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Sustainability, particularly as articulated in cities, acts as an imaginary that shapes science, technology and social order to attain desirable futures. Imaginaries of sustainability represent visions of social and natural well-being now and into the future. Like sociotechnical imaginaries, imaginaries of sustainability are both descriptive of potential futures and prescriptive about the futures that ought to be pursued. Proponents of smart cities tout the ability of technology and big data to accelerate democratization and public participation, yet these projects carry embedded assumptions about knowledge production, technological risks, public engagement and broader visions of the good life. Smart cities discourses and technologies shape and become enrolled in both imaginaries of sustainability and sociotechnical imaginaries. Through case studies of smart cities and sustainability in London and New York City, notions of technological progress are shown to be linked with progress on environmental and social sustainability issues. In both New York and London, smart cities are entangled with techno-political projects related to innovation and economic development as well as normative commitments to sustainability. Though imaginaries of sustainability present a set of goals and values for science and technology, techno-politics dominated by corporate actors and techno-scientific optimists may ultimately prevent cities from opening up space for alternative imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are rapidly emerging in United States cities, leaving urban and regional planning institutions unsure how to plan and develop policies. This paper analyzes how regional transportation plans (RTPs) developed by metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) are approaching the risks and opportunities presented by AVs. Among 52 MPOs, a majority only mention key issues and emphasize high levels of uncertainty. Twelve MPOs develop policies on infrastructure, safety, partnerships, data-sharing, and multimodal transportation. Despite a positive trend, many recently adopted RTPs do not incorporate AVs. To plan for uncertain mobility futures, MPOs must develop more flexible approaches to long-term infrastructure investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of cities are incorporating resilience into their plans and policies to respond to shocks, stresses, and uncertainties. While some scholars advocate for the potential of resilience research and practice, others argue that it promotes an inherently conservative and neoliberal agenda, prevents systemic transformations, and pays insufficient attention to power, politics, and justice. Notably, critics of the urban resilience agenda argue that policies fail to adequately address social equity issues. This study seeks to inform these debates by providing a cross-sectional analysis of how issues of equity are incorporated into urban resilience planning. We develop a tripartite framework of equity that includes distributional, recognitional, and procedural dimensions and use it to analyse the goals, priorities, and strategies of formal resilience plans created by member cities of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities programme. Our analysis reveals considerable variation in the extent to which cities focus on equity, implying that resilience may be more nuanced than some critics suggest. There are, however, clear areas for improvement. Dominant conceptions of equity are generally tied to a distributional orientation, with less focus on the recognitional and procedural dimensions. We hope our conceptual framework and lessons learned from this study can inform more just resilience planning and provide a foundation for future research on the equity implications of resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the first electrification systems were established in the United States between 1910 and 1930, energy systems governance at the municipal level has included competing visions for how engineering design and energy policy-making should foster particular social outcomes. Using Phoenix as a representative metropolitan area, and the cases of distributed generation and in-home power management devices as examples, this paper explores how the norms and values embedded in energy systems design and planning shape how residents experience change in the energy grid. Through these case studies, the authors argue that such “sociotechnical imaginaries” – collectively formed visions of social life related to science and technology development – are a crucial, yet overlooked, pathway for social science to engage in fostering socially reflexive mechanisms in energy development. To conclude, the authors outline a research program for applying the established methodology of socio-technical integration research (STIR) in order to develop socially reflexive capacities in municipal energy producing, regulating, and planning institutions. Such a program has the ability to produce a deeper intellectual understanding of how energy development occurs, and in doing so generate new pathways for fostering cultural and material changes in the structure of contemporary energy systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]