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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]

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]