart on the southern island of Van Diemen’s Land in 1804 and Moreton Bay-Brisbane in 1824 in south-eastern Queensland. In contrast, other colonies in the west – King George Sound (later Perth, 1826) – and south – Melbourne anchoring the Port Phillip colony (1835) and Adelaide, South Australia (1836) – were established as ‘free’ colonies based on commercial land uses. Limited by an arid interior and boosted by their roles as administration hubs, these ports and points of initial settlement in turn became the major centres of their 19th-century export-oriented economies: wheat from South and Western Australia, wool and meat from the remainder.
While large and dominant economically and politically, with all but Brisbane and Hobart becoming primate cities, the presence of these colonial capitals did not preclude the existence of other townships, servicing their inland pastoral, agricultural and later mining economies. Some of these centres saw themselves as successfully rivalling the first-order cities and, in the 20th century, grew on the basis of particular industries; examples include the steel cities of Newcastle and Wollongong adjacent to Sydney, Whyalla north of Adelaide and Kwinana near Perth (Rich, 1987).
This chapter considers the implications of Pendras and Williams’s emphasis on ‘intra-regional relationality’ for work in city-regionalism (Moisio and Jonas, 2018), particularly where this work involves planning, growth and urban development practices around global climate action and the new politics of ‘carbon control’ (While et al, 2010; Granqvist et al, 2020). Selective empirical examples derived from my own past and forthcoming work (and the work of others) within the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia and Europe are briefly referenced throughout the chapter to emphasize how ‘intra-regional relationality’ sheds a different theoretical light on the politics, policies and practices of green urban and metropolitan action. ‘Greater’ Vancouver and ‘Greater’ Seattle, including Surrey and Tacoma, respectively, receive special consideration at the end of the chapter. Ultimately, the discussion explores how the central concept of ‘intra-regional relationality’ helps urban and regional scholars to place the alternately complementary and contradictory roles of regional secondary cities in multi-scalar urban development regimes now struggling to balance economic competitiveness with ecological resiliency and social cohesion, that is, urban sustainability. As more such cities – for example, Tacoma, Geelong, Long Beach, Malmo, Porto, Stellenbosch – adopt and implement green policies and also pursue global carbon control politics, the discussion considers how the concept of intra-regional relationality shifts our interpretation of these developments in urban studies and global affairs.
The analytical focus on urban green policy adoption and global carbon geopolitics – or what I have elsewhere called ‘variegated urbanizations of green internationalism’ (Dierwechter, 2019: 50) – may seem arbitrary; but this empirical focus represents a useful way to explore the theoretical relevance of intra-regional relationality in studies of the ‘greening’ of city-regions, whether mapped through the piecemeal adoption of ‘local’ sustainability policies or, more recently, through transnational carbon mitigation efforts.
