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Climate change and advances in urban technology propel forward the 'smart city'. As decision makers strive to find a technological fix, smart city strategies are often based on technological orthodoxies which are conceptually and empirically shallow. The motivation behind this paper is to address the conceptual adolescence which relates to the wholesale digitisation of the city by pursuing a twin argument about the democratic and environmental consequences. The authors draw on interdisciplinary theory and insights from urban studies, infrastructure, informatics, and the sociology of the Internet to critique the way the 'smart city' is taken forward. It is concluded that private firms market smart city services and solutions based on an ideological legacy of 'ubiquitous computing', 'universal infrastructure', and 'green technology'. Based on evidence from three UK cities--Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow--it is argued that the underlying principle of future city strategies is to expand the market for new technology products and services to support 'green growth' with disregard for their wider impacts. For citizens, becoming a consumer of the technologies is often presented as progressive 'participation' or 'empowerment' with unknown or hidden consequences both political and environmental. The city systems become a digital marketplace where citizen-consumers' participation is increasingly involuntary and the hegemony of global technology firms is infiated. What follows is that the city's 'intelligent systems' are defined through a digital consumer experience that has inherent biases and leaves parts of the city and its population unaccounted for. This renders the city less resilient in the face of future social and climatic risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the interaction between urban-scale energy infrastructure and the regulatory regime which underpins the liberalisation of energy systems. Using the example of district energy in a number of UK cities, we outline the ways in which the structure of national electricity markets and the activities of the energy regulator influence and shape the development of low-carbon infrastructure in cities. We draw upon recent contributions to the sociotechnical systems literature which highlights the role of cities in shaping infrastructure transitions and argue that the influence of sector regulation has been underrepresented and underexplored. Our study points to significant tensions and misalignments between a regulatory regime designed to promote economic efficiencies in incumbent national infrastructure sectors and the development of district energy systems at the urban scale. We propose that regulation needs to evolve from its traditional emphasis on promoting competition and short-term efficiencies towards a more dynamic model which is open to alternative logics and low-carbon transition pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is good reason to be interested in how older people in ageing societies organise their winter warmth. Winter mortality rates are highest amongst this group. Several initiatives have accordingly sought to alleviate the fuel poverty some older people experience at this time. Yet many older people are also wealthier than ever. This leads to alternative anxieties about how their potentially extravagant home heating could exacerbate wider climate change. This paper pursues the contention that future policies relating to both issues stand to benefit from a fuller appreciation of how current older person households relate to the private winter warmth practices of their generational peers. Building on studies that explore the dynamics of domestic thermal convention and consider how to engender new sustainable energy norms at home, it presents findings from a serial interview project with a diverse sample of older people in the UK. We consider whether these respondents connected their actions to the idea of a wider generational mode of managing domestic winter warmth and the reasons why they seldom did. We end with the implications of this situation for further research on domestic energy norms and interventions aimed at the winter practices of this growing sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts from the premise that our understanding of the extent to which, and of the conditions under which, we might rely on new or neoliberal forms of governance beyond the state to deliver particular public interest objectives is limited, especially when they seek to instigate changes in corporate behaviour. In response, we briefly explore some of the key elements of debates on 'governance from the outside' where public, private, and civic actors engage in activities that seek to shape the behaviour or performance of a corporation, and 'governance from the inside' where the behaviour of a corporation is shaped by, for example, its structures and systems, resources and opportunities, and cultures and values. We hypothesise that the ability of a particular set of governance conditions to change the behaviour or performance of a business will be shaped by the strength and alignment of (a) the range of external governance pressures surrounding the business and (b) the internal governance conditions within that business. We then consider the reasons why firms within one key sector (UK supermarkets) have responded to one key issue (climate change) in recent years. We argue that a specific set of governance conditions brought about a step change in UK supermarkets' approach to climate change in 2007/08, and that this has triggered a period of improvement in their climate-related performance. However, we suggest that this process of improvement is bounded by the presence of a business case that simultaneously supports incremental change and constrains the potential for more transformative change. We conclude by suggesting that if the business case weakens, then governance conditions are likely to be characterised either by collective inaction or by socially led governance, with its influence being determined by whether the diverse forms of social pressure that are central to it are stronger and better aligned than any associated forms of business resistance. We argue that this has significant implications for our understanding of the extent to which new or neoliberal forms of governance beyond the state can be relied upon to ensure that corporations--or indeed other actors--might help to deliver public interest objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short and deliberately provocative paper I reflect on what seems to be a yawning gulf between the potential contribution of the social sciences and the typically restricted models and concepts of social change embedded in contemporary environmental policy in the UK, and in other countries too. As well as making a strong case for going beyond what I refer to as the dominant paradigm of 'ABC'—attitude, behaviour, and choice—I discuss the attractions of this model, the blind spots it creates, and the forms of governance it sustains. This exercise provides some insight into why so much relevant social theory remains so marginalised, and helps identify opportunities for making better use of existing intellectual resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I use ideas about the complexity of economic and sociotechnical relations, drawing especially on the work of John Law and Michel Callon, to consider domestic energy efficiency in a landscape in which governmental interventions attempt to reduce carbon emissions while also tackling fuel poverty. Policy responses to energy efficiency in the UK largely framed by `the market' go on to perform the market in interventions such as the Energy Efficiency Commitment. The way that the Energy Efficiency Commitment has been designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions while performing a welfare function and the multiple effects of calibrating it in such a way are explored in the paper. In particular, I suggest that attempts to order and govern energy networks struggle to contain the generative effects that stem from climate change and fuel poverty being hardwired to the same technical and social phenomena such as homes, energy technologies, and energy users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]