Redeploying Urban Infrastructure: The Politics of Urban Socio-Technical Futures [1st ed. 2020] 978-3-030-17886-4, 978-3-030-17887-1

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xix
Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure (Jonathan Rutherford)....Pages 1-44
Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces and Remaking Socio-Technical Configurations in Outer Stockholm (Jonathan Rutherford)....Pages 45-70
Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation in the Green Capital of Europe (Jonathan Rutherford)....Pages 71-97
Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition in Paris (Jonathan Rutherford)....Pages 99-121
Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures: Permeability and Politics of the Closed Loop of Hammarby Sjöstad (Jonathan Rutherford)....Pages 123-155
Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban Systems: Reflections on Ordering and Disordering the City (Jonathan Rutherford)....Pages 157-172
Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures (Jonathan Rutherford)....Pages 173-187
Back Matter ....Pages 189-191

Citation preview

THE POLITICS OF URBAN SOCIO-TECHNICAL FUTURES

JONATHAN RUTHERFORD

Redeploying Urban Infrastructure

Jonathan Rutherford

Redeploying Urban Infrastructure The Politics of Urban Socio-Technical Futures

Jonathan Rutherford LATTS Université Paris Est Marne-la-Vallée, France

ISBN 978-3-030-17886-4 ISBN 978-3-030-17887-1  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Grafissimo/gettyimages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

Over the past twenty years, urban infrastructure has come to be seen and studied as one of the key sites and vantage points of global urban transformations. Cities are facing the ongoing challenge of reconciling social inclusion, economic prosperity and environmental sustainability in their socio-technical systems (energy, water, communications, transport…). Scholars have responded by unpacking and critically investigating the shifting capacities of diverse actors to shape these systems, the various means they use to envision, enact and contest change, and the wide-ranging implications of systemic urban transitions. There is a meaningful politics of infrastructure which is and will continue to be a crucial and productive arena of debate and conflict over the directions, forms, modalities and outcomes of future urban change. This book seeks to substantively develop and demonstrate, both conceptually and empirically, this fertile politics of urban infrastructure. While infrastructure is increasingly present in urban studies and there is something of an ‘infrastructure turn’ in the wider social sciences (see for example Harvey et al. 2017), much of this work remains quite piecemeal and diffuse across disciplines, sectors or contexts. There is still work to be done to bridge between technology scholars seeking v

vi     Preface

efficiency and optimal solutions and social scientists concerned by contingent ‘softer’ relations between actors, and a sense that generalizing or theorizing across these various boundaries—moving towards “a comparative theory of urban infrastructure” (Graham and McFarlane 2015, p. 13)—remains a difficult task as we seek broader understanding of why and how infrastructure matters or comes to matter in and between situated urban contexts. Paying more attention to the materiality of infrastructure can help in this undertaking. It is perhaps here that infrastructure demands what Jackson et al. (2007) call a ‘sensibility’: “a way of thinking and acting in the world capable of moving between the separate registers of technical and social action”. Redeploying infrastructure in theory and in practice involves a recognition that social and technical worlds are not carved off neatly one from the other, but are always untidily intertwined. This calls forth particular views and enactments of human–technology relations which are highly contingent and consequential for shaping futures. Infrastructure creates and maintains “the conditions of possibility for a particular higher-order objective” (Carse 2012, p. 540), while its redistributive nature means that particular configurations always work to the advantage of some groups and entities and to the disadvantage of others (Jackson et al. 2007). Not only do the material and physical qualities of infrastructure make a difference to its functioning, to how it works and is developed and taken up, but they also (increasingly?) have political consequences and indeed constitute political (im)possibilities (Barry 2013; Mitchell 2011). I use urban infrastructure as a window to explore shifting relationships between cities, humans, technologies and ecologies, as imperatives to sustainable urban futures continue to be promulgated, but for varying, often contradictory, visions, rationales and interests. Continuing exploration of the relationship between infrastructure change and urban transitions is required to analyse how and why socio-technical systems are put to work for wider sociopolitical projects and the implications and contests this implies and draws out. To do this I develop a relational socio-technical perspective which sees urban infrastructure as an emerging material political process or achievement in which technological components and social relations are fully entwined and mutually

Preface     vii

constitutive. Here, the urban is at once the context, constituent and consequence of infrastructural processes: simultaneously shaping of and shaped by, but also, crucially, fully constitutive or actively formative of actual and possible pathways. In other words, while cities are a milieu of socio-technical change (with historical and territorial specificities) and an outcome of change processes, they are also constantly emerging material political configurations through which change actually comes about. Understanding the urban as a socio-technical process through which materiality becomes political, rather than as a pregiven state or a set measure of density/centrality, helps to underscore that studying how infrastructure becomes debated or disputed is to explore how urban socio-technical change comes about. There are three main objectives of the book. The first is to use original empirical studies of urban infrastructure change processes in European cities, and to show these to be at the heart of crucial, ongoing debates over urban futures. The second is to straddle and interface engagement between the latest theoretical advances and empirical investigation of urban planning practice and socio-technical engineering of systems and flows, forging new reflections and perspectives across distinctive worlds of infrastructure. The third is to open out our understanding of urban infrastructure by tracking different rationales, materials and flows through the urban arena as they are employed to connect to, disconnect from, and contest wider urban political projects. In so doing, it contributes to reflections around the role of urban infrastructure and its multitude of actors in enacting more desirable, progressive and collective urban futures. I begin in Chapter 1 by setting out a conceptual framework for exploring the politics of urban infrastructure which draws on a variety of resources from across urban studies and science and technology studies (STS). By engaging with, and bringing together, debates around sustainability transition processes, urban materialities and ecological urbanisms, I develop an overarching perspective on the material politics of urban socio-technical change which situates theoretically the stories of urban infrastructure of the following chapters. Chapters 2–6 each start from and focus on a distinct pretext and process of change (suburban planning, low carbon, energy transition,

viii     Preface

eco-city integration, smart urbanism) as implemented in Stockholm and Paris, two European cities which have been at the forefront of sustainable urban development and where debates over the orientations and outcomes of this development have been intense. This is not a comparative study of the two cities, and the aim is not to provide a comprehensive overview of each city, but to delve into a handful of illustrative examples of how infrastructure is implicated in realizing more sustainable urban futures. They are close to what Braun (2014, p. 52) calls ‘vignettes’ which “resist being read in totalizing terms as examples of an overarching ‘plan’ of government, but nevertheless reveal in their details particular ways in which urban life is ‘managed’ or ‘administered’…”. These vignettes are thus not presented as emblematic of urban sustainability in practice but in order to explore and expose a material political process in which particular socio-technical configurations, flows, sites and visions are negotiated and disputed in specific urban contexts. As mentioned above, the idea is that foregrounding the politics of infrastructure can shed light on how urban socio-technical change takes place. The research on which the chapters are based has been conducted over a number of years across different projects. In each case, qualitative methods were privileged involving in-depth semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, site visits and participant observation, and analysis of secondary material, reports and documentation. While the research was done at different times and the focus and results are therefore necessarily distinct and uneven, there was always a particular emphasis on engaging a socio-technical methodology by trying to understand the technical functioning and operations of infrastructure configurations, the activities they support, as well as seeking out different viewpoints and controversies concerning the wider social significance and political implications of these configurations. Chapter 2 focuses on water infrastructure systems which are crucially important in extending and reworking socionatural suburban spaces. These systems have always either accompanied and supported or preceded and stimulated urban growth. Yet, paradoxically, the actual ways and processes of making and remaking suburban infrastructure configurations are largely ignored. Mixing insights from socio-technical

Preface     ix

studies and infrastructure situations and experiences in the South, the chapter reflects on infrastructure planning and engagement as an ongoing provisional socio-technical achievement in the Stockholm archipelago area where particular hybrid configurations of water infrastructure are at the heart of changing forms, modalities, and outcomes of local development and modes of residence. Chapter 3 is focused on the material politics of low carbon agendas in Stockholm, the first Green Capital of Europe. There has been significant debate over proposed visions for Stockholm’s future ‘green’ development. This debate was captured by the question of whether the city was concretely aiming to be both or either ‘fossil fuel free’ by 2050 and/ or ‘world class’ in 2030, and by the different means and resources which were attributed to working concretely and materially towards these objectives. The chapter tracks ongoing struggles over urban energy–climate issues through a number of material settings of transition around policy trajectories, resources for environmental work, district heating infrastructure and mobility politics. This highlights how socio-technical change is understood, negotiated, experienced and practiced through the multiple arrangements and mobilisations of urban materiality by particular interests and groups. Chapter 4 is an attempt to make sense of the nature, modalities, outcomes and possibilities of urban energy transition in Paris. This transition process is examined in the context of a variety of equally meaningful stakes and strategic objectives around decarbonisation, municipal control of infrastructure and the continuing role of nuclear power. Each of these concerns emerges through debates and knowledge controversies around the make-up, functioning and use of particular objects or materials including resources, pipes, contracts, reports and radiators. This captures a processual notion of transition as characterized by work and activities at different sites and levels, and as constituted by the effectivity of material circulations, flows and stabilities which reveal and highlight key issues and contentions, become open to claims and appropriations, and defy, resist and remain unruly. Chapter 5 explores the complex and contested processes and practices involved in rebundling infrastructure systems as part of ecological

x     Preface

urbanism objectives in Stockholm. Focusing on the well-known eco-district of Hammarby Sjöstad, I trace some of the important disjunctures between vision, discourse, practice and material politics in and around the reconfiguring and integration of energy, waste and water systems, within the context of wider debates and tensions over future urban planning in the city. Across model and conception, limits and deviations in practice, and evaluation and transfer, eco-city integration and circularity is exposed as a struggle to contain and control systems, flows and engagements which are often intractable. Chapter 6 examines the nature and implications of urban enhancement propounded by recent smart urban initiatives. Using a short analytical vignette of the reconfiguration of energy system flows in a district level smart grid project near Paris, it reflects on the implications of smart logics and what these may say about the temporalities of urban planning, the boundaries and scales of urban projects and experiments, and the prospects of devolving agency and control of urban systems and flows to technology. Finally, a short conclusion offers summary reflections on the arguments developed across the chapters, around why infrastructure matters, how infrastructure comes to matter and what can be gained from pursuing explorations of urban infrastructure futures. It tenders some thoughts on future concerns and priorities for research and practice in this area. Marne-la-Vallée, France

Jonathan Rutherford

References Barry, Andrew. 2013. Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline. Chichester: Wiley. Braun, Bruce. 2014. A New Urban Dispositif? Governing Life in an Age of Climate Change. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32: 49–64. Carse, Ashley. 2012. Nature as Infrastructure: Making and Managing the Panama Canal Watershed. Social Studies of Science 42 (4): 539–563.

Preface     xi

Graham, Stephen, and Colin McFarlane (eds.). 2015. Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context. Abingdon: Routledge. Harvey, Penny, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuro Morita (eds.). 2017. Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion. Abingdon: Routledge. Jackson, Steven, Paul Edwards, Geoffrey Bowker, and Cory Knobel. 2007. Understanding Infrastructure: History, Heuristics, and Cyberinfrastructure Policy. First Monday 12 (6), June 2007, https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index. php/fm/article/view/1904/1786. Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.

Acknowledgements

This book is the outcome of work and thinking which has developed over many years. A number of people have helped me with my research during that time, through shared projects and collaborations, by offering constructive feedback or friendly advice, and in various conversations and exchanges. I am very grateful to all and I acknowledge their contribution in helping to shape the best parts of what follows. Any shortcomings are of course strictly my own responsibility. First, Olivier Coutard has been a permanent source of inspiration, unwavering support and good advice across many projects, publications and wide-ranging discussions. Other colleagues at LATTS (Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and Université Paris Est) have made the centre a stimulating and collegial environment for urban socio-technical research. I have benefited enormously in particular from the presence and encouragement of Sylvy Jaglin, Ludovic Halbert, Eric Verdeil (now at Sciences Po), Gilles Jeannot, Valérie November, Valérie Bocquillion and, more recently, Mustafa Dikeç and Martine Drozdz. LATTS has also been lucky to have an incredible cohort of dynamic young Ph.D. and postdoctoral researchers over the years working on infrastructure, energy and urban issues in a variety of contexts around the world xiii

xiv     Acknowledgements

including Anastasia Touati, Lise Desvallées, Catalina Duque-Gomez, Daniel Florentin, Pauline Gabillet, Sylvère Angot, Francesca Pilo, Rémi Curien, Antoine Guironnet, Félix Adisson, Aida Nciri, Morgan Mouton, Hélène Subrémon, Thomas Blanchet. Simon Marvin has been a steadfast ally and inspiring company through a number of adventures in urban technology, most recently in arranging a visiting post at Sheffield’s Urban Institute. Tim Moss, Steve Graham, Harriet Bulkeley, Simon Guy, Andy Karvonen and Jochen Monstadt have been consistently supportive over the years as well as a source of great work. I have also had stimulating and encouraging conversations and discussions with Andrés Luque-Ayala, Jonathan Silver, Aidan While, Harald Rohracher, Pauline McGuirk, Roger Keil, Pierre Filion, Janette Webb, Mike Hodson, Sabine Barles, Cyria Emelianoff, Stefan Bouzarovski and Will Eadson among many others. I worked with Frédérique Boucher-Hedenström on the study which forms the basis of Chapter 2. I thank Rachael Ballard and Joanna O’Neill at Palgrave Macmillan for their support and great patience through various deadlines. Finally, and most importantly, Christelle, Eloïse, Anthony and the rest of my family are just wonderful and I love them all to bits.

Contents

1 Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure 1 2 Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces and Remaking Socio-Technical Configurations in Outer Stockholm 45 3 Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation in the Green Capital of Europe 71 4 Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition in Paris 99 5 Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures: Permeability and Politics of the Closed Loop of Hammarby Sjöstad 123 6 Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban Systems: Reflections on Ordering and Disordering the City 157

xv

xvi     Contents

7 Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures 173 Index 189

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6

Settlements along the coast in Norrtälje 54 Summerhouse residence in Norrtälje 55 Off-grid home in Norrtälje with well and septic tank 58 ‘Community’ connection to municipal networks (Source Redrawn from Norrtälje kommun, n.d., p. 5) 59 The trajectory to ‘fossil fuel free’ (Source Based on City of Stockholm [2010c, p. 9]) 79 The rising price of district heating in Stockholm, 2000–2011 (Source Extracted by the author from Nils Holgersson reports, 2000–2011 [Nils Holgersson gruppen, n.d.]) 83 Hammarby Sjöstad 128 Infrastructure integration in miniature at Hammarby Sjöstad, 2007 131 Loop closing and systems integration: the Hammarby model (final iteration) (Source Lena Wettrén, Bumling AB) 132 Organic waste chute in Hammarby Sjöstad 139 Waste inlets in a Hammarby Sjöstad courtyard (visible from apartment buildings) 142 Waterfront apartment buildings, Hammarby Sjöstad 148 xvii

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Percentage of population connected to centralized water and wastewater systems in Stockholm county municipalities 53 Table 3.1 Changes to the text of Stockholm’s Action Plan for Climate and Energy 85 Table 5.1 Aims and operational goals set by the city in 1996 for the Hammarby Sjöstad project 130 Table 5.2 ‘Green technologies’ deployed or to be deployed within Hammarby Sjöstad 134

xix

1 Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure

Mirages and Materialisations Frustration or fascination? Whenever we talk about transformative change or transition, in its various guises and for distinctive reasons, it is quite easy to be underwhelmed by what is actually happening on the ground. While it is widely argued that the urban is a vital nexus for implementing transitions to sustainability, there only ever appear to be modest or piecemeal shifts toward sustainable cities (however defined) and few concrete results. Dave Eggers captures both the persistent allure of the vision and the constant dissatisfaction at the level of progress in his novel A Hologram for the King, where an IT consultant waits around to pitch for a technology contract for a new city under painstakingly slow construction in the Gulf: Alan saw no sign of a city-to-be. ‘Whatever it is, it’s there’, Youssef said, pointing in front of them. The road was new, but it cut through absolutely nothing. They drove a mile before they arrived at a modest gate, a pair of stone arches over the road, a great dome atop it all. It was as if someone had built a road through unrepentant desert, and then erected a gate somewhere in the © The Author(s) 2020 J. Rutherford, Redeploying Urban Infrastructure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_1

1

2     J. Rutherford

middle, to imply the end of one thing and the beginning of another. It was hopeful but unconvincing. (Eggers 2012, p. 40)

I have also long been unconvinced and discouraged at the disconnect between the major stakes at hand and the apparent lack of material or tangible progress on the ground, not in building brand new tabula rasa settlements but in reworking existing cities. There is, of course, no end of small urban projects and experiments claiming to offer responses to big fundamental issues, but many of these seem to be only token initiatives with limited potential for leading on to something more meaningful. Clearly, this is an inescapable normative question about the forms, the degrees and the sources of required change and desirable futures that we all have in mind. We can agree on the one hand about the scale of response that is needed to confront the social and ecological issues of the times, while disagreeing or holding different views of where, how and by whom such a response might be constituted and built up. Eggers’ protagonist steadily abandons his preconceived ideas and expectations of the new city in the desert as he waits for the King to turn up to make the contract decision. Similarly, I suspect that my frustration derives, at least in part and for several reasons, from thinking overly in terms of immediate and rigid scales, linear trajectories and grand results, which leads to standing outside of the processes being studied and endeavouring to understand only inertias, blockages and obstacles—what and who is preventing a preconceived notion of change from happening. I have come to recognize that becoming more open to the multiplicity and incrementality of initiatives in the making, their emergent processes and outcomes, and continuous reshaping of relations and associations may help to perceive possibilities in even the most localized and contingent encounter. This is a book about urban futures in the making, as seen through the lens of urban infrastructure. Over the past ten years or so, I have studied the systems, networks and components of infrastructures as they have developed, been maintained, modified and put to work in the context of north European cities. These cities have been facing a set of challenges (inequalities, austerity, ecological crisis, political legitimacy…) which broadly call into question the existing capacities of authorities to ensure

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     3

urban reproduction. Infrastructure offers a pertinent window through which to view how urban actors respond to these challenges, because it constitutes the socio-technical1 arrangements through which urban life and urban functions take place. While often longstanding and generally quite stable, even to the point of invisibility, these arrangements are being recast (and thus made visible again) in various strategic ways as actors seek to address challenges and to govern and shape infrastructures to guarantee future urbanity. I suggest that exploring shifting sociotechnical arrangements of urban infrastructure necessitates holding together two stances. The first is that urban change must be seen as inherently political (there is no simple and singular way to address challenges and ensure urban futures), and infrastructure constitutes a key political site through which urban futures are negotiated and forged. In other words, given the stakes at hand, we need to be concerned with how struggles over infrastructure come to manifest/materialize diverse, often discordant, views of sustainable urban transitions. At the same time, there is likely to be only so much that can be done in organizing and governing urban futures, until we account for and take into account the vitality of materials, flows and entities of infrastructures in constituting emerging socio-technical change. This means uncovering the often hidden and unnoticed material processes of urban functioning, paying attention to small scale and situated yet dynamic interactions between the pipes, paper and people of infrastructure arrangements which may be constitutive of and effective in urban transitions. I argue that this dual stance can account for urban vitality in/of socio-technical change processes and contribute to exploring the material politics of always emerging, potentially transformative, urban futures. The focus here is on shifts or reconfigurations in infrastructure which are at once envisioned, made and contested to bring 1I

understand socio-technical as a move beyond an artificial distinction between social and technical aspects, components and actors of systemic change processes and thus to speak constantly and symmetrically across the two to underscore their always already intertwined and co-evolutionary formation. This ‘seamless web’ allows analysis of relations between actors, their interests, rationalities and purposes, and to take seriously the make-up and materiality of the technologies and instruments deployed, in a perspective which stresses that these are mutually (and indissociably) shaping of potentials and limits.

4     J. Rutherford

about various ‘sustainable’ urban futures. Such a focus reminds us or brings to bear how infrastructure circulates resources which provide many of the most basic necessities of life (water, heat, electricity…), and yet the current ways in which this circulation is done are held to be often profoundly unsustainable on different levels. There is thus a political ecology to infrastructure as diverse views emerge and conflict of how ‘best’ to configure resource flows and technical systems to allow for consuming nature in the city. While urban transitions/ futures are captured by a variety of terms or epithets which announce relatively undisputed change, the chapters here study infrastructure struggles emerging respectively in the name of suburban development, low carbon, energy transition, eco-urbanism and smart which demonstrate in each case contingent and plural interpretations and enactments. In each chapter, a series of otherwise quite prosaic material encounters in particular urban environments becomes a strategic arena for contests over how, why and for whom city-making processes and practices (are put to) work. These encounters produce effects and consequences well beyond the immediate technical constitution and functioning of infrastructure. It is indeed arguably because infrastructures are (considered as) usually quite stable, obdurate systems that even small adjustments and shifts in their constitution both may become immediately visible and can be an index of potentially substantive wider societal changes. Exploring the material struggles and encounters of the city in flux produces an understanding of the shifting interplay between technology, ecology and politics, and a sense that the direction and substance of urban futures is very much in play, up for grabs and thus tangible and shapeable. This may be a sizeable ambition for a study that remains in so many ways a partial take on our evolving socio-technical world, yet the aspiration also allows us to give the socio-technical world its full chance, to be open to the prospect of meaningful futures becoming present in particular infrastructure arrangements, rather than accepting foreclosure according to necessarily arbitrary criteria. Indeed, the main task of infrastructure is to present the future. It exists to connect people and things over distance and time, to convey useful, even essential, fluids and resources to points and places where they will be consumed. Its telescopic

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     5

configuration at once maintains local material relations and extends these across space, bringing closer together and rendering immediate and live that which would otherwise be far away, intangible and/or forever forthcoming. Exploring the material politics of infrastructure allows us to make sense of relational worlds and collective life always in the making.

Urban—Infrastructure In this introductory chapter, I make the case for mobilizing urban infrastructure as a key site to view always emerging reconfiguration processes of urban socio-technical change. The following chapters then explore particular instances of such processes in which infrastructure constitutes a material and discursive arena in which various pathways and guises of urban futures are laid out, enacted and contested/struggled with or over. This chapter locates and situates this perspective within existing debates and literatures to develop a conceptual understanding of infrastructure and the politics of urban socio-technical futures. I suggest that this demands critical engagement with notions of and debates around transitions, materialities and the politics of eco-urbanisms, and this is the focus in the second half of this chapter. First, however, it makes sense to deal with two preceding questions which frame the wider concerns of the study: namely, in exploring the forms, modalities and outcomes of potentially transformative socio-technical change, why an urban focus, and, more specifically, why urban infrastructure?

Urban Processes of Transformative Change Cities are increasingly seen to have a central ‘role’ in contributing to major systemic societal changes.2 This is all the more so given the lack

2Recent

reports and publications on various topics from international organizations such as the World Bank, the OECD and the European Commission have highlighted this point, while The Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde and other media outlets either have ‘cities’ pages or run frequent reports on urban issues.

6     J. Rutherford

of movement and action in some areas on national and international scales. Global urban population growth, the increasing dependence of increasingly urbanized societies on energy and other resources (requiring ever more complex and long-distance logistics chains of supply), and the policy responsibility and mandate which has been allocated to, or taken up by, local and urban authorities in many countries for developing local responses to sustainability issues mean that a specific urban focus is highly relevant (see McCormick et al. 2013, for a number of case studies and perspectives on urban sustainable transformation). From this starting point, however, perspectives begin to diverge on how and why the urban matters. Cities are still often predominantly viewed as targets for or instruments through which some national or sectoral policy objectives or strategic goals can be met. Whether it is, for example, the ‘territorialisation’ of environmental policy or ‘energy transition’ in France, the generic design of smart city ‘solutions’ by global IT corporates, or how urban energy production and consumption challenges are subsumed by major international organizations into the wider issues of climate change, ‘green growth’, or both combined (OECD 2010; World Bank 2010a; UN-HABITAT 2011; Kamal-Chaoui and Robert 2009; Hammer et al. 2011), there is a top-down conception and reification of cities as being homogeneous and often largely passive receptacles or agents, which can be simply given an impulse along a prescribed pathway. In this instrumentalized view, urban contexts and their wealth of stakeholders are somehow outside of defining and addressing the processes in question. Elsewhere, the traditional assets and characteristics of cities— agglomeration, proximity, density, economies of scale, quality of life—are seen as qualities to be built on in the production of urban sustainability/futures with regard to, for example, infrastructure and service provision, promotion and dissemination of innovation, or management of waste and pollution (see, for example, Newman et al. 2009). Urban authorities and actors frequently have a range of responsibilities and mandates for extending and improving environmental actions and performances in their own building stock and municipal practices, in public service provision, in planning and transport policy, and in building and land use regulation (Bulkeley and Betsill 2003). So local and

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     7

urban actors (in a wide sense) always have at least some degree of agency and capacity to shape, orient and effect locally specific interventions and change within broader situations and processes (Krueger and Agyeman 2005). In other work, the potential for ‘disruptive socio-technical change’ emerging from urban sites and arenas is quite high (McCormick et al. 2013; Rohracher and Späth 2014). This is the case when cities come together to form quite powerful collective lobbies, as shown, for example, by the thousand or more European cities which are pushing for more stringent energy efficiency and renewable energy objectives than those adopted by the European Commission (Energy Cities 2014). But, crucially, it is also the case in smaller-scale initiatives and actions within individual cities and communities, where a variety of ‘experiments’, projects and mobilizations driven by different groups and interests may well have as much meaning and transformative potential. Recent research focusing on collaboration and learning through the development of ‘urban laboratories’ is one example of this (see, for example, Nevens et al. 2013; Karvonen and van Heur 2014). There is recognition then that the forms and degrees of change now necessary require more transformative shifts than piecemeal local actions and policies. At the same time, the range and diversity of sites, arenas and coalitions of possible urban transformation have multiplied, marking ‘the realization that what we call “the urban” is a complex, multiscale and multidimensional process where the general and specific aspects of the human condition meet’ (Keil 2003, p. 725). This relational urban perspective, sensitive to a notion of cities as porous ‘meeting places’ with particular intersections of social and technical relations which are all ‘constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself ’ (Massey 1994, p. 154), has implications for our ways of conceptualizing, studying and knowing possible transformative change. The array of actors and interests involved, but also, crucially, both the variety of tools and ways of working that they use, and the active presence of a host of materials, entities, plants, animals, technologies and other ‘non-humans’ (which comprise the ‘majority’ of urban worlds), alter the questions we pose and our frames of analysis. In short, cities can be seen as socio-technical arenas

8     J. Rutherford

of interaction, which are reducible neither to the sum of all flows circulating within/through them, nor to a notion of places ‘containing’ pre-existing components such as buildings or infrastructure. They are always produced through a series of processes, events, performances and practices: ‘ongoing stories’ (Massey 2005, p. 131) involving all kinds of visible and less visible actors performing a multitude of constantly changing lead roles and bit parts (Latour and Hermant 1998; Amin and Thrift 2002). In this context, Whitehead (2003, p. 1186) observes how urban sustainability becomes ‘as much a political vision or social ideal – incorporating its own moral geography and forms of ecological praxis – as it is a tangible object, or location on a map’. Similarly, Braun (2005, p. 640) has argued for ‘urban sustainability [to] be seen in terms of urbanization processes, and as fundamentally a political rather than a technical or design problem’. This involves recognizing that constituting urban futures is inherently founded on competing ideologies, imaginaries and practices of the urban; it mobilizes organizations and arrangements of flows, networks and distributions that are put to work for particular interests and purposes; and it produces uneven outcomes through which different social groups and spaces are affected in diverse ways (see Heynen et al. 2006b). Uncovering and understanding how sustainability becomes a political process in different urban arenas is now a key task for analysis of urban transitions. Indeed, when we see, for example, organizations as diverse as Greenpeace, the International Energy Agency, the Transitions Towns movement, GDF Suez and the Covenant of Mayors all propounding a shift to local energy and climate responses (Greenpeace 2005; International Energy Agency 2009; GDF Suez 2010; Covenant of Mayors, n.d.), it becomes essential to unpack these different interests, to understand how they can be apparently brought together around a particular material goal or site, and whether, why and for whom they are, in fact, working in distinct ways. These competing views and actions always frame, and indeed help to forge, a variety of possible pathways to sustainable/future urban configurations (Guy and Marvin 1999; White and Wilbert 2009; Cook and Swyngedouw 2012). It is this ongoing and contested process of making sustainabilities/futures that needs to be analysed. I argue in this

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     9

book that urban infrastructure is a key site through which this can be done. In order to gain a firmer grasp of this contested process and how the urban becomes constitutive of it, the following chapters analyse a number of illustrative urban interventions where broader sociotechnical futures are being negotiated and played out around or through infrastructure.

Infrastructure Entanglements Infrastructure is understood here as a process rather than any fixed object. This perspective foregrounds the allusiveness, uncertainty and multidimensional nature of infrastructure, taking in ‘the proliferation of discourses and material realisations’ (Chatzis 2017, p. 22) through which it is (provisionally) achieved. As Star and other STS (science and technology studies) scholars have recognized, it is highly embedded, historically constituted over time and has a stable and regular quality that means it often fades into the background of everyday life (Star 1999; Edwards 2002; Thrift 2005; Hommels 2005), thus demanding ‘infrastructural inversion’ (Bowker 1994) to make its finer processes and operations visible. Yet at the same time it is dynamic, lively and always shifting, never still, constantly folding in new alliances and unfurling new connections. STS flavoured analysis of infrastructures varies, like other theories of social change, depending on where one places the cursor between continuity, stability, inertia, path dependency, lock-in, obduracy, etc., on the one hand or transformation, transition, innovation, etc., on the other hand. There is also a related set of distinctions across a spectrum moving from technological determinism at one end to forms of social constructivism at the other, with scholars emphasizing or privileging the effects of ‘harder’ or ‘softer’ actors and relations in the constitution of socio-technical configurations and change. Yet, it is contingent interaction between or across these notions, and indeed their mutual constitution, both in individual studies and collectively in transdisciplinary infrastructure studies, that account for the continuing fertility of STS approaches (e.g. Bijker and Pinch 2012). As Edwards et al. (2009, p. 365) suggest: ‘Infrastructure today seems both an

10     J. Rutherford

all-encompassing solution and an omnipresent problem, indispensable yet unsatisfactory, always already there yet always an unfinished work in progress’. Rather than offering a definition of the ‘object’ under investigation then, given that this is often a key element of controversy, studying infrastructure necessitates instead asking ‘when is an infrastructure?’ (Star and Ruhleder 1996), or in other words being clear about how it becomes a tool of action when it connects to a particular purpose. As Larkin (2013, p. 330) observes, ‘Given the ever-proliferating networks that can be mobilized to understand infrastructures, we are reminded that discussing an infrastructure is a categorical act. It is a moment of tearing into those heterogeneous networks to define which aspect of which network is to be discussed and which parts will be ignored. It recognizes that infrastructures operate on differing levels simultaneously, generating multiple forms of address, and that any particular set of intellectual questions will have to select which of these levels to examine. Infrastructures are not, in any positivist sense, simply “out there”’. In other words, it is important to be clear about what is under investigation, what aspects of infrastructures are in focus or foregrounded and what is backgrounded or outside the scope of a study, and what is being shown through infrastructure. There are therefore many ‘ways in’ to studying infrastructure captured in many distinctive and diverse literatures, and the very ontology of infrastructure, as notion, object and process, is inherently fluid and heterogeneous. Indeed, these definitional questions—what infrastructure constitutes or allows and what claims are made for it—become part of any study of infrastructure. Just as infrastructures can be said to operate a number of functions simultaneously, circulating, connecting up or enabling a multitude of things to happen,3 so scholars can explore wide-ranging interests through analysis of infrastructures. It matters crucially therefore what this analysis is trying to say or to tell us. Not least because the infrastructures in focus can be substantially different 3This understanding reflects the perspectives and practices of ‘heterogeneous engineering’ on the ground where those ‘doing’ infrastructure are simultaneously laying and maintaining material systems and components and deploying and working organizational arrangements, values, imaginaries, etc. (Law 1987).

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     11

depending on the research interest being explored: in one study, it may well be a system of water pipes, while in others the (no less) material focus may be the administrative or bureaucratic techniques used to govern a water system: ‘pipes turn out to be documents’ (Larkin 2013, p. 335; see Chapter 2). A core driving question in developing my conceptual and empirical approach has been to seek to understand more precisely how urban infrastructure matters. Infrastructure is a site of intervention which presently materializes the future socio-technical arrangements through which possibilities of urban life and functioning are being cultivated. It is studied here as an ongoing material political process through which urban futures are conceived, constituted and contested. My approach thus builds on the particularity of urban infrastructure which lies, I think and as I show over the following chapters, at the intersection between its density and complexity of (relationally constituted) material components and systems which produce and reproduce many aspects of city life, and its pivotal political potential through which some of the key debates and contests about the organization and space of the city can be played out. The city today is where materiality (as a figure of human– environment relations) primarily becomes political. As Amin and Thrift have recently argued, it is in the machinic combination and confrontation of people, buildings, visions and infrastructures that we find a city, creating essential urban networks and systems that order, circulate and manipulate life and its possibilities: ‘It is the coming together of overlapping sociotechnical systems that gives cities their world-making power’ (Amin and Thrift 2017, p. 2). No longer just the underpinnings or medium of other aspects and functions of cities, infrastructure can now be seen as ‘the urban structure itself – the very parameters of global urbanism’ (Easterling 2014, p. 12), the sinews of planetary urbanization (Brenner 2014), actively formative in its replicative formulas, standards and models of the potentials of urban lives, settlements and futures. But urban infrastructure also summons a socio-technical arrangement of different participants and entities through which emerging alternative collectives/futures may be constituted, cultivated and contested. There has long been an exciting undercurrent of research on cities and infrastructure cutting across various epistemic communities

12     J. Rutherford

(urban history, large technical systems, urban planning) (see, e.g., Tarr and Dupuy 1988; Hughes 1983; Melosi 2000; for a review see Coutard and Rutherford 2016a). But work on urban infrastructure has proliferated over the last two decades, sparked to a large extent by Graham and Marvin’s (2001) Splintering Urbanism. The key shift operated by Splintering Urbanism was to re-place infrastructure networks at the heart of the social and political make-up of cities worldwide and to show critically how they become trenchant carriers and mediators of political and economic power and interests which reinforce existing social inequalities and produce new forms of disparity. Re-placing infrastructures at the core of critical urban research agendas inspired more scholars to seek out the vital processes and politics of the cables, wires, pipes and roads undergirding urban development. Their contribution to cities, their urban qualities, have thus been reinterrogated in relation to both very different infrastructure experiences in the majority urban world in the South (see Chapter 2), and global environmental turbulence through which the intensive spatial and temporal connections of urban areas and lives to multiple elsewheres beyond the urban here and now are being made ever clearer, and which are revealing ‘new’ lively components and processes of infrastructure assemblages that were not previously known or studied (Luke 2003; Amin and Thrift 2017). Sustained and constantly reworked through zestful discussion between STS and urban studies (Monstadt 2009), urban infrastructure has been productively analysed as a loose, interdependent arrangement of different systems and networks of provision, service configurations, rules and norms, finance, material and resource flows, and individual and social practices and experiences. This analysis translates what appear to be on the surface quite mundane and passive urban objects into captivating mediators of all kinds of relations, flows, symbolisms, powers and politics. It thus demands engagement with its material forms, technical workings and reconfigured territorialities through which it becomes a vibrant urban ingredient in a dynamic, contingent and contested arrangement of things, processes and relations. This emergent and processual notion of infrastructure can be relevant across different urbanizing contexts, and help to unpack the specificities of infrastructural change in each. In our recent edited collection Beyond the Networked City, Olivier Coutard

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     13

and I (2016b) discuss in more detail the trajectories and deviations provoked by these ‘new infrastructure territorialities’ and their consequences for urban research and practice. This volume ties together and offers a transversal analysis of my own recent research into urban infrastructure politics in European cities. The title ‘Redeploying urban infrastructure’ tries to capture both the strategic reworking of infrastructure currently being done in practice in these cities as a response to various needs and drivers (necessitating perhaps new tactics in laying, knowing, experiencing infrastructure), and my own mobilization of infrastructure as a theoretical tool offering a pertinent perspective on processes of urban change. Redeploying is also taken in its etymological sense as an unfolding, a gradual uneven process through which infrastructure evolves in the interaction between purposeful (tactical) design and by being grown or nurtured (Edwards et al. 2009, p. 369). This sets up an understanding of urban socio-technical change as ‘reconfiguration’ through which embedded socio-technical systems come under pressure to change and compose a new formation (Summerton 1994; Moss 2014). Again, however, it is the processes through which any reconfiguration emerges which are the focus of study rather than the more or less stable formations which result. In keeping with the developing concern for the politics of infrastructure in and beyond urban studies, a constant in my research is that socio-technical systems of energy, water and information are approached through the tensions and contests they inherently generate. Infrastructures are conceptualized relationally as, and empirically shown to be, lively meeting points for diverse and divergent interests and views of how a city’s essential functional systems are, can be, and should be provided, managed, maintained and used. These ‘bring us below the surface level of goals and implementation, into the murky depths of tension, failure, and compromise where conflicting purposes and political differences meet technical details’ (Edwards et al. 2009, p. 366). This is less a method of infrastructural inversion, foregrounding background components and processes, than a particular stance or posture which suggests that infrastructure is always remarkable and to the fore through the politics it both shapes and is shaped by (McFarlane and Rutherford 2008). Tensions are indeed recognized as ‘one of the chief sources of

14     J. Rutherford

infrastructural change, growth, and learning over time’ (Jackson et al. 2007), and thus offer a useful heuristic for exploring socio-technical change. But this political constitution of infrastructure processes is encountered in quite differing or distinct ways, forms, intensities or degrees. ‘What is significant politically’ or constitutes political activity is distributed through the city and is not restricted to the realm of only municipal or state policymakers (Magnusson 2011, p. 169). It resides in the practices and performances of everyday urban infrastructural lives (e.g. Graham and McFarlane 2015) as well as in highly visible forms of remonstration, contestation and disorder (e.g. Kallianos 2018). In the following chapters, there are sometimes openly hostile placards and protests in the street, just as in other instances it is more about subtler contests or other ways of doing. We thus move between hot and cool politics, from organized dissent to individuals refusing or doing differently (cf. Edwards et al. 2009, p. 372). More generally across the chapters, I suggest that political infrastructures are encountered particularly as/through active material components and objects which become effective in various ways, enabling and constraining actions and possibilities. This points to how struggles with infrastructure always constitute ‘a politics of small interventions with large effects’ (Amin and Thrift 2017, p. 6; Furlong 2011). The approach adopted here thus does not so much seek causal factors in system development as explore how shifting relations between components reveal and constitute the (shifting) meaning and ‘substance’ of infrastructure configurations (Star and Ruhleder 1996, p. 113).

Urban Infrastructure Matters: Thinking Through Transitions, Materialities and Eco-Urban Politics In focusing on urban infrastructure as a lens to view emerging processes of urban socio-technical change, I have sought out wide-ranging conceptual resources from the increasingly fertile borderlands between urban studies and STS. In the remainder of the chapter I continue to work through a conceptual perspective on infrastructure and the

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     15

politics of urban socio-technical futures by discussing and engaging in more detail with three stimulating areas of scholarship around (sociotechnical) sustainability transition processes, urban materialities, and the politics of eco-urbanisms/techno-natures. These are rich debates around core notions of relevance here: around emergent transformations to sustainable configurations, about the active contribution of materials and technologies in transformations which rejig or adjust our view of human-environment relations, and about the wider politics of urban ecological change/futures. Taken together, they forge a conceptual-methodological stance or bearing which foregrounds the processual, relational and material political constitution of urban transformation. I am neither arguing that these comprise the sole, exhaustive resources to inform work on urban infrastructure, nor aiming to extensively cover and advance on the full realm of knowledge that each of these has produced over the years. But they have stimulated my thinking and have oriented the studies presented in the chapters. I advance here a particular and partial view of these notions and areas, and suggest that taken in combination some of their elements have much to offer my overarching interest in contributing to our understanding of the material politics of urban socio-technical change, i.e. of how urban infrastructure comes to constitute a political arena within which meaningful future socio-technical configurations are debated and enacted. The three conceptual discussions thus serve three purposes. First, they situate theoretically the empirical material presented in the following chapters, grounding the ‘cases’ in existing approaches and linking ‘case’ elements to specific arguments in the literature. Second, through these three conceptual discussions, there is a gradual building up of a distinct perspective on the material politics of urban socio-technical change: approaches to transitions, materialities and eco-urbanisms each offer resources towards this perspective but it is in the incremental combination of these resources that I situate the wider contribution of the study as a whole. Third, they relate the infrastructure focus elaborated above to these core debates to locate the wider significance of studying urban infrastructure which constantly reverberates through and into concerns for how human-environment futures are envisaged, theorized and enacted.

16     J. Rutherford

Sustainability Transitions: Understanding Urban Socio-Technical Change Processes The inherently normative connotations of any notion such as sustainability, which attempts to capture a favourable future trajectory or state, mean that there tends to be more clarity about desired ‘end points’ or overall objectives than about either the complicated processes through which these outcomes might be achieved or the alliances and dissonances involved in negotiating pathways. This is demonstrated, for example, by both the regular discussions of what cities may (or should) look like in (say) 2050 after their socio-technical systems of resource flows and service provision have been radically transformed, and the recognition of persistent implementation gaps between general ambitions and concrete work on the ground. Recent work around (urban) sustainability transitions can help to overcome this conceptual limit. This notion captures both the underlying rationale of perpetual search for societal (urban) improvement and the concrete processes of implementing meaningful or transformative change to our living spaces and conditions. A diverse and disparate literature is emerging, across disciplines and traditions, focusing attention on the processes through which socio-technical change is defined, implemented and contested in a search for more sustainable configurations. Much of this work analyses the nature, modalities and implications of some form of ‘transition’, a notion that has become increasingly diffuse across the social sciences in the last 20 years and an important nexus for transdisciplinary conversations about socio-technical change. Building on work in the vein of the ‘Dutch school’ of transitions, this notion identifies a fundamental, systemic, long-term and multilevel process of societal, or socio-technical, change (Rotmans et al. 2001). It is argued that in current times such change is required to address a series of interconnected, deep-set and recurrent problems, and to shift society onto more sustainable pathways (Elzen et al. 2004). Socio-technical transitions research is a well-established field branching across STS, innovation studies, policy studies and other cognate areas. This research studies transformations in the major systems of

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     17

societal functioning and reproduction and how these changes emerge and build up. Historical studies of socio-technical evolution and change focusing on a variety of technological artefacts and sectors allowed gradual conceptual refinement of the ‘multilevel perspective’ (MLP), a heuristic analytical tool which identifies the interacting sets of logics and forces present across landscape, regime and niche levels which are productive of change (see, for example, Geels 2002; Geels and Schot 2007). Socio-technical regimes are stable, embedded and intertwined assemblages of technologies, infrastructures, regulations, norms and user practices. They are dynamic and can change through a combination of pressures from the wider social context (landscape) and from emerging distinct (or competing) configurations developed in niches. Much research has focused on the innovation processes of emergence, stabilization and diffusion of new configurations (progressive ‘alignment’ or ‘structuration’ of the components in regime assemblages), and thus on ‘niche–regime interactions’ supported by landscape pressures. These ‘levels’ are interdependent, in constant flux, and represent analytical topologies rather than fixed, containerized, or indeed geographical, hierarchies or scales. Through study of current ‘sustainability transitions’, ongoing innovation and change processes are analysed in their multidimensional, dynamic aspects in an attempt to produce better understanding of potentially radical shifts in (otherwise stable) socio-technical systems ‘which exhibit strong advances regarding environmental performance, economic prosperity and societal equity’ (Truffer and Coenen 2012, p. 5; see also Markard et al. 2012). A systems approach is adopted to understand the dynamics of socio-technical change in the structures underpinning production and consumption. This has shed great light on the multilevel interactions through which socio-technical system configurations evolve, notably processes of stabilization, path dependence and lock-in of established forms and the factors and conditions facilitating destabilization or the emergence of new forms. Cross-fertilization and debate across fields and disciplines have led to conceptual refinements and expansions of transitions frameworks. A number of scholars have sought to make connections between transitions analysis and other distinctive literatures and approaches to systemic

18     J. Rutherford

societal shifts (Meadowcroft 2009; Monstadt 2009; Bulkeley et al. 2011; Lawhon and Murphy 2011; Truffer and Coenen 2012; Wolfram and Frantzeskaki 2015). This work has notably been important in calling for more analysis of the central role of space, place, scale and politics in systemic change. Communities, cities and regions have usually been neglected in transitions studies where a pre-eminent national context has been seen as crucial for innovation, industry and policymaking. Equally, participants in transition processes have often been restricted to major players in these domains leading to limited understanding of the deployment, shaping and outcomes of particular (other) agencies and power relations in the formation of systems (Shove and Walker 2007). Truffer and Coenen (2012, p. 2) summarize refinements and advances as having helped to deepen understanding of ‘how and under which conditions new and radically more resource efficient socio-technical configurations emerge or, alternatively, how existing socio-technical configurations support or hinder major transformations to sustainability’. An emerging subfield around ‘urban sustainability transitions’ has begun to apply transitions thinking to the study and practice of placebased sustainability policy. Emanating partly out of the normative policy-oriented agenda of transition management, researchers in this subfield note the fragmented organization and only incremental adjustments promoted by local responses and call for more holistic, joined-up, long-term thinking for policy learning and ‘better’ reflexive governance of the ‘locus of change’ (Roorda et al. 2012; Wittmayer et al. 2014). While there is a more inclusive participatory approach here involving a wider set of stakeholders than authorities and businesses, this conception of urban sustainability transitions still attempts to steer change in the ‘right’ direction: ‘Cities are given an impulse that translates into a sustainability movement for the city’ (Wittmayer et al. 2014, p. 9). In this view, cities become ‘transition managers’ by grouping practitioners and decision-makers together to make rational choices about urban futures and the ‘optimal’ pathway to be taken, although the forms of participation, inclusion and collaborative planning remain open and require further investigation. Other urban transition approaches attempt to feed off, rather than overcome, uncertainty by seeing it as a resource for the creation and

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     19

extension of productive spaces of debate and negotiation which might open up alternatives and possibilities not yet considered. This recognizes that cities are neither merely neutral contexts within which transition happens to take place nor singular and homogeneous actors governing the transition process on behalf of all citizens (Hodson and Marvin 2010a; Rohracher and Späth 2014), but are assembled relationally through exchanges between a multitude of agents working at and across scales (Affolderbach and Schulz 2016). Through this, there is a call to open out processes of transition to a wider framing of the political contests through which change can come about: ‘Sustainability initiatives should be analysed not only as instrumental policy problems, but also as discursive acts in an ongoing political struggle for resources and as an expression of conflicts of interest in the respective regions’ (Truffer and Coenen 2012, p. 15). Configurations for societal futures, like technology, are inherently malleable, full of interpretive flexibility, and can be put to use for very different purposes and interests. This is what Easterling (2014) calls the art of ‘extrastatecraft’.4 There may well be material consequences from a wider set of ‘technological interventions’ that are not just restricted to those of the most evident policy and industrial players in socio-technical systems (Maassen 2012). There has been some productive work around regime destabilization which takes another perspective on the MLP focusing on contested material change rather than novelty and diffusion, and this offers a further entry point into transition politics (Geels 2014; Meadowcroft 2011; Hess 2013; Turnheim and Geels 2013). The lessons from this work are that we need to take into account competing understandings of otherwise apparently ‘stable’ components and systems, and foreground the ways in which these are mobilized or ‘destabilized’ by particular social groups for specific aims and finalities (Lawhon and Murphy 2011; Geels 2014). I suggest that there is room for sustainability transitions approaches to engage further with meanings and materialities of the urban, and through this engagement to get to the ‘urban’ constitution of the components, work and practices that go into change. Coenen and Truffer 4See

below, but it is important to note the infiltration of this kind of thinking into ‘transitions’.

20     J. Rutherford

(2012) (and others) have called for dynamics of ‘territorial embeddedness’ to be given more ‘theoretical purchase’ in analysis to take into account local specificities and contingencies in understanding systemic change processes (see Bulkeley et al. 2011). Through this urban formation process, capturing the multiform and uneven processes and outcomes through which cities and urban spaces are actually being made and remade, urban transitions might move beyond seeking to promote shared understandings of problems and potentials, and envisage change as emerging from disagreement and discrepancy, as the art of negotiating possible urban worlds. This may further contribute to an emerging critical transitions framework, focused squarely on the underlying ideologies, meanings and materials of urban transition and (thus) on questions about who initiates change, for what purpose, through which elements of the urban fabric and with what consequences.

Urban Materialities: Sustaining Human-Environment Hybrids Urban materiality is often used as a shorthand for justifying analysis of material or physical components of the city, in urban disciplines where the primacy of social relations in explaining processes is still strong. But materiality is about more than just the ‘stuff’ of the urban fabric and environment per se and must be seen as an inherently relational notion. There are a number of ways in which materiality has been productively conceptualized and understood which are relevant for discussion here. It stirs, first, a concern for exploring whether and how the properties and qualities of objects/artefacts have consequences for how they are used or put to work within a given network or context. To this end, a number of useful reflections on the materiality of the city have been made, offering a fruitful way into thinking through reconfigurations of the urban in current times (Amin and Thrift 2002; Lees 2002; Latham and McCormack 2004; Hubbard 2006; Amin and Thrift 2017). This push to ‘rematerialise’ urban studies has been partly about taking issue with an increasing proliferation of work on immaterial culture and representations influenced by the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1990s, which has

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     21

had a tendency to overly detach subjectivity, identity and experience from the tangible, evident artefacts, forms and processes of cities. But it has also been about a more fundamental recognition that urban studies scholars have generally ‘under-conceptualized’ urban matter (Latham et al. 2009). This is not merely a question of returning to empirical studies of concrete objects and things in cities. Rematerialisation arguments have indeed particularly called for, and highlighted in existing work (Lees 2002), deeper and more varied articulations of material and immaterial to get beyond a duality which has sometimes been used ‘as a shorthand for tensions between empirical and theoretical, applied and academic, concrete and abstract, reality and representation, quantitative and qualitative, objective and subjective, political economy and cultural studies, and so on’ (Lees 2002, p. 102). Rematerializing urban studies involves a focus on the relations between people and the objects encountered in everyday urban life, and the multiplicity of ways in which these are understood, used, mobilized and experienced as we negotiate the urban worlds in which we live. Materiality here is viewed as ‘a spatio-temporal process in which the more tangible, physical stuff of the city is a lively participant’ (Latham et al. 2009, p. 62, original emphasis). This does not imply that we can no longer study the (a priori less visible and less tangible) social meanings and power relations bound up in or cast into urban form and the built environment, but that we study these questions differently, ‘as an active and engaged process of understanding, rather than as a product to be read off retrospectively from its social and historical context’ by a ‘detached analytical observer’ (Lees 2002, p. 107). By foregrounding urban materialities which articulate the everyday engagements of people and artefacts within a strategic or policy context of discourses and visions of urban futures, we privilege an approach focused on ‘the practical negotiation of the city’ (Hubbard 2006, p. 96). This does not just account for things in the urban environment, but is especially concerned about how things come to matter to the various interest groups of ‘sustainable’ cities in the making. This approach focuses on the different ways in which objects, points of contention and policy orientations are made visible, tangible and/or durable by or for these groups through, for example, practices of ‘ordering,

22     J. Rutherford

circulation and manipulation’ (Latham et al. 2009). Such a perspective is implicit when Betsill and Bulkeley (2007, p. 452) discuss the need to reframe global climate change as a local stake, often by linking it to issues already on the local agenda, i.e. what matters to people, or when research focused on energy production highlights the combination of local decisions and situated power plants and networks through which national policies and national systems pass in connecting consumers (Wessberg 2002; Akerman and Peltola 2006; Gailing and Moss 2016; Hawkey et al. 2016). Bakker (2012) and Swyngedouw (2015) show, for example, how water flows are always simultaneously material and political. In this approach, what is material (or what matters) is not just or not so much physical objects per se but more the varying relations bound up in them in the ways they are used, experienced, performed and understood in different ways (Braun and Whatmore 2010). As Latham and McCormack argue, urban materiality must be viewed as present in the connections between things, technologies, people, bodies, signs, texts, etc., with none of these as inherently more material or immaterial than the others: ‘we only begin to properly grasp the complex realities of apparently stable objects by taking seriously the fact that these realities are always held together and animated by processes excessive of form and position’ (Latham and McCormack 2004, p. 705). The production and reproduction of cities becomes a ‘hybrid’ affair, not just operated by people, but equally by other more ‘fluid’ (‘more-thanhuman’) presences (cf. Latour 2005; Whatmore 2002), such that we are called in fine ‘to explore the way these materials combine in particular instances with particular forces, and to scrutinise how this play of effects and affects produces particular urban formations’ (Hubbard 2006, p. 248). This effectivity of various materials therefore leads into debate about the roles of non-humans in ‘social’ action and the extent to which agency, or indeed power, is distributed well beyond the usual groups of human actors, becoming invested in a host of technologies and entities which, as part of networks or assemblages, thus also contribute to urban functioning and change (Farias and Bender 2010; Blok 2013; Murdoch 1997). Latham (2016) talks about a constant invocation of the material plenitude of urban environments, summoning understanding of how

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     23

tangible, physical and/or biological entities, from traffic lights and air conditioning systems to foxes and microbes, become lively participants in all kinds of urban processes. In this view, human ‘control’ is always limited and constrained (and enabled) by the vitality, dynamism and power of things and materials. Irrespective of the degree of agency we attribute to objects (with some object-oriented ontologies allocating inherent agency), things and materials do behave in ways and have or produce effects which shape, reshape and regulate contexts in which humans act (as per ‘thingpower’: Bennett 2010). This is especially the case in relations and systems around infrastructure (see also Bijker 2007). Bennett’s case study of the North American blackout is a prime example of socio-technical analysis which decenters (but does not disregard) human agency and foregrounds effects of materials, flows and forces usually in the background to consider the complex interplay of always associated humans and non-humans. As she argues, ‘There was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity. What is perhaps different today is that the higher degree of infrastructural and technological complexity has rendered this harder to deny’ (Bennett 2005, p. 463). Building on these arguments, Amin (2014) studies lively infrastructure with infrastructure as a ‘gathering force’ and site of political potential because of its fundamental shaping of wellbeing and social interactions. Meehan (2014) conceptualizes tool-power and force-full objects wherein objects can be sources or ‘wellsprings of power’ through the alliances and networks they become enrolled into which offers them an emergent capacity to broker, extend and limit state power. The combination of seeking understanding of emerging material sites and arenas of dispute (over meaningful change) and taking fully into account the active participation of components in hybrid collectives busy effecting or constituting possibilities of change in some ways pushes a socio-technical perspective about as far as it can go. Forms and effects of particular artefacts and relations can thus contribute to constituting wider collective concerns (Latour 2004b). As Mitchell argues, ‘They are disputes about the kind of technologies we want to live with, but also about the forms of social life, of socio-technical life,

24     J. Rutherford

we would like to live’ (Mitchell 2011, p. 239; see also Winner 2004). In this regard, infrastructure comes to matter differently here. The medium becomes the message as the materiality of infrastructure produces effects or has an efficacy and effectivity in broader change processes (Easterling 2014; Filion 2013). Yet, at the same time, the notion of the anthropocene highlights that human activity is having significant long-term effects on global systemic processes. This means, fundamentally, that while materiality offers a focus on the constantly shifting nature of relations between humans and their physical world/environment, the shifting is not just unidirectional with the physical/material becoming (seen as) more active in the constitution of worlds. As materials are drawn into political life (Barry 2013) and humans become part of biogeochemical processes, this opens even more the possibility that we cannot meaningfully separate the two, that neither should be seen as anything other/more than humanenvironment or socio-technical hybrids (Latour 2004a; White and Wilbert 2009). In this way, introducing some of the recent thinking around urban materiality into debates around urban futures could therefore complement and extend existing work around strategic infrastructure and systemic socio-technical change by showing how the process of making things matter is a complex operation or encounter of multiple co-existing engagements with the concrete objects, natures and flows of the urban living space. What this approach to materiality offers is a more precise understanding of the disparate settings and arenas in and through which policy discourse and goals are actively translated into actual concrete actions and political interventions. These material settings and arenas are constituted by shifting hybrid relations and engagements between multiple urban actors and all kinds of ‘infrastructural’ objects (but which have active effects). These emerging ecological settings are also therefore inherently constitutive of (the potential for) socio-political struggles as the orientations of ongoing and future urban ecological transition are materially understood, experienced and performed in diverging ways (Swyngedouw 1996; Latour 2004a). This work on materiality suggests in fine that what we are endeavouring to sustain in ‘transition’ work is the intrinsic and intertwined relationships

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     25

between humans and their environments, which, as we shall see in the next section, is also a question of our capacities to disagree about how the work of sustaining these might be enacted and accomplished.

Ecological Urbanism and a Politics of Techno-Natures Concern for the links between cities and ecology and how urban planning has interpreted and enrolled nature and a variety of environmental resources into the production of urban space is, of course, not new (see Roseland 1997, for analysis of the evolution of the notion of ‘eco-city’). But, as notions of sustainable urban development, urban resilience, low carbon cities, etc., have moved up urban agendas into the mainstream (World Bank 2010b; Joss 2011; De Jong et al. 2015), so researchers have engaged in quite diverse theoretical and empirical analyses of what ecological discourses and imperatives mean for understanding and practice of urban development (Haughton 1997; Rapoport 2014; Coutard and Lévy 2010). This analytical diversity, a clear recognition of a plurality of natures, is at odds with the parallel attempt by some to impose narrow criteria, norms and standards by which the eco-city (and therefore Nature) can be defined in practice (e.g. the work of the International Eco-city Framework and Standards mentioned in Rapoport 2014, p. 139). Some research has an applied focus, offering frameworks of possible responses and examples of ‘best practice’ in sustainability planning based on a normative view of what urban practitioners might, or indeed should, be doing to improve urban environments (Girardet 2000; Kenworthy 2006; Newman et al. 2009). Other research works from the limits of official planning practice to promote alternative, bottom-up urban sustainability collectives focused on meeting local community needs and creating meaningful social interaction (see, for example, Seyfang and Smith 2007; Pickerill and Maxey 2009). The aims, practices and outcomes of current eco-urbanism initiatives have also come under critical scrutiny. These accounts uncover and unpack the singular storytelling, dominant social interests, narrow techno-economic knowledge and rationales, and pernicious consequences of the making

26     J. Rutherford

of supposedly exemplar urban projects around the world (Hodson and Marvin 2010b; Caprotti 2014b; Rapoport 2014). While they may be the latest in a long line of ‘utopian’ planning ideals reflecting the dominant social concerns of the day (Cugurullo 2013; Rapoport 2014), their particular mix of the discursive and the material has made them useful objects of critical analysis of urban sustainable transformation processes. It is here that a politics of ‘techno-natures’ supplants modernist remnants of a singular, pure, static Nature or separate ecological dimension to understanding (urban) life. The term is used here in the sense of White and Wilbert for whom it seeks to capture ‘a moment during which the environmental debate seems to be folding into a vastly more complex social-ecological-technological field of political discussion’ (White and Wilbert 2009, p. 13). In this way, ecological urbanism is being opened out to a broader understanding of how we inhabit diverse environments, the forms these take, and the groups and interests that drive configurations (Latour 2004a). It follows that urban change is crucially an inherently politicized process, as different powers and capacities to act confront through and over matters/materiality (Latham et al. 2009, p. 64). The discursive and material processes through which urban environments are shaped (as in Swyngedouw’s ‘city as a hybrid’), processes that (following the previous section) make things matter, are not merely about top-down imposition or decision-making, but are constantly inflected and deviated by people’s differing positions, capacities and subjectivities with regard to the visions/narratives and circulations/objects in question (what matters, how, and to whom). As Hubbard puts it: ‘After all, cities may be scripted, but our performances do not always follow the script’ (Hubbard 2006, p. 126). Prescribed policy goals, visions and actions can therefore be reinterpreted, reiterated and contested by the different groups and interests present according to what matters to them (‘hacking’ infrastructure space in Easterling’s terms). Urban materiality thus becomes a key arena for urban politics as a set of ‘everyday struggles over ecological (re)production and consumption’ (MacLeod and Jones 2011, p. 2450; see also Bouzarovski 2016). This approach takes us onto the terrain of urban political ecology where a number of scholars have, over the last twenty years, proceeded

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     27

to trace and analyse the uneven, conflictual, dynamic and translocal processes through which the urban is made and remade (Gandy 2004; Loftus 2012). Rather than seeing the circulation of material and energy flows through and around the urban as a question of quantification, of only policy analysis, or indeed of the seeking of optimal, rational, techno-economic engineered configurations, these researchers have sought to recover the inherently emergent, hybrid, dynamic and contested (socio)nature of urban metabolism (Swyngedouw 1996; Keil 2003), and thus to shift focus onto ‘the political processes through which particular socio-environmental urban conditions are made and remade… ask[ing] questions about who produces what kind of socio-ecological configurations for whom’ (Heynen et al. 2006a, p. 2). This necessitates, for example, looking beyond the city as a bounded static environment and tracing long distance metabolic flows, ‘operational landscapes’ and relational urbanization processes through which dense eco-cities are remade, and which have consequences on extraneous places/environments (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2014; Caprotti and Romanowicz 2013; Luke 2003; Brenner 2014). Far from constituting sites of progressive sustainable configurations and demonstrating transformative urban pathways for the future, some nominally eco-city projects are shown to emblematise merely the latest round of ‘entrepreneurial’ capitalist accumulation integrating inter alia: the creation of development opportunities, whether on new build sites, ‘cleaned up’ brownfield land, or through retrofitted environments (Joss 2010; Caprotti 2014a, p. 12); insertion of erstwhile green technology and infrastructure; gentrification, dispossession, and social control/filtering; intensive marketing and branding to add value to the whole; and the circulation and transfer of models, expertise and labour between cities and projects as the sustainable narrative goes global. The organizing principle for recent eco-cities is thus a combination of specific expert knowledge, technology deployment and a narrow view of innovation as top-down techno-social change leading necessarily to greater sustainability (see Luke 2003). The finality of most initiatives is economic: investment, competitiveness, property and real estate, translocal diffusion… This urban market environmentalism or green capitalism offers ‘a hollowed-out vision of the city–nature nexus, as the urban becomes

28     J. Rutherford

devoid of human and political potential while being elevated to the role of stage on which the interplay of technology and green capitalism can be unleashed in a time of constructed crisis’ (Caprotti 2014b, p. 3). Urban design has been put to work to make ecology a business opportunity; nature has become a mere subset of the global economy (Smith 2007; Keucheyan 2014). Other work recognizes and reaffirms the mediating function of infrastructures in socio-natural transformations of urban environments (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000; Karvonen 2011). In an emerging and evolving urban anthropocene then, it is clear that the operation and control of circulation and ordering of flows through capacious urban vessels is becoming a crucial means of guaranteeing and securing urban futures (Hodson and Marvin 2009). A variety of actors are, indeed, testing and experimenting reworkings of circuits to create and sustain potential for addressing socio-ecological issues in and through the city (Bulkeley et al. 2014; Karvonen and van Heur 2014; Björkman and Harris 2018). Learning possibilities come from seeing and studying these developments, not as standalone entities, but always within their political and economic contexts (Rapoport 2014, p. 141). As Rohracher and Späth (2014) have shown in their study of Freiburg and Graz, eco-urban initiatives can stagnate or decline because of quite banal and everyday difficulties such as maintaining political interest over time and shifting priorities, capacities and resources. Elsewhere, local actors and coalitions often have a lot of work to do to produce ‘green’ cities alongside traditional economic development or to link sustainability to broader local agendas (Desfor and Keil 2004; While et al. 2004; Krueger and Gibbs 2007). These kinds of analyses take us beyond a concern for urban form and design practices to focus on ongoing struggles over urbanization processes (Braun 2005; Whitehead 2003), which may be trenchant opposition or declining interest. As Amin and Thrift (2017, pp. 160– 161) argue: ‘The supposed technicalities of urban provisioning turn out to be an enormous political hinterland of access to resources, of proximity to and distance from contamination, of scripts of spatial and social selection written into objects which have broken out of the frames in which human thinking had formerly confined them’.

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     29

Infrastructure processes become an ongoing achievement requiring constant maintenance and readjustment across shifting elements of permanence and change (Castan Broto and Bulkeley 2013). These processes exceed a host of boundaries, becoming transformative in their dynamic, mobile constitution and the shifting exchanges they order and reorder. Indeed, taking into account the overflows and ‘spills’ of engagements with socio-technical systems may help to forge new pathways of change: ‘Impurifications are not aberrations to be scrubbed from the data, but are the very gist of what constitutes the emergence and transformation of environments, as well as their practices and imaginings’ (Gabrys 2009, p. 671). This all points towards a politics of eco-urbanism that is less concerned with studying only external conflicts resulting from infrastructure deployment, than tracing an internal set of struggles around urban material circulation processes wherein infrastructure, actor positions and their shifting relational dynamics dialectically constitute each other. In other words, in tracing the ‘imbalances’ of metabolic flows—energy, waste and water flows and interconnections which redistribute fluids around the city—we can capture some of the political contours of the making and remaking of urban environments which circulate, redistribute and rebundle a variety of potentials and possibilities, inclusions and exclusions, costs and benefits. These concerns for the making and remaking of green cities through a combination of infrastructural elements including ambitious ecoprojects, technical networks and material and energy flows must be situated within their changing wider cultural and political contexts. Understanding of how particular initiatives and configurations are linked to dominant ecological ideas and imaginaries of the time helps to identify the potentially immense significance of infrastructure processes as part of the shaping of urban futures. In Last Futures, for example, Douglas Murphy (2016) revisits the architectural projects of the late 1960s and early 1970s which offered fantastical yet material attempts to come to terms with global ecological crisis and emerging recognition of planetary limits. His analysis grounds avant-garde futures in particular projects for inhabiting the Earth in conjunction with changing (views of ) natures, thus demonstrating ‘glimmers of potential’ (p. 5) for today’s

30     J. Rutherford

socio-technical challenges. Albeit perhaps on a more modest scale, urban infrastructure projects are currently imagined and implemented with strikingly similar future world-making goals: ‘Infrastructure provides the trails from the past into the future that, like the Australian dreaming, do not just locate us but tell us what we are’ (Amin and Thrift 2017, p. 96). But whereas some of Murphy’s projects were tentative efforts at working within limits, the tendency today, as we see in this section, under the dominant narrative of ecological modernization, is a promotion of transcendence, the defining of ways to bypass, avoid or benefit from crisis and constraint (Hodson and Marvin 2010b). As well as fitting neatly with the transferability of designs, models and technologies which can be marketed and deployed the world over, this transcendence notably effaces ideas of working within environmental limits to growth by overcoming technological and cultural limits for growth, thus creating urban repositories for state-of-the-art global dwelling that are not constrained (e.g. in technology or finance…) by their immediate milieux. It is in this sense that the nature of political infrastructures, as uncovered in the following chapters, is of concern beyond local struggles and disputed entanglements of humans and non-humans, as these come to be part of bigger debates already engaged over the uncertain urban, ecological limits to planetary futures, which are the veritable substance of material political processes of transitions to sustainability.

Towards Material Politics/Critical Hybridity Consideration of emerging processes of sustainability transition, the effectivity of materials and their contribution to shifting humanenvironment relations, and the wider politics of urban ecological change allows us to push forward the conceptualization from earlier in the chapter of the urban as fully formative of ongoing reconfigurations of human–environment relations. It moves the focus onto the material and political components, modalities and outcomes of change which make and remake the urban. In fine, conceiving the urban in constantly evolving material and political terms is to focus on how meaningful socio-technical change comes about.

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     31

Gandy (2014, p. 24) argues that ‘The story of urban environmental change, and the politics of infrastructure networks, are marked to a significant degree by the largely unseen and unrecorded dimensions to human experience’. In this view, the question becomes how infrastructure comes to matter in a given situation, moment or locality, and for whom, and thus how particular infrastructural situations are made or rendered visible and thus political. This issue and process is the crux of the following chapters. Two recent works offer particularly useful contributions to understanding this material politics of urban socio-technical change. Andrew Barry traces the conflicts that emerged during the construction of a long distance oil pipeline, especially those around the quality, nature and meaning of certain materials and objects, but also in the production and dissemination of information on the project. From his perspective, infrastructure is not a ‘passive and stable foundation on which politics takes place’ (Barry 2013, p. 1). Rather, the politics of socio-technical change are actively produced and indeed constituted by artefacts and relations of infrastructure systems which become fundamental to the conduct and possibilities of politics. In this view, many of the tensions and struggles over socio-technical systems emerge around the flows, infrastructures and materialities which make up the system and its functioning (see also Mitchell 2011). There is neither a pre-given shared understanding of the nature of the system, and its ‘basic’ components and interactions (for example, what a district heating network or electricity system is), nor agreement over dispositions and configurations of the system for ‘sustainable’ present and future provision of any particular city. There is, instead, always a series of competing accounts (information) of the nature, meaning, significance and future of infrastructure and technology. This constitutes a ‘political situation’ around any transition, with indeterminate and contingent bounds and significance, which calls for ‘an expansion of the range of elements that should be considered when analyzing a controversy…’ (Barry 2013, p. 11). So one aim of the chapter studies is to follow Barry in ‘developing accounts of the political geography of materials whose ongoing existence is associated with the production of information’ (Barry 2013, p. 5). Then we might see in all this information (about logistics/circulation of materials

32     J. Rutherford

and flows of power) not consensus and shared visions of urban futures but ‘new concerns, sites and problems about which it matters to disagree’ (Barry 2013, p. 5), and therefore new political possibilities forged from engagement with materialities. Keller Easterling’s (2014) excavation of infrastructure space is also a useful intervention into this material political process. She traces a series of ‘active forms’, or underlying markers, which always give infrastructure a ‘disposition’ or a potential, in which we can detect the organization and outcomes of socio-technical activity (Easterling 2014, p. 73). This helps to uncover the wider, often hidden, significance of particular configurations, but crucially this also may then create possibilities for intervention or ‘hacking’: ‘finding switches and connectors that can amplify policy intentions and isolate damaging eventualities…’ (Amin and Thrift 2017, p. 160). She shows the pertinence of an immanent approach which tracks always emerging configurations in situ rather than against pre-given ideas of networks and their components. Local forms and processes hook into, reproduce and expand, and thus make visible, the workings of global infrastructure space as a ‘technological zone’ (Barry 2001) with common standards, regulations and procedures which assist governability. Here, infrastructure is in constant flux, always doing something, exceeding its immediate constitution (Latour 2005), reflecting how it is put to work through material political processes (circulation, ordering, manipulation) of ‘active forms’ such as multipliers, switches, topologies and stories. Infrastructure becomes a site or arena of material politics as particular social interests engage with and appropriate in contested ways a variety of systems, objects and components that are not necessarily passive in their make-up, functioning and activity (e.g. Braun and Whatmore 2010). Building on Barry, Easterling and other scholars, the following chapters zoom in on and dissect particular ongoing urban infrastructural processes which constitute material enactments of sociotechnical futures. In each case, the focus is at once on the policy context, the capacities and actions of various actors present, and the various materials and technologies put to work to meet or divert specific interests. These always emerging hybrid processes work through lively tensions, conflicts and overflows producing not just new urban infrastructures

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     33

but also shifting, uneven relations between technologies, humans and environments: ‘reorganising socio-technical worlds, in which what we call social, natural and technical processes are present at every point’ (Mitchell 2011, p. 239; see also Latour 2005; Callon et al. 2001). Holding together transition/emergence, hybridity and criticality is a precarious affair itself replete with tension and contradiction. It requires openness to possibilities and at the same time some form of normative concern for potentially uneven and unequal configurations, and even the potential for ‘hacking’ infrastructure space (Easterling 2014). Actors have at best a partial, temporary grasp over bits of very complex socio-technical systems such that notions of agency, flows and mechanisms of functioning and change are increasingly indistinguishable. At the same time, we are attached to political systems in which specific individuals have to be held accountable for actions or lack of actions such as gaps between aspirations and actual measurable or visible results. Bennett (2005, p. 464) captures neatly the crucial conundrum between responsibility/intentionality and a more symmetric effectivity: ‘It is ultimately a matter of political judgment what is more needed today: should we acknowledge the distributive quality of agency in order to address the power of human-nonhuman assemblages and to resist a politics of blame? Or should we persist with a strategic understatement of material agency in the hope of enhancing the accountability of specific humans?’ There is no definitive response to this question, but sensitivity to the unruliness and vitality of matter (see Braun and Whatmore 2010) may at the very least open up what Damian White and colleagues (2016) call a critical hybridity perspective on always emerging socio-ecological processes and human-environment relations. This recognizes that the material politics of urban transition works through, and not against, human agency, but a recombinant agency in which the potentials and performances of materials and technologies can help to ‘activate’ new political actions and strategies: ‘Objects matter. Non-humans matter. Entanglements matter. Yet, when all is said and done, it is our view that a more just, egalitarian, democratic and hopeful anthropocene will only be brought into being by reclaiming, celebrating and channeling the productive and reconstructive potential of us. Yes, us – entangled, diverse, fractured hybrid humans as inventive

34     J. Rutherford

hominids, creative gardeners, critical publics, political agents’ (White et al. 2016, p. xx). This perspective is particularly useful for its openness to the possibilities of change, its desire to explore new relations between humans, technology and their environments, and its concern for critically understanding the wider politics of provisional socio-technical configurations. Indeed, while we can say there are only ever ongoing processes of future-making enacted only ever by human–environment hybrids and working only ever through struggles and contests (Callon et al. 2001; Luke 2003), far from being reductive this stance opens up and diversifies possible pathways, participants and politics of urban socio-technical change. This is crucial if we accept that current ongoing configurations are unlikely to be sufficient to bring about the progressive change urgently needed. These are elements which underpin the stories of infrastructure entanglements and emerging urban futures in the following chapters.

References Affolderbach, Julia, and Christian Schulz. 2016. Mobile Transitions: Exploring Synergies for Urban Sustainability Research. Urban Studies 53 (9): 1942–1957. Akerman, Maria, and Taru Peltola. 2006. Constituting the Space for Decision Making: Conflicting Calculations in a Dispute over Fuel Choice at a Local Heating Plant. Geoforum 37: 779–789. Amin, Ash. 2014. Lively Infrastructure. Theory, Culture and Society 31 (7/8): 137–161. Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift. 2002. Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity Press. Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift. 2017. Seeing Like a City. London: Polity Press. Angelo, Hillary, and David Wachsmuth. 2014. Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39 (1): 16–27. Online. Bakker, Karen. 2012. Water: Political, Biopolitical, Material. Social Studies of Science 42 (4): 616–623.

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     35

Barry, Andrew. 2001. Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society. London: Athlone Press. Barry, Andrew. 2013. Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline. Chichester: Wiley. Bennett, Jane. 2005. The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout. Public Culture 17 (3): 445–465. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Betsill, Michele, and Harriet Bulkeley. 2007. Looking Back and Thinking Ahead: A Decade of Cities and Climate Change Research. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 12 (5): 447–456. Bijker, Wiebe. 2007. Dikes and Dams, Thick with Politics. Isis 98 (1): 109–123. Bijker, Wiebe, and Trevor Pinch. 2012. Preface to the Anniversary Edition. In The Social Construction of Technological Systems, 2nd ed, ed. W. Bijker, T. Hughes, and T. Pinch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Björkman, Lisa, and Andrew Harris. 2018. Engineering Cities: Mediating Materialities, Infrastructural Imaginaries and Shifting Regimes of Urban Expertise. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42 (2): 244–262. Blok, Anders. 2013. Urban Green Assemblages: An ANT View on Sustainable City Building Projects. Science & Technology Studies 26 (1): 5–24. Bouzarovski, Stefan. 2016. Retrofitting the City: Residential Flexibility, Resilience and the Built Environment. London: I.B. Tauris. Bowker, Geoffrey. 1994. Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920–1940. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Braun, Bruce. 2005. Environmental Issues: Writing a More-Than-Human Urban Geography. Progress in Human Geography 29 (5): 635–650. Braun, Bruce, and Sarah Whatmore (eds.). 2010. Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brenner, Neil (ed.). 2014. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis. Bulkeley, Harriet, and Michelle Betsill. 2003. Cities and Climate Change: Urban Sustainability and Global Environmental Governance. Oxon, NY: Routledge.

36     J. Rutherford

Bulkeley, Harriet, Vanesa Castan Broto, M. Hodson, and S. Marvin (eds.). 2011. Cities and Low Carbon Transitions. London: Routledge. Bulkeley, Harriet, Vanesa Castan Broto, and Anne Maassen. 2014. Low Carbon Transitions and the Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructure. Urban Studies 51: 1471–1486. Callon, Michel, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe. 2001. Agir dans un Monde Incertain: Essai sur la Democratie Technique. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Caprotti, Federico. 2014a. Critical Research on Eco-Cities? A Walk Through the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City, China. Cities 36: 10–17. Caprotti, Federico. 2014b. Eco-Urbanism and the Eco-City, or, Denying the Right to the City? Antipode 46 (5): 1285–1303. Caprotti, Federico, and Joanna Romanowicz. 2013. Thermal Eco-Cities: Green Building and Urban Thermal Metabolism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (6): 1949–1967. Castan Broto, Vanesa, and Harriet Bulkeley. 2013. Maintaining Climate Change Experiments: Urban Political Ecology and the Everyday Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructure. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37(6): 1934–1948. Chatzis, Konstantinos. 2017. Introduction. In Les Métamorphoses des Infrastructures: Entre Beton et Numérique, ed. K. Chatzis, G. Jeannot, V. November and P. Ughetto. New York: Peter Lang. Coenen, Lars, and Bernhard Truffer. 2012. Spaces and Scales of Sustainability Transitions: Geographical Contributions to an Emerging Research and Policy Field. European Planning Studies 20 (3): 367–374. Cook, Ian, and Erik Swyngedouw. 2012. Cities, Social Cohesion and the Environment: Towards a Future Research Agenda. Urban Studies 49 (9): 1959–1979. Coutard, Olivier, and Jean-Pierre Lévy (eds.). 2010. Ecologies Urbaines. Paris: Economica-Anthropos. Coutard, Olivier, and Jonathan Rutherford. 2016a. Beyond the Networked City—An Introduction. In Beyond the Networked City: Infrastructure Reconfigurations and Urban Change in the North and South, ed. O. Coutard and J. Rutherford. Abingdon: Routledge. Coutard, Olivier, and Jonathan Rutherford (eds.). 2016b. Beyond the Networked City: Infrastructure Reconfigurations and Urban Change in the North and South. Abingdon: Routledge. Covenant of Mayors. n.d. Covenant of Mayors: Committed to Local Sustainable Energy. http://www.covenantofmayors.eu/index_en.html.

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     37

Cugurullo, Federico. 2013. The Business of Utopia: Estidama and the Road to the Sustainable City. Utopian Studies 24 (1): 66–88. De Jong, Martin, Simon Joss, Daan Schraven, Changjie Zhan, and Margot Weijnen. 2015. Sustainable–Smart–Resilient–Low Carbon–Eco– Knowledge Cities: Making Sense of a Multitude of Concepts Promoting Sustainable Urbanization. Journal of Cleaner Production 109: 25–38. Desfor, Gene, and Roger Keil. 2004. Nature and the City: Making Environmental Policy in Toronto and Los Angeles. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Easterling, Keller. 2014. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso. Edwards, Paul. 2002. Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems. In Modernity and Technology, ed. T. Misa, P. Brey, and A. Feenberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Edwards, Paul, Geoffrey Bowker, Steven Jackson, and Robin Williams. 2009. Introduction: An Agenda for Infrastructure Studies. Journal of the Association for Information Systems 10: 364–374. Eggers, Dave. 2012. A Hologram for the King. London: Penguin. Elzen, B., F. Geels, and K. Green (eds.). 2004. System Innovation and the Transition to Sustainability: Theory, Evidence and Policy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Energy Cities. 2014. Empowering Local and Regional Authorities to Deliver the EU Climate and Energy Objectives. Paris: Energy Cities. http://www. energy-cities.eu/IMG/pdf/comm_2030_amended_web.pdf. 18 February 2014. Farias, Ignacio, and Thomas Bender (eds.). 2010. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. London: Routledge. Filion, Pierre. 2013. The Infrastructure Is the Message: Shaping the Suburban Morphology and Lifestyle. In Suburban Constellations, ed. R. Keil. Berlin: Jovis. Furlong, Kathryn. 2011. Small Technologies, Big Change: Rethinking Infrastructure Through STS and Geography. Progress in Human Geography 34 (4): 460–482. Gabrys, Jennifer. 2009. Sink: The Dirt of Systems. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 666–681. Gailing, Ludger, and Timothy Moss (eds.). 2016. Conceptualizing Germany’s Energy Transition: Institutions, Materiality, Power, Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

38     J. Rutherford

Gandy, Matthew. 2004. Rethinking Urban Metabolism: Water, Space and the Modern City. City 8 (3): 363–379. Gandy, Matthew. 2014. The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. GDF Suez. 2010. Cities of Tomorrow: Rediscovering Energy. ed. G. S. International Relations Directorate. Paris: GDF Suez. Geels, Frank W. 2002. Technological Transitions as Evolutionary Reconfiguration Processes: A Multi-Level Perspective and a Case-Study. Research Policy 31 (8–9): 1257–1274. Geels, Frank W. 2014. Regime Resistance Against Low-Carbon Transitions: Introducing Politics and Power into the Multi-Level Perspective. Theory, Culture and Society 31 (5): 21–40. Geels, Frank W., and Johan Schot. 2007. Typology of Sociotechnical Transition Pathways. Research Policy 36 (3): 399–417. Girardet, Herbert. 2000. Cities, People, Planet. In Liverpool Schumacher Lectures. Urban Sustainability. April. Graham, Stephen, and Colin McFarlane (eds.). 2015. Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context. Abingdon: Routledge. Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge. Greenpeace. 2005. Decentralising Power: An Energy Revolution for the 21st Century. London: Greenpeace. Guy, Simon, and Simon Marvin. 1999. Understanding Sustainable Cities: Competing Urban Futures. European Urban and Regional Studies 6 (3): 268–275. Hammer, Stephen, Lamia Kamal-Chaoui, Alexis Robert, and Marissa Plouin. 2011. Cities and Green Growth: A Conceptual Framework. OECD Regional Development Working Papers 8. Paris: OECD Publishing. Haughton, Graham. 1997. Developing Sustainable Urban Development Models. Cities 14 (4): 189–195. Hawkey, David, Janette Webb, Heather Lovell, David McCrone, Margaret Tingey, and Mark Winskel. 2016. Sustainable Urban Energy Policy: Heat and the City. Abingdon: Routledge. Hess, David. 2013. Sustainability Transitions: A Political Coalition Perspective. Research Policy 43 (2): 278–283. Heynen, Nikolas, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw. 2006a. Urban Political Ecology: Politicizing the Production of Urban Natures. In The Nature of

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     39

Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, ed. N. Heynen, M. Kaika, and E. Swyngedouw. London: Routledge. Heynen, Nikolas, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw (eds.). 2006b. In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London: Routledge. Hodson, Mike, and Simon Marvin. 2009. Urban Ecological Security: A New Urban Paradigm? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33: 193–215. Hodson, Mike, and Simon Marvin. 2010a. Can Cities Shape Sociotechnical Transitions and How Would We Know If They Were? Research Policy 39 (4): 477–485. Hodson, Mike, and Simon Marvin. 2010b. Urbanism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Urbanism or Premium Ecological Enclaves? City 14 (3): 298–313. Hommels, Anique. 2005. Studying Obduracy in the City: Toward a Productive Fusion Between Technology Studies and Urban Studies. Science, Technology and Human Values 30 (3): 323–351. Hubbard, Phil. 2006. City. Abingdon: Routledge. Hughes, Thomas. 1983. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930. London: Johns Hopkins University Press. International Energy Agency. 2009. Cities, Towns and Renewable Energy: Yes in My Front Yard. Paris: IEA and OECD. Jackson, Steven, Paul Edwards, Geoffrey Bowker, and Cory Knobel. 2007. Understanding Infrastructure: History, Heuristics, and Cyberinfrastructure Policy. First Monday 12 (6), June 2007, https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index. php/fm/article/view/1904/1786. Joss, Simon. 2010. Eco-Cities: A Global Survey 2009. In The Sustainable City VI: Urban Regeneration and Sustainability, ed. C. Brebbia, S. Hernández, and E. Tiezzi. Ashurst: WIT Press. Joss, Simon. 2011. Eco-Cities: The Mainstreaming of Urban Sustainability: Key Characteristics and Driving Factors. International Journal of Sustainable Development and Planning 6 (3): 268–285. Kaika, Maria, and Erik Swyngedouw. 2000. Fetishizing the Modern City: The Phantasmagoria of Urban Technological Networks. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 (1): 120–138. Kallianos, Yannis. 2018. Infrastructural Disorder: The Politics of Disruption, Contingency, and Normalcy in Waste Infrastructures in Athens. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36 (4): 758–775.

40     J. Rutherford

Kamal-Chaoui, Lamia, and Alexis Robert. 2009. Competitive Cities and Climate Change. OECD Regional Development Working Papers 2. Paris: OECD Publishing. Karvonen, Andrew. 2011. Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Karvonen, Andrew, and Bas van Heur. 2014. Urban Laboratories: Experiments in Reworking Cities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (2): 379–392. Keil, Roger. 2003. Urban Political Ecology. Urban Geography 24 (8): 723–738. Kenworthy, Jeffrey. 2006. The Eco-City: Ten Key Transport and Planning Dimensions for Sustainable City Development. Environment & Urbanization 18 (1): 67–85. Keucheyan, Razmig. 2014. La nature est un champ de bataille: essai d’écologie politique. Paris: Zones. Krueger, Rob, and David Gibbs (eds.). 2007. The Sustainable Development Paradox. New York: Guilford Press. Krueger, Rob, and Julian Agyeman. 2005. Sustainability Schizophrenia or “Actually Existing Sustainabilities?” Toward a Broader Understanding of the Politics and Promise of Local Sustainability in the US. Geoforum 36 (4): 410–417. Larkin, Brian. 2013. The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–343. Latham, Alan. 2016. Materialities. In Urban Theory: New Critical Perspectives, ed. M. Jayne and K. Ward. Abingdon: Routledge. Latham, A., and D. McCormack. 2004. Moving Cities: Rethinking the Materialities of Urban Geographies. Progress in Human Geography 28 (6): 701–724. Latham, Alan, Derek McCormack, Kim McNamara, and Donald McNeill. 2009. Constructions. In Key Concepts in Urban Geography, ed. A. Latham, D. McCormack, K. McNamara, and D. McNeill. London: Sage. Latour, Bruno. 2004a. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004b. Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry 30: 225–248. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Emilie Hermant. 1998. Paris Ville Invisible. Paris: La Découverte.

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     41

Law, John. 1987. Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion. In The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. W. Bijker, T. Hughes, and T. Pinch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lawhon, Mary, and James Murphy. 2011. Socio-Technical Regimes and Sustainability Transitions: Insights from Political Ecology. Progress in Human Geography 36 (3): 354–378. Lees, Loretta. 2002. Rematerializing Geography: The ‘New’ Urban Geography. Progress in Human Geography 26 (1): 101–112. Loftus, Alex. 2012. Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Luke, Timothy. 2003. Global Cities vs. ‘Global Cities’: Rethinking Contemporary Urbanism as Public Ecology. Studies in Political Economy 70: 11–33. Maassen, Anne. 2012. Heterogeneity of Lock-in and the Role of Strategic Technological Interventions in Urban Infrastructural Transformations. European Planning Studies 20 (3): 441–460. MacLeod, Gordon, and Martin Jones. 2011. Renewing Urban Politics. Urban Studies 48 (12): 2443–2472. Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. Abingdon: Routledge. Markard, Jochen, Rob Raven, and Bernhard Truffer. 2012. Sustainability Transitions: An Emerging Field of Research and Its Prospects. Research Policy 41 (6): 955–967. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. McCormick, Kes, Stefan Anderberg, Lars Coenen, and Lena Neij. 2013. Advancing Sustainable Urban Transformation. Journal of Cleaner Production 50: 1–11. McFarlane, Colin, and Jonathan Rutherford. 2008. Political Infrastructures: Governing and Experiencing the Fabric of the City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32 (2): 363–374. Meadowcroft, James. 2009. What About the Politics? Sustainable Development, Transition Management, and Long Term Energy Transitions. Policy Sciences 42: 323–340. Meadowcroft, James. 2011. Engaging with the Politics of Sustainability Transitions. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 1 (1): 70–75.

42     J. Rutherford

Meehan, Katie. 2014. Tool-Power: Water Infrastructure as Wellsprings of State Power. Geoforum 57: 215–224. Melosi, Martin. 2000. The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present. London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso. Monstadt, J. 2009. Conceptualizing the Political Ecology of Urban Infrastructures: Insights from Technology and Urban Studies. Environment and Planning A 41 (8): 1924–1942. Moss, Timothy. 2014. Socio-Technical Change and the Politics of Urban Infrastructure: Managing Energy in Berlin Between Dictatorship and Democracy. Urban Studies 51 (7): 1432–1448. Murdoch, Jonathan. 1997. Towards a Geography of Heterogeneous Associations. Progress in Human Geography 21 (3): 321–337. Murphy, Douglas. 2016. Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture. London: Verso. Nevens, Frank, Niki Frantzeskaki, Leen Gorissen, and Derk Loorbach. 2013. Urban Transition Labs: Co-creating Transformative Action for Sustainable Cities. Journal of Cleaner Production 50: 111–122. Newman, P., T. Beatley, and H. Boyer. 2009. Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change. Washington: Island Press. OECD. 2010. Cities and Climate Change. Paris: OECD Publishing. Pickerill, Jenny, and Larch Maxey. 2009. Geographies of Sustainability: Low Impact Developments and Radical Spaces of Innovation. Geography Compass 3 (4): 1515–1539. Rapoport, Elizabeth. 2014. Utopian Visions and Real Estate Dreams: The EcoCity Past, Present and Future. Geography Compass 8 (2): 137–149. Rohracher, Harald, and Phillip Späth. 2014. The Interplay of Urban Energy Policy and Socio-Technical Transitions: The Eco-Cities of Graz and Freiburg in Retrospect. Urban Studies 51 (7): 1415–1431. Roorda, Chris, Suzanne Maas, Niki Frantzeskaki, and Karen Fortuin. 2012. Systems Analysis for Urban Sustainability Transitions: A Joint Understanding of Complexity and Dynamics. In 3rd International Urban Research Symposium. Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Roseland, Mark. 1997. Dimensions of the Eco-City. Cities 14 (4): 197–202. Rotmans, J., R. Kemp, and M. van Asselt. 2001. More Evolution Than Revolution: Transition Management in Public Policy. Foresight 3 (1): 15–31.

1  Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure     43

Seyfang, Gill, and Adrian Smith. 2007. Grassroots Innovations for Sustainable Development: Towards a New Research and Policy Agenda. Environmental Politics 16 (4): 584–603. Shove, Elizabeth, and Gordon Walker. 2007. CAUTION! Transitions Ahead: Politics, Practice, and Sustainable Transition Management. Environment and Planning A 39 (4): 763–770. Smith, Neil. 2007. Nature as Accumulation Strategy. Socialist Register 43: 16–36. Star, S.L. 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist 43 (3): 377–391. Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. 1996. Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information Systems Research 7 (1): 111–134. Summerton, Jane (ed.). 1994. Changing Large Technical Systems. Boulder: Westview. Swyngedouw, Erik. 1996. The City as a Hybrid: On Nature, Society and Cyborg Urbanization. Capitalism Nature Socialism 7 (2): 65–80. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2015. Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tarr, J., and G. Dupuy (eds.). 1988. Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America. Philadephia: Temple University Press. Thrift, Nigel. 2005. But Malice Aforethought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2): 133–150. Truffer, Bernhard, and Lars Coenen. 2012. Environmental Innovation and Sustainability Transitions in Regional Studies. Regional Studies 46 (1): 1–21. Turnheim, Bruno, and Frank Geels. 2013. The Destabilisation of Existing Regimes: Confronting a Multi-dimensional Framework with a Case Study of the British Coal Industry (1913–1967). Research Policy 42 (10): 1749–1767. UN-HABITAT. 2011. Cities and Climate Change: Policy Directions (Global Report on Human Settlements 2011). New York: United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Wessberg, Nina. 2002. Local Decisions in the Finnish Energy Production Network: A Socio-Technical Perspective. Landscape and Urban Planning 61: 137–146. Whatmore, Sarah. 2002. Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures and Spaces. London: Sage.

44     J. Rutherford

While, Aidan, Andrew Jonas, and David Gibbs. 2004. The Environment and the Entrepreneurial City: Searching for the Urban ‘Sustainability Fix’ in Manchester and Leeds. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28 (3): 549–569. White, Damian, Alan Rudy, and Brian Gareau. 2016. Environments, Natures and Social Theory: Towards a Critical Hybridity. London: Palgrave. White, Damian, and Chris Wilbert (eds.). 2009. Technonatures: Environments, Technologies, Spaces, and Places in the Twenty-First Century. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Whitehead, Mark. 2003. (Re)Analysing the Sustainable City: Nature, Urbanisation and the Regulation of Socio-Environmental Relations in the UK. Urban Studies 40 (7): 1183–1206. Winner, Langdon. 2004. Technologies as Forms of Life. In Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, ed. D. Kaplan. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Wittmayer, Julia, Chris Roorda, and Frank van Steenbergen. 2014. Governing Urban Sustainability Transitions—Inspiring examples. Rotterdam: DRIFT and Erasmus University. Wolfram, Marc, and Niki Frantzeskaki. 2015. Urban Sustainability Transitions: From Emergent Scientific Trajectories Towards a Future Agenda in Research, Policy and Practice. World Bank. 2010a. Cities and Climate Change: Responding to an Urgent Agenda. Urban Development Series Knowledge Papers 10. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. 2010b. Eco2 Cities: Ecological Cities as Economic Cities. Washington, DC: World Bank.

2 Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces and Remaking Socio-Technical Configurations in Outer Stockholm

Introduction The intertwined dynamics and tensions between urban and infrastructure development are often fully on display in suburban areas at the edge of city and grid. In the peripheral and less dense areas of some European regions—areas that are not (yet) served by centralized infrastructure systems—local planners, technicians and residents are questioning the relevance of water and energy network extensions. In contexts of low population density and distinctive modes of residence, actors and authorities are balancing possible returns on investment from network deployment and use, and the technical difficulties and additional costs of laying and maintaining the necessary cables and pipes. These areas that lie beyond the network may be included in future extension plans or may remain more dependent on alternative infrastructure arrangements which are already adapted to suburban living. Filion and Keil (2017) argue that there is a clear articulation between ‘suburbanization’ as a process of making and remaking the suburbs and ‘suburbanisms’ as ways of inhabiting these areas. © The Author(s) 2020 J. Rutherford, Redeploying Urban Infrastructure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_2

45

46     J. Rutherford

Infrastructure systems are an important means of sustaining this articulation in their extending and reworking of suburban living spaces through resource and service provision. These systems have always either accompanied and supported, or preceded and stimulated, urban growth. Yet, paradoxically, the actual forms and processes of making and remaking suburban infrastructure configurations are largely ignored, and indeed ‘massively unknown’ and ‘working as the ultimate black box’ (Filion and Keil 2017, p. 9; but see Keil 2013; Addie 2016). Much work on infrastructure in suburban contexts has usually restricted itself to the study of the relative financial cost of sprawl or extended urban development compared to that of densification (for an overview, see Jaglin and May 2010), reducing both suburbanization to a narrow and preset techno-economic issue which can objectively inform more efficient planning practice, and infrastructure to generic and passive equipment, the features and specificities of which have little influence on development. Eschewing this limited perspective, this chapter explores the circumstances, processes and implications of reconfiguring water infrastructures in outer areas of the Stockholm region where particular hybrid socio-technical arrangements for water provision and wastewater removal are at the heart of changing forms, modalities and outcomes of local development and modes of residence. There is a wider resonance to this case, as it offers a perspective on, and wider lessons for, urban futures more broadly. At the fringes of urban spaces and grid systems, as conventionally thought, are important transformations of socio-technical infrastructure space which reflect the status of ‘in-between’ areas as a major zone of recent residential, functional and infrastructure change (Young et al. 2011). Exploring infrastructure here provides analytical purchase on constantly shifting frontiers between collective organization and individual liberty, public and private realms, industrial and vernacular technology, untamed ‘nature’ and societal reproduction (see Desfor and Keil 2004; Gandy 2014). The dynamics of infrastructure, where it is actually being deployed or redeployed, thus reshuffle a host of given interactions and arrangements in a potentially distinctive politics of infrastructure beyond networked urbanism.

2  Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces …     47

Thinking (Sub)Urban Infrastructure Configurations from the South? An emergent and processual notion of infrastructure, as sketched out in Chapter 1, can be relevant across different urbanizing contexts, and help to unpack the specificities of infrastructural change outside of dense, central cities in areas where economies of scale, modes of residence and living, and the technical processes of deploying, maintaining, reconfiguring and using infrastructure are quite distinct. Some recent work on urban infrastructure has dispensed with the traditional narrative of growth and extension of centralized technical networks as an epistemological, practical and aspirational norm (see Coutard and Rutherford 2016), and focused on how infrastructure is actually lived and experienced in diverse ways (see Graham and McFarlane 2015). It is a fair assumption that suburban areas constitute, and are constituted by, a hybrid and persistently evolving set of configurations and practices of dealing with, planning for and experiencing infrastructure that do not necessarily relate or respond to a single, settled ideal or model. Studying, knowing and accounting for suburban infrastructure thus requires dispensing with any assumption that the suburbs are marginal areas within larger infrastructure territories, whose residents lie passively in wait for the usual urban connections, flows and accessibilities. There are likely to be distinctive systems, relations and mixes of components which fit or work together very differently, and involve the labour, expertise and strategic efforts of many different actors in discrete combinations. It is here that studies of infrastructure in cities of the South may be helpful in exploring heterogeneous configurations which become part of urbanizing processes more generally. As Monstadt and Schramm have suggested, this work may ‘provide insights for better understanding recent changes in the technological fabric of cities in the global North, where more diversified socio-technical arrangements increasingly challenge urban and infrastructure planning’ (Monstadt and Schramm 2017, p. 123). This scholarship is particularly useful as it highlights at least three pertinent points which speak to a socio-technical perspective

48     J. Rutherford

by drawing out the indivisible social significance of particular s­ystem configurations. First, there are often multiple, co-existing forms of provision, services and/or waters, as is highlighted in a range of cases from metropolitan Jakarta (Kooy and Bakker 2008, p. 375) across sub-Saharan African cities (Jaglin 2012) to smaller cities of South America (Furlong 2015). These arrangements are built on long entrenched histories of fragmented systems and differentiated access to these systems (McFarlane 2008, p. 417; Kooy and Bakker 2008, p. 376; Jaglin 2005; Gandy 2008), which constitute a very different dynamic to that of the splintering of an ‘infrastructural ideal’ and its associated socio-technical arrangements (Graham and Marvin 2001; see Coutard 2008). Second, in many contexts in the South, there is adaptation already to this diversity of arrangements as everyday practices and routines maintain and reproduce these co-evolving systems as a working norm involving economic exchange, labour and material engagement (Silver 2014; Baptista 2015). In some cases, crisis, disrepair or dysfunction, unreliable or sporadic service and poor quality meet expectations of any ‘norm’, with many people having long adjusted to such situations and to the effort required to maintain these arrangements (Furlong 2015). Third, these existing socio-technical systems are acutely formative of particular subjectivities, agencies and urban citizenship more broadly, as difference and inequality between social groups and spaces is materially and discursively inscribed in infrastructure configurations (McFarlane and Rutherford 2008, p. 366; McFarlane 2008; Kooy and Bakker 2008). This is shown in the relationship between classification of residents, differentiation of spaces and inequality of access to services (Kooy and Bakker 2008; Anand 2011), where infrastructure becomes a governmental means to make self-governing hygienic, moral subjects and to regulate ‘the conditions of possibility of urban life’ (McFarlane 2008, p. 418). Infrastructure in the urbanizing South is thus visible and active— ‘lived materiality’ in Graham et al.’s (2015) terms—and has long been formative of the nature and repercussions of the urban political here through an imbrication of ‘discursive strategies, socio-economic agendas, identity formation, and infrastructure creation; an iterative process with changing patterns of socio-spatial access to water supply as an

2  Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces …     49

artefact’ (Kooy and Bakker 2008, pp. 385–386). We can draw on this knowledge of established infrastructure situations and experiences in the South in order to think through the meaning of shifting practices and arrangements in the North. Many infrastructure projects in the North are being linked to different ecological and economic necessities and thus may come to promote multiple, co-evolving configurations within which residents must adapt, negotiate and maintain their own arrangements. In doing so, they forge residence, belonging or citizenship through infrastructure. I suggest that this is the case with regard to water and wastewater systems in the Stockholm archipelago, which are bound up in shifting planning practices, residential patterns and the wider socio-politics of this low density area. Infrastructure is tremendously active here in shaping living spaces, as material components and relations constantly constrain and enable suburban possibilities.

Planning for Water and Wastewater Systems in the Stockholm Archipelago For a number of years, the Swedish capital region of Stockholm has seen increasing tensions between demographic and residential change and infrastructure dynamics, especially in relation to water and wastewater systems. The population of Stockholm County (Stockholms län) has been steadily rising every year, modes of residence are transforming, and in some areas what were previously second homes are becoming permanent residences. At the same time, demand for water is increasing, policies generally promote connection to centralized networks, and the costs and financing of infrastructure extension are evolving, while national and European regulation becomes stricter on environmental and health grounds (Svenskt Vatten 2013). In a large part of the county, and especially in the archipelago area, water and wastewater are now at the centre of local planning preoccupations. These are at once economic, environmental and socio-spatial concerns. First, the question of financing local services takes on new importance in a context of residential change with extension of permanently inhabited areas within

50     J. Rutherford

municipalities, local budgetary constraints and an absence of available information about and calculations of costs of supplying services. Water systems also impact on resources and, more generally, on an increasingly fragile suburban environment. Finally, local planning and infrastructure decisions and projects (e.g. whether to extend local networks) influence residential and social equilibriums in municipalities, notably through the redistribution among households of new costs associated with water infrastructure and systems (Stockholms läns landsting 2013). Stockholm County already has very contrasting forms of urban fabric and urbanization processes. Its increasing population of more than 2 million is heavily concentrated in a central ‘belt’ in and around the main city (one of 26 municipalities). Almost half the surface area of the county is forest, while agriculture and water still occupy more land than built-up urban areas which represents only 14% of land use (SCB 2008). This translates into strong variations in density between the 4000 inhabitants/km2 of central Stockholm and archipelago municipalities, where there are sometimes fewer than 100 inhabitants/km2. Regional planners have strongly promoted densification (‘building the city inwards’) and tried to protect countryside and coastal areas from unwarranted sprawl, but local municipalities are responsible for planning policy and have interpreted these guidelines in different ways (RTK 2007; Pemer 2006). However, suburban transformation in Stockholm takes on a particular form constituted by heterogeneous and non-contiguous residential dispersion rather than any standard linear peri-urban diffusion or sprawl. Sparsely populated areas of mostly summerhouses are transformed from secondary summer residences into permanent all year residences requiring constant access to water and wastewater among other services. The drivers of this shift are multiple: urban regional demographic growth, retirees moving out of the city and the search for cheaper alternatives to increasingly expensive and scarce homes in central Stockholm (SLL Office of Regional Planning 2010). One of the main issues for local and regional planners—perhaps even ‘the primary concern’ (regional planner interview, October 2010)— is the presence of around 100,000 seconds homes or ‘summerhouses’ owned mainly by Stockholm residents and located primarily in the

2  Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces …     51

coastal archipelago area. Swedish anthropologists have captured neatly the importance of these second homes in Swedish culture: To many Swedes the summerhouse is of much higher symbolic value than the permanent home. The summerhouse is the happy place where you spend the high value time of vacation, while the home is a necessary requirement, tied to work, the daily rat race and sheer survival. Many urban Swedes dream of moving to the summerhouse, simply because this means moving to a happier place. The opportunity comes when commuting time is shortened, when you work part time or when you don’t have to go to work each day. (Arnstberg and Bergström 2002, pp. 6–7)

The issue is the increasing practice of households moving permanently into these summerhouses. Over the last twenty years, the regional planning office (SLL, formerly RTK) estimates that up to 1000 residences have been transformed every year (regional planning official interview, October 2010). This can lead to problems arising from the fact that the homes were not built for permanent all year living, while municipalities must deal with a population increase and new requirements in the management of local services: Municipalities say that when more than 30% of the people live there permanently, then the area begins to change, because they have greater requirements for services for which the area was not originally intended. And the people only there part-time want to keep it in its half-organised state. And for the municipalities to be able, for example, to draw out municipal water, generally they have to change the whole area and put in twice as many houses, to sell land areas to be able to pay for the whole changing growth, building out the sewerage systems. So it’s a whole change of area that needs to be planned very carefully if everybody’s going to get organised. (regional planning official interview, October 2010)

Provision and management of water and wastewater systems are mandated in Sweden to local municipalities which either take care of these systems themselves or group together in intermunicipal organizations (Sveriges Riksdag 2006). Local decisions are therefore made about which zones to connect to networks and how to regulate or control the

52     J. Rutherford

use of water installations. Costs are financed by tariffs such that what is paid by households is reinvested into local systems (Svenskt Vatten 2000). On a regional level, this inevitably means that there is a great variation1 between tariffs paid by a household in an apartment in central Stockholm and a household living in an isolated house on an island in the archipelago: There is a direct correlation between density or pipe length and the costs. As long as you have a wider spread network, you not only have to invest in longer pipes, but also in pump stations and so on. (intermunicipal water organization official interview, 2010)

Within municipalities, tariffs are standardized with no differentiation operated between households depending on where they live, for example, in relation to the pipe layout. This simplifies billing processes and allows a reasonable level of solidarity between households in the same local area, but it also produces a substantial degree of redistribution across sometimes very large and diverse municipal territories, as illustrated below. Crucially, not all households are connected to local centralized water infrastructure. It is estimated that around 90,000 households in Stockholm county use alternative systems to municipal networks (Kommunförbundet Stockholms Län/VAS-rådet 2006). The most recent regional plans have indeed promoted ‘small-scale solutions’ in sparsely populated areas of the region which ‘may be significantly better than today’s systems’ (SLL Office of Regional Planning 2010, p. 151). In these areas, what is infrastructure beyond the networked city? How do local officials plan for infrastructure? How do residents and other actors contribute to configurations? The central question at hand is to understand how infrastructure matters here as it becomes a nexus for different views of and actions around modes of residence, environment, finance and technology, thus articulating a shifting politics of suburban

1Up to three times more expensive in outer municipalities than in central ones according to figures from Svenskt Vatten.

2  Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces …     53 Table 2.1  Percentage of population connected to centralized water and wastewater systems in Stockholm county municipalities Municipality

% population connected to water network

% population connected to wastewater network

Norrtälje Värmdö Nykvarn Österåker Nynäshamn Vallentuna Vaxholm Södertälje Upplands-Bro Haninge

56.07 58.64 72.60 76.47 79.15 79.61 81.53 84.00 86.61 87.11

56.07 58.64 72.01 76.71 79.15 79.83 81.53 84.00 86.51 85.71

Source Compiled from Svenskt Vatten (2007) figures

socio-technical arrangement. In order to investigate how changing modes of residence and population dynamics are accounted for in local planning decisions and infrastructure provision, I examine the forms, stakes and wide-ranging implications of water and wastewater systems in one municipality of the Stockholm archipelago (Table 2.1).

Infrastructures of Permanence? Norrtälje is the largest municipality in Stockholm County, taking up fully a third of its surface area in the north. Although it is around 70 km from central Stockholm, roads and public transport connections make it an increasingly attractive residential area. Its population of around 60,000 is widely dispersed in a patchwork of small urban centres, hamlets and quite isolated settlements inland, along the coast and on numerous small islands (Fig. 2.1). During weekends and over the summer, its population expands two- or threefold as Stockholmers and others escape to their summerhouses of which there are 25,000 in Norrtälje. Recent local planning policy has taken on a liberal slant under the Moderate (conservative) majority,2 as local politicians have pushed to 2Norrtälje

had a Moderate-led majority in the city council from 1998 to 2014.

54     J. Rutherford

Fig. 2.1  Settlements along the coast in Norrtälje

attract incoming residents for increased tax revenue (local planning official interview, October 2010). They have become permissive of new constructions and extensions, including the formerly protected coastal area. Furthermore, they have also supported permanent residence in summerhouses (local planning official interview, October 2010), with more than 200 having been transformed per year on average over the last twenty years (Norrtälje kommun 2013, p. 22). For the Mayor of Norrtälje, it was ‘a question of local democracy, which does not concern the departments of the state’ (quoted in Dagens Nyheter, 26 February 2008). As a core part of this urbanizing policy, the municipality has explicitly and regularly recognized the need to expand and adjust water infrastructure and service provision for a growing and increasingly permanent population (Norrtälje kommun 2008, 2013, 2015b).

2  Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces …     55

This is an attempt at reconfiguring a multiplicity of systems for a changing residential and suburban fabric. As we can see from Table 2.1, 44% of the population is not connected to local centralized water and wastewater grids, meaning that there are almost 40,000 properties without connection to the municipal wastewater system (Norrtälje kommun 2015b, p. 7). There are particularly important water access and wastewater removal issues on the many islands, some of which are not accessible by bridge (Länsstyrelsen i Stockholms län 2008). One fundamental issue is that many seasonal homes (as in Fig. 2.2) do not have all year round water supply but access only to municipal ‘summer water’ (sommarvatten) which is available six months of the year roughly between May and October (local planning official interview, October 2010). Homes with only summer water supply tend to have ad hoc installations and smaller pipes with valves that must be turned off and protected in advance of cold winter months notably to avoid water freezing in the systems.

Fig. 2.2  Summerhouse residence in Norrtälje

56     J. Rutherford

This diversity of geographical situations and living spaces means that there are, in effect, at least four existing and juxtaposed water system configurations, all with distinctive divisions of ownership, organization, responsibility and financing: • Direct connection of a house or apartment to the centralized network: households pay water tariffs to the municipality which owns and manages the network. • Community connection to the centralized network: a collective cluster of houses is interconnected by a mini-network installation with a single connection point to the municipal grid (households pay tariffs as a community). • Autonomous community systems: a collective cluster of houses installs their own mini-network with small treatment plant and wastewater tank, authorized and regulated by the municipality. • Individual home systems: wells and septic tanks for one property financed and maintained by households, and authorized and regulated by the municipality. The response of Norrtälje municipality was to develop an ambitious, long-term water and wastewater strategy and investment programme in 2007 (Norrtälje kommun 2008). The foundation of this strategy and programme was a categorization of local areas into three zone types: (a) zones of development where homes are being constructed or expanded; (b) zones ‘in transformation’ with primarily summerhouses which are being transformed into permanent homes; and (c) zones for treatment where there are environmental problems or risks including poor water quality, infiltration, eutrophication, leaching and seepage of wastewater into either potable water systems or the Baltic Sea.3 These zones are then dealt with through a three-pronged sustainability strategy for water and wastewater systems. This involved, first, major

3Pollution of the Baltic Sea from alternative systems of wastewater management has been a major problem along the Swedish coast for many years, leading to high-level political discussions among national governments of the Baltic region (Stockholms läns landsting 2013).

2  Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces …     57

long-term investment in new and extended infrastructure in order to support urban growth and extend or upgrade pipes and installations to developing residential areas. This included deploying a big water pipe to the port of Kapellskär and doubling the capacity of the main treatment plant. An outlay of 1.6 billion kronor was planned over twenty years making this the biggest ever-single municipal investment project. This was to be financed primarily by increasing the tariffs paid by all households (in accordance with Swedish law). The original programme plan also mentioned the possibility of resorting to ‘tax-funded liquidity support’ in case of overall losses over three consecutive years (Norrtälje kommun 2008, pp. 25–26). The second part of the strategy was for a series of measures to be introduced for mini-network collectives where a small number of clustered homes group together and maintain a community water system with (or sometimes without) a connection point to the municipal network. The third aspect was to reinforce the regulation of individual systems, those off-grid homes with wells and septic tanks (see Fig. 2.3), which have been the source of many of the environmental problems, but which are expected to increase in number by 2030. Taking these elements together, and drawing on a processual understanding of infrastructure, this strategic intervention around infrastructure planning can be read as an attempt at working through particular configurations of technology, materiality and responsibility.

Heterogeneous Technology What is remarkable here, first, is the acknowledgement that all year round, connection to local municipal networks is neither feasible nor desirable in many sparsely populated areas. Rather than targeting a reduction in the number of households with alternative water systems, the local authority actually envisages this number to increase by 2030 from around 23,000 to 36,000 (Norrtälje kommun 2008). There is then an explicit hierarchy of local areas in terms of existing and possible water systems, in which local planners, residents and a variety of technologies, resources, waters, finance arrangements and regulations become embroiled in creating and maintaining a working solution for

58     J. Rutherford

Fig. 2.3  Off-grid home in Norrtälje with well and septic tank

water provision and wastewater removal, and through this a sustainable suburban living space. In between a direct connection to a centralized network at one end of the scale, and off-grid individual solutions such as wells and septic tanks at the other, are several options that are utilized for small groups of dwellings, which are often located some distance from urban centres. Either the dwellings cluster to connect to a centralized network for ‘summer water’ or more permanently (Fig. 2.4), or they implement collective autonomous solutions, such as a small treatment plant for example, which are used only by the local residents. This stratification of technical solutions according to several local factors (density, distance from network, geographical conditions, seasonal residence, technical possibilities, costs) therefore allows the adaptation of services to vary to some extent, depending on specific contexts and living conditions. This ‘fluid’ approach to infrastructure (de Laet and Mol 2000), operating on the principle that a number of sparsely populated areas will never be supplied by centralized network systems, opposes the

2  Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces …     59

Municipal network Community system Connec on point

Fig. 2.4  ‘Community’ connection to municipal networks (Source Redrawn from Norrtälje kommun, n.d., p. 5)

largely dominant view that network expansion tends to follow, accompany or even anticipate the urbanization of new suburban areas.

Engaging Materials In their work for the Norrtälje programme, the municipality’s technicians and planners came up with a total of 122 zones which required analysis and some form of intervention based on a variety of criteria: residential ‘pressure’ envisaged by 2030, distance to existing network installations, physical conditions for eventual alternative system use, local environmental concerns and economic conditions for extending the municipal network. After analysis using a ‘decision tree method’ (Norrtälje kommun 2008, p. 10), 64 of these zones were classed as suitable for connection to the municipal network system, and the other 58 zones were classed as requiring alternative solutions (either off-grid homes or autonomous community systems). In the former case, this may take the form of a collective group of around twenty homes creating a mini-network system which can then be connected to the central network. This form necessitates a land survey first, but is encouraged by the municipality as it creates a sustainable solution for homes with wells and/or wastewater systems which cannot be feasibly maintained in the long run due to pollution problems, and it allows technicians to connect these homes through a single point of connection with the

60     J. Rutherford

household collective taking on the responsibility for installing and maintaining the mini-network (Norrtälje kommun, n.d.). While planners engaged in the conventional deployment of maps, zones, pipes and money to extend big infrastructure and future-proof for growth (Norrtälje kommun 2008), local residents were themselves constantly defining and redefining how their modes of residence could adapt and be adapted to materialities of a particular system configuration. This could involve the creation of a socio-technical collective with shared community space, routines and a division of labour to organize the deployment of a small-scale system installation, maintenance of equipment (e.g. turning valves on or off at different times of the year), the associated forms and paperwork for regulatory conformity or the negotiation and collection of costs and tariffs. Off-grid households are responsible themselves for doing the work for and paying the costs of ensuring quality of water drawn from wells, organizing lorries to come for regular emptying of septic tanks, and maintaining non-­permeability of their installations. Thus, socio-technical arrangements in the Stockholm archipelago suggest different meanings of and negotiations with infrastructure. Infrastructure is inhabited in a variety of contingent ways, and through entanglement and engagement with multiple indefinite objects and processes, which cannot be taken for granted but have to be produced and reproduced on a regular basis (see also Bijker 2007).

Responsibility and Citizenship For the local authority, the differentiated socio-technical infrastructure arrangements privilege ‘shared responsibility’ (Norrtälje kommun, n.d.) with their own planning and investment being supplemented, or even replaced, by some degree of resident self-organization, such that residents are required to take on economic and environmental costs and risks. As an example, in order to encourage the creation of selforganized community systems as well as conformance to environmental norms and rules, the municipality has offered extra building rights to households as a ‘carrot’. Through this integration into the municipal programme, infrastructure becomes a governmental means to make

2  Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces …     61

responsible suburban citizens. Enrolment in the duties and tasks which reproduce sustainable local water systems becomes a core part of a binding contract of local citizenship. Overseen by the rules and regulations of the municipal authority, this can be viewed as helping to create a coherent and manageable infrastructure territory out of a diverse array of situations. Yet, the production of suburban infrastructural lives here is always a provisional, collective achievement. It depends on a series of incremental interventions by households, technicians and specialists which contribute to reproducing (and improving) a system through practices of use, components and zones for intervention, and norms and rules. It implies repetition not only in the sense of a series of regular patterns and components but also as rehearsal or trial performance, through which authorities and other actors are constantly seeking ‘configurations that work’. Whether it is improvements in relation to levels of pollution, redistribution of costs or performance of pipe or tank materials, sustainability becomes an often fine-grained socio-technical process involving a contingent and situated layering of repetitions. These emerge on and across scales of households, communities and the municipality as a whole, and allow actors to learn and finesse their ‘performances’ in relation to one another and a host of active materials, drawing on a series of attachments to enact what Metzger (2014) calls a ‘caring for place’. At the same time, however, the uncertain and unresolved goals, dispositions and outcomes of this system of repetitions and responsibilities— status quo, spirals of growth for some but not others, new social and ecological organizations of/through infrastructure—demonstrate that suburban infrastructure is also constituted through a variety of tensions.

Tensions in Suburban Infrastructure Configurations Suburban socio-technical change in Stockholm is brought about through persistent friction between residential dynamics, local growth strategies and the diversity of actually existing water systems. While a

62     J. Rutherford

hierarchy of socio-technical arrangements adapts diverse local contexts and modes of residence to particular system configurations to some extent, there are tensions and points of dispute over various aspects of these differentiated arrangements, underscoring the contested nature of suburban infrastructure (Filion and Keil 2017). Drawing on Easterling (2014), this can be seen, for example, in the combination of three ‘active forms’ within infrastructure interventions which indicate ordering modes and outcomes of socio-technical activity: the classification and zoning of residential areas used to deploy infrastructure and manage territory; the repetitive components or practice routines and regulatory procedures required to organize infrastructure arrangements; and the narratives for envisioning future planning and expectations. First, classifications, zones and hierarchies of residential areas, technical systems and modes of access to services are used as a tool of managing territory through infrastructure, as shown in the documents for the water programme. The way in which zones are defined and bounded, tariffs decided and intervention accomplished, is not neutral and has political basis and consequences. This process of infrastructural emergence reflects spatial and temporal priorities such that certain zones can expect development, transformation and treatment earlier or later, or at differing rhythms, in a 20-year programme of intervention. Priority is given to the big pipe for the port (and therefore the local economy) and doubling the capacity of the main treatment plant in support of further overall population growth (and local taxes). A ‘zone of development’ clearly has different economic, ecological and infrastructural prospects than a ‘zone for treatment’, so being close to new big water pipes offers potential connection and inclusion in the municipal project. This adds another layer of hierarchy onto that which distinguishes in practice between four technical forms of water provision. This series of classifications allows infrastructure to actively constitute residential living spaces. Infrastructure is not just deployed passively and then taken up and used, and it is not just another sector of local policy. Infrastructure interventions are direct reconfigurations of residential possibilities. de Laet and Mol (2000, p. 237) argue that a water pump technology in Zimbabwe has a number of boundaries which help to constitute, for example, a community or a nation. Here, when a local

2  Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces …     63

authority decides to make its biggest public investment ever in extending and improving local water systems, it knows that this is about much more than service provision and access. Hierarchy and classification of infrastructure zones actually orients urban policy more broadly, so quality of access to water and wastewater services partially determines decisions about construction and urban extension. It enacts ongoing and future development of suburban areas as a whole. As Filion (2013) proclaims: ‘infrastructure is the message’, bringing the suburbs into being. A second active form of suburban infrastructure intervention is the circulation of repetitive components such as paperwork, norms, tariffs, routines and system materials. These are necessary to produce particular infrastructure configurations, but always work in specific ways. Zones and classifications of particular infrastructure configuration become ‘multipliers’ that allow the deployment of repetitive components and forms. These repetitive components make heterogeneous territory manageable and governable for the authority; they facilitate knowing and intervening in an otherwise vast and diverse set of contexts. Recurring elements include norms and routines governing both individual and collective water systems (e.g. ensuring ‘summer water’ valves are turned off in the autumn to prevent pipe damage), year-on-year water tariff rises permitting the programme of work and intervention, and the circulation of the workers and companies that intervene in laying pipes, maintaining systems and emptying tanks. Autonomous or quasiautonomous households are not excused from regular regulatory incursions into domestic or community space. They are obliged to work for their autonomy through routines of ensuring that forms are filled in correctly, environmental norms and standards are met and checks and controls are undertaken and paid for. Individual arrangements must accord with (reproduce), or at least not unduly hamper, the collective good. As Easterling (2014, pp. 74, 81) argues, these kinds of ‘multipliers of activities’ which ‘spread spatial changes throughout a field’ are the ‘levers of disposition in infrastructure space’ taking socio-technical change in a particular direction. Most notably, there have been repeated increases in water tariffs to fund the major investment programme. Regular 7% annual increases in recent years (Norrtälje kommun 2015a, and other annual reports)

64     J. Rutherford

have led to Norrtälje becoming the municipality with the highest tariffs in the region (Fastighetsägarna 2015; Nils Holgersson 2015). The ‘sharply increased’ tariffs were noted and criticized in the local press as representing a more than 50% rise in the price of a m3 of water in the last ten years (Sverke 2014). These are associated with shifting distributions of costs and benefits between households depending on where they live (former Mayor interview, October 2010). Households living in the ‘dense’ central towns of Norrtälje already connected to networks are paying rising prices to extend networks to those Stockholmers arriving to live in newly permanent and more distant homes. In the context of a municipality with the lowest average income per household in the county,4 this is amounting to a questionable subsidization of new, usually well-off residents and their lifestyles by existing residents who have already paid for the water systems they use. A third active form of infrastructure intervention is the construction and interlinking of narratives that serve as productive techniques for envisioning desirable futures, creating collective trajectories and enrolling people into public concerns. These are common methods through which planners try to build buy-into projects (see Beauregard 2015). The water programme is tied into a story of municipal growth and expansion, whereby more permanent residents bring more tax revenue, thus feeding into an attractive image of the municipality as a dynamic place to live. This fits coherently into a wider regional strategy oriented around ‘making our environments available for even more residents and businesses’ (Stockholms läns landsting 2013, p. 2). Concerned publics are constructed through provision of information, attribution of responsibility and system regulation. Consequently, infrastructure narratives matter, such as demonstrated here. They might become a tool local politicians and practitioners can use as a local growth strategy, prioritizing some areas over others, regulating modes of residence, and making residents responsible for the infrastructure systems they ‘inhabit’. Yet, as Easterling (2014) argues, active forms in infrastructure

4Norrtälje is not a low-income municipality per se, but has average income levels a little below the other municipalities in Stockholms län.

2  Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces …     65

space are also markers of potential political intervention, where dispositions can be seized on, diverted or subverted by other actors. In this case, it enables residents to create diverse adapted infrastructure solutions, to sustain their own lifestyles and routines, and to engage with or contest ‘official’ suburban story-making for the years to come. Equally, while nature is being transformed by liberal urban growth and the deployment of bigger infrastructure to meet increasing demand, it also resists change through infiltration, seepage and a number of physical transformation processes, forcing further regulation of systems and potential sanctioning of offenders. Infrastructure ‘acts’ thus in multiple, contingent ways: ‘For if the pump must act, what is it to do: provide water or provide health? Build communities or make a nation?’ (de Laet and Mol 2000, p. 247). This is a story of how evolving infrastructure arrangements are produced in the suburbs, becoming, as per configurations in the South, actively adapted and adjusted to local needs, situations and specificities, and not subjected to or passively enrolled in the expansion of a generic network model imported from elsewhere. There is the mobilization of a circular metabolism centred on suburban spaces and uses rather than being subsumed into a linear system organized elsewhere. Infrastructure is inherently part of the remaking of suburbanisms, shifting possibilities for ways of life and ‘hydraulic citizenship’ (Anand 2011) in low density areas. This is the political salience of suburban infrastructure here, as it not only opens up new residential areas but creates and constrains new modes of residence and collective life. It is a key site of potential material struggle over the direction, means and outcomes of suburban change, or what Silver (2014) describes as a ‘prefigurative politics’ where claims are staked in the present to desired, possible futures. The articulation between collective organization/responsibility and individual freedom, between public and private spheres, the redistribution of costs and benefits, and the degree of agency attributed to materials and environmental processes all emerge as charged issues in unsettling infrastructure arrangements. Infrastructure here evolves continually through the shifting entanglements and interactions of its components and arrangements, and is always deployed and used processually (‘to develop’, ‘to transform’, ‘to

66     J. Rutherford

treat’). There are different meanings of and engagements with infrastructure, which, as in urban contexts of the South is thus ‘inhabited’ and not taken for granted. The particular case focused on here may appear rather prosaic at first, but it quickly and continuously overflows into broader issues and questions of environmental pollution, local and regional futures in an age of climate change, community and citizenship, collective addressing of suburban futures through cross-­ subsidization between infrastructure users and resource transfers, and short-term versus long-term planning. In short, there is a meaningful and substantive politics of socio-technical change through which the contours of suburban living and planning are negotiated.

Conclusion Infrastructure and socio-technical systems are a primary means through which wider decisions about and planning of the future development of suburbs are taking place. Infrastructure is at the heart of changing forms, modalities and outcomes of local suburban development and distinctive modes of residence, e.g. whether seasonal or all year round. However, in the case explored here, this does not signify the usual singular network extensions of the city. There is acceptance that municipalities are not all on a linear pathway to large centralized infrastructure systems, and that not all households have to be hooked up to municipal systems even in the longer term, leading to tolerance and even promotion of heterogeneous socio-technical arrangements. In the Stockholm archipelago here, but also in a variety of other contexts, exploring modes and meanings of infrastructure means going beyond networked urbanism and its narrative, paradigm and model of connection to centralized, industrial technical systems. Building on an emergent and processual understanding of infrastructure, and insights from work on infrastructure in the urban South, this chapter has explored how intervention in suburban infrastructure necessitates engagement with multiple co-evolving technological configurations, a variety of material components and a reworking of divisions of labour and responsibility between the actors involved, from municipal planners and water

2  Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces …     67

technicians to households themselves. Planning here thus means finding ways to allow different configurations to exist and to co-evolve, thus promoting active socio-technical cultivation of place and place futures. This requires understanding of technologies, skills and the interests and ‘cares’ of those present (Metzger 2014; Beauregard 2015). The overall capacities, meanings and concerns of infrastructure only materialize immanently in the shifting relative positions of its components. There is a hybridized, flexible socio-technical disposition which is constantly being reconfigured for active and multilayered infrastructure spaces, and which both incorporates and resists encroaching urban dynamics as seen in a host of constitutive tensions around active forms such as classifications, circulations and future narratives. Emerging suburban areas are therefore somewhat fluid frontier spaces mediating between contested notions, practices and implications of collective and individual, public and private, large-scale and local vernacular technology, and in a context in which ‘vestiges of nature’, modes of residence and societal change are mutually imbricated (see Gandy 2014, p. 18). Across local planning and politics, and lived and maintained materialities, flows and sediments of water systems, infrastructure becomes a marker and an arena of potentially transformative change in making visible the socio-technical constitution of suburban living spaces.

References Addie, Jean-Paul. 2016. Theorising Suburban Infrastructure: A Framework for Critical and Comparative Analysis. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41: 273–285. Anand, Nikhil. 2011. Pressure: The Politechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai. Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 542–564. Arnstberg, K.-O., and I. Bergström. 2002. URBS PANDENS Project Case Study Report on Stockholm: An Introduction. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Baptista, Idalina. 2015. ‘We Live on Estimates’: Everyday Practices of Prepaid Electricity and the Urban Condition in Maputo, Mozambique. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39 (5): 1004–1019.

68     J. Rutherford

Beauregard, Robert. 2015. Planning Matter: Acting with Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bijker, Wiebe. 2007. Dikes and Dams, Thick with Politics. Isis 98: 109–123. Coutard, Olivier. 2008. Placing Splintering Urbanism: Introduction. Geoforum 39: 1815–1820. Coutard, Olivier, and Jonathan Rutherford (eds.). 2016. Beyond the Networked City: Infrastructure Reconfigurations and Urban Change in the North and South. Abingdon: Routledge. de Laet, Marianne, and Annemarie Mol. 2000. The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology. Social Studies of Science 30 (2): 225–263. Desfor, Gene, and Roger Keil. 2004. Nature and the City: Making Environmental Policy in Toronto and Los Angeles. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Easterling, Keller. 2014. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso. Fastighetsägarna. 2015. Norrtälje har högsta taxan för Vatten och Avlopp i Stockholms län. Stockholm: Fastighetsägarna. Filion, Pierre. 2013. The Infrastructure Is the Message: Shaping the Suburban Morphology and Lifestyle. In Suburban Constellations, ed. R. Keil. Berlin: Jovis. Filion, Pierre, and Roger Keil. 2017. Contested Infrastructures: Tension, Inequity and Innovation in the Global Suburb. Urban Policy and Research 35 (1): 7–19. Furlong, Kathryn. 2015. Rethinking Universality and Disrepair: Seeking Infrastructure Coexistence in Quibdó, Colombia. In Beyond the Networked City: Infrastructure Reconfigurations and Urban Change in the North and South, ed. O. Coutard and J. Rutherford. Abingdon: Routledge. Gandy, Matthew. 2008. Landscapes of Disaster: Water, Modernity, and Urban Fragmentation in Mumbai. Environment and Planning A 40: 108–130. Gandy, Matthew. 2014. The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Graham, Stephen, and Colin McFarlane (eds.). 2015. Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context. Abingdon: Routledge. Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge. Graham, Stephen, Renu Desai, and Colin McFarlane. 2015. De-networking the Poor: Revanchist Urbanism and Hydrological Apartheid in Mumbai. In

2  Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces …     69

Beyond the Networked City: Infrastructure Reconfigurations and Urban Change in the North and South, ed. O. Coutard and J. Rutherford. Abingdon: Routledge. Jaglin, S. 2005. Services d’eau en Afrique subsaharienne: la fragmentation urbaine en question. Paris: CNRS Editions. Jaglin, Sylvy. 2012. Services en réseaux et villes africaines: l’universalité par d’autres voies? L’Espace Géographique 41: 51–67. Jaglin, Sylvy, and Nicole May. 2010. Etalement urbain, faibles densités et ‘coûts’ de développement: Introduction. Flux 79 (80): 6–15. Keil, Roger (ed.). 2013. Suburban Constellations: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st Century. Berlin: Jovis Verlag. Kommunförbundet Stockholms Län/ VAS-rådet. 2006. Avloppsvattenrening i Stockholms län år 2030 - en översiktlig studie av hinder samt möjliga vägar framåt. Stockholm: KSL. Kooy, Michelle, and Karen Bakker. 2008. Technologies of Government: Constituting Subjectivities, Spaces, and Infrastructures in Colonial and Contemporary Jakarta. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32 (2): 375–391. Länsstyrelsen i Stockholms län. 2008. Förbättring av enskilda avlopp inom Norrtälje kommuns skärgårdsområde. Stockholm: Länsstyrelsen i Stockholms län. McFarlane, Colin. 2008. Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-colonial Bombay. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32 (2): 415–435. McFarlane, Colin, and Jonathan Rutherford. 2008. Political Infrastructures: Governing and Experiencing the Fabric of the City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32 (2): 363–374. Metzger, Jonathan. 2014. Spatial Planning and/as Caring for More-ThanHuman Place. Environment and Planning A 46: 1001–1011. Monstadt, Jochen, and Sophie Schramm. 2017. Toward the Networked City? Translating Technological Ideals and Planning Models in Water and Sanitation Systems in Dar es Salaam. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41 (1): 104–125. Nils Holgersson. 2015. Fastigheten Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige - en avgiftsstudie för 2015. Stockholm: Nils Holgersson. Norrtälje kommun. 2008. Program för utveckling av kommunalt vatten och avlopp 2008–2030. Norrtälje: Norrtälje kommun. Norrtälje kommun. 2013. Oversiktsplan 2040. Norrtälje: Norrtälje kommun.

70     J. Rutherford

Norrtälje kommun. 2015a. Taxa för kommunalt vatten och avlopp. Norrtälje: Norrtälje kommun. Norrtälje kommun. 2015b. VA-policy. Norrtälje: Norrtälje kommun. Norrtälje kommun. n.d. Att ansluta till kommunalt vatten- och avloppsnät. Norrtälje: Norrtälje kommun. Pemer, M. 2006. Creating a Sustainable City in a Polycentric Region: The Stockholm Example. Stockholm: City of Stockholm Planning Department. RTK. 2007. Vision, mål och strategier för regionens utveckling. Program för ny regional utvecklingsplan (RUFS 2010). Stockholm: Regionplane- och trafikkontoret (RTK). SCB. 2008. Statistical Yearbook of Sweden. Stockholm: Statistiska centralbyrån. Silver, Jonathan. 2014. Incremental Infrastructures: Material Improvisation and Social Collaboration Across Post-colonial Accra. Urban Geography 35 (6): 788–804. SLL Office of Regional Planning. 2010. RUFS 2010 Stockholm Regional Plan. Stockholm: SLL Office of Regional Planning. Stockholms läns landsting. 2013. Regional miljöstrategi för vatten. Stockholm: Stockholms läns landsting. Svenskt Vatten. 2000. Facts on Water Supply and Sanitation in Sweden. Stockholm: Svenskt Vatten. Svenskt Vatten. 2007. VASS Water Statistics. Stockholm: Svenskt Vatten. Svenskt Vatten. 2013. Vattenvisionen: Forsknings- och Innovationsagenda för Vattensektorn. Stockholm: Svenskt Vatten. Sveriges Riksdag. 2006. Lag (2006:412) om allmänna vattentjänster. Stockholm: Sveriges Riksdag. Sverke, Johan. 2014. Kraftigt höjda taxor för vatten och sopor. Norrtelje Tidning. Young, Douglas, Patricia Burke Wood, and Roger Keil (eds.). 2011. In-Between Infrastructure: Urban Connectivity in an Age of Vulnerability. Kelowna, BC, Canada: Praxis (e)Press.

3 Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation in the Green Capital of Europe

Introduction In 2010 the European Commission made Stockholm, the capital city of Sweden, the very first Green Capital of Europe. The city has long had a reputation of being one of the greenest cities in Europe, and this reward recognized its long-established concern and policies for environmental protection and improvement (it was at the time of implementing its sixth consecutive Environment Programme). It regularly ranks among the world’s most livable cities according to surveys by media outlets and consultant firms including the Siemens/The Economist Green Cities Index and the Mercer Quality of Life Index. Stockholm is therefore usually presented as an emblematic example of best practice in sustainable urbanism and in resilient city-making (see, for example, Girardet 2000; Newman et al. 2009; Lux Research 2012; Metzger and Olsson 2013). The municipality’s international relations department coordinates more visits from foreign delegates seeking knowledge and ideas

This chapter is a revised version of Rutherford, J. (2014). The Vicissitudes of Energy and Climate Policy in Stockholm: Politics, Materiality and Transition. Urban Studies 51 (7): 1449–1470. © The Author(s) 2020 J. Rutherford, Redeploying Urban Infrastructure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_3

71

72     J. Rutherford

about environmental issues and ‘sustainable’ city planning than about any other policy topic. Practitioners and politicians play major roles in transnational or inter-urban networks about environmental policy, and especially energy–climate policy. The municipality’s climate mitigation policies are not the sole element of this ‘green’ image, but they do constitute an important part of it, thus illustrating the emerging role of climate policy in city branding strategies (see Gustavsson and Elander 2012). The environmental department of the municipality has had a climate action plan since the mid-1990s and there have been significant efforts to measure the carbon savings associated with specific projects and activities. These climate efforts work in turn to a large extent through energy policy where the municipality has, in theory, the most leverage (district heating, decarbonizing public transport, energy efficient construction, retrofitting of existing buildings…). It is here therefore that the discourse of decarbonization encounters the materiality of the urban fabric. Policy documents present this encounter as largely unproblematic, with the municipality and other actors able to adjust and render malleable the urban built environment for a coming ‘fossil fuel free’ age. Already in the past, however, the encounter between urban political regimes in Stockholm and material city-building has been ‘messy’ and contentious (Gullberg and Kaijser 2004). The shifting relations between, and varied implications of, urban development and wider environmental objectives have been studied through a number of lenses including: the very different long-term sustainable urban development scenarios for Stockholm analysed from an environmental justice perspective (Gunnarsson-Östling and Höjer 2011; see also Höjer et al. 2011); a focus on the practice of sustainable urban planning (Metzger and Olsson 2013) and both its equity and justice implications (Bradley 2009) and the actor networks translating nature–society relations into specific projects (Bylund 2006); the role of social movements in urban change and evolutions in local politics (Stahre 2004); and analysis of changes in infrastructure and network service provision in the light of economic and environmental reforms (Rutherford 2008). Within a context of the widely observed ‘ecological modernization’ of Sweden (Anshelm 2002; Fudge and Rowe 2001; Lundqvist 2000; Vail 2008;

3  Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …     73

Hilding-Rydevik et al. 2011), these studies come to a shared conclusion that the traditional social equality goals of urban and environmental planning in the Swedish capital have evolved, and that the ongoing material planning processes, practices and struggles in the city thus merit great attention. A number of areas of tension and struggle have indeed emerged around energy–climate agendas and issues that problematize any actual idea of shared pathways, visions and goals, and therefore contribute to repoliticizing the city’s environmental agenda. The material politics of energy–climate agendas in the Swedish capital is thus the focus of this chapter. It goes beyond the question of the priorities and implications of policy discourse in this area to analyse how energy and climate become a set of issues which come to matter in the local urban arena in a conjoined political and material sense. In short, the chapter is less interested in the construction of Stockholm as an ‘exceptional’ green city than in the ordinary, daily politics of the urban environment as practised by a host of local actors and groups with diverging interests (see also Rosol et al. 2017). I draw on policy documents and empirical analysis covering the period around the Green Capital award. By delving into the concrete actions and infrastructures through which energy–climate policy has been both implemented and contested in Stockholm, and utilizing conceptual work around urban materialities discussed in Chapter 1, the aim is to unpack the ongoing, everyday struggles over urban low carbon transition, thus highlighting the diversity of ways in which change is understood, negotiated, experienced and engaged with.

Energy–Climate Policy in Stockholm The municipal policy of the City of Stockholm in the domain of energy and climate change dates back at least to the early 1990s, with the Swedish capital achieving international recognition for being one of the few municipalities to have initiated a major energy and climate policy programme which has generated measurable success. This was one of the main reasons for Stockholm becoming the first Green Capital

74     J. Rutherford

of Europe.1 Before the Action Plan for Climate and Energy adopted in 2010 (City of Stockholm 2010c), the City of Stockholm had implemented three Action Programmes Against Greenhouse Gases, covering 1995–2000 (City of Stockholm 1998), 2000–2005 (City of Stockholm 2003) and 2005–2015 (City of Stockholm 2007b), which met their objectives in terms of emissions reductions. Greenhouse gas emissions were estimated to have decreased by over 24% between 1990 and 2009, during which time the population of the city actually increased by 22%. This meant a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 38% per resident between 1990 and 2009 (City of Stockholm 2010c, p. 7). Energy and climate policy in Stockholm took advantage of the combination of the orientations of the national policy context in Sweden2 and local factors and resources, including a dense urban core (with further densification as an explicit planning goal) and a star-shaped urban structure (RTK 2002, p. 85; Gunnarsson-Östling and Höjer 2011,

1The

reasons given for Stockholm being designated European Green Capital 2010 included: (a) the presence within the municipality of an integrated administrative system that guarantees that environmental aspects are considered in budgets, operational planning, reporting and monitoring; (b) its success in reducing carbon dioxide emissions since 1990; and (c) its adoption of an ambitious objective of being fossil fuel free by 2050 (City of Stockholm 2010a). 2‘Reduced climate impact’ and ‘a good built environment’ constitute two of the sixteen environmental quality objectives adopted by the Swedish Parliament (Swedish Environmental Protection Agency 2011). The ‘integrated climate and energy policy’ outlined in two government bills in March 2009 set out a ‘national roadmap’ for 2050 with an overall aim for Sweden to be ‘an emissions-neutral country by 2050’ (Swedish Government 2008a, b, 2011). This translated into a number of interim targets for 2020, which as a whole went beyond EU objectives: 40% reduction in climate emissions (on 1990 levels); 50% of energy use to come from renewable energy sources; 20% more efficient energy use; and 10% use of renewable energy in the transport sector. Action plans focused on renewable energy, energy efficiency and a fossil fuel free transport sector were initiated to work towards these targets (Profu 2012; Swedish Government 2010, 2011). The government at the time (like a high proportion of the population) was also in favour of continued use of nuclear power in electricity production, thus reversing the 1980 decision to phase out Sweden’s existing reactors. The government saw win-win opportunities for the economy and the environment from working towards its energy and climate objectives: ‘Investment in renewable energy and more efficient energy use are strengthening Sweden’s competitiveness and putting Swedish research and Swedish enterprises at the forefront of the global climate transition. We are laying the foundations for new innovations, new enterprises and new jobs in green industries of the future’ (Swedish Government 2009).

3  Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …     75

p. 1055; City of Stockholm 2010e, p. 10), which allowed policy orientation to draw on economies of scale relative to the size of the city. The decentralization of many responsibilities and mandates to local government means that municipalities hold many powers, including over land use and planning, and have real possibilities for discretionary action on energy and climate issues, even if they have no obligations in this domain3 (Gustavsson et al. 2009). So although the City cited a number of factors which accounted for its apparent success (City of Stockholm 2003, p. 11), the simultaneous expansion and decarbonization of district heating in Stockholm has been primordial, and indeed ‘is the single largest reason for the decrease in emissions in Stockholm’ (City of Stockholm 2010c, p. 11). Expansion of the heating network has been an explicit policy of the City with local detailed plans encouraging both new building and renovations to be connected to the network and to use energy efficient methods to reduce consumption (Magnusson 2011).4 District heating covers almost 80% of heating demand in the city. Decarbonization of the heating sector in Stockholm (as in other Swedish cities) has to be seen as a direct result of the national carbon tax introduced in 1991 which has been levied on the emitted quantities of carbon dioxide from all fuels except biofuelsand peat, which pushed district heating companies into abandoning fossil fuels in favour notably of biofuels. The Stockholm heating system runs on almost 80% renewables. The overarching long-term policy objective for energy and climate in Stockholm has been for the city to be ‘fossil fuel free’ in 2050 (City of Stockholm 2013; Tolf 2013) by ‘continu[ing] to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the same rate as in the past [1990–2005]’ (City of

3The

2009 energy bill mentioned ‘voluntary agreements’ between central government and local authorities on energy efficiency objectives, as well as the need for municipalities to identify ‘appropriate sites’ for wind power in their planning documents (Swedish Government 2008, p. 149). The 2009 climate bill mentioned the proposal made by the Climate Advisory Council that municipal comprehensive plans should have to show how they contribute to emissions reductions objectives (Swedish Government 2008, p. 131). 4These goals have been also quite coherent with those of regional planning which has promoted reductions in energy consumption (through energy efficiency measures) and a transition to renewable energy sources (Regionplanekontoret 2010).

76     J. Rutherford

Stockholm 2010d, p. 8). Yet, at the time of the Green Capital award, major strategic planning orientations in Stockholm were, in parallel, guided by the ‘Vision 2030: a world-class Stockholm’ document which had been adopted by the right of centre Moderate/Alliance-led Stockholm City Council in June 2007 (City of Stockholm 2007c). This set out a ‘sustainable growth’ vision for ‘a denser and better connected Stockholm’ as well as around 200,000 new residents over the following twenty years, but was also, and primarily, about taking Stockholm to the world. In the introduction, the Mayor of Stockholm talked about ‘sharpening Stockholm’s competitive edge’ and creating ‘an internationally competitive capital region’. As she argued: ‘we are sufficiently large to offer the sort of qualities that will enable us to compete with the world’s great metropolises’ (City of Stockholm 2007c, p. 3). This vision underpinned all subsequent planning documents and work: ‘All the administrations and companies within the City of Stockholm are required to help make this vision a reality, both in their daily activities and through long-term development work’ (City of Stockholm 2010e, p. 11). Thus, the City Plan adopted by Stockholm City Council in March 20105 was seen as ‘a clear example of how this vision of the future can be made more concrete’ (City of Stockholm 2010e, p. 11), through its outlining of a number of urban development strategies and focus areas representing ‘public interests’. This begins to get at some of the underlying tensions to energy– climate policy in Stockholm. Although the City of Stockholm has clearly made a far greater contribution to local climate mitigation than the majority of other European cities, it is still important to highlight areas, arenas or issues of recent contention which problematize the idea of a set of municipal actors speaking for the city and engaging it on a single, already marked out pathway to reach already agreed-upon goals for the short term and the long term (see Krueger and Gibbs 2007). Following Hubbard’s (2006) call to study the urban performances which

5This was a comprehensive plan, i.e. a steering document and not legally binding for local detailed plans which officially regulate new building, renovations and extensions (City of Stockholm 2010e, p. 3).

3  Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …     77

do not necessarily follow the script prescribed by policy discourse, in the next section I analyse three areas of conflict which have constituted particularly important material struggles over urban transition.

Three Matters of Contention Around Energy–Climate Policy Trajectories, Resources and Redistribution The ‘world-class’ vision mobilized a particular idea of how energy and climate issues could contribute to urban development. Indeed, although it engaged the City on a pathway to ‘an ecologically sustainable city’ and mentioned the ‘fossil fuel free’ goal, these were discussed within the theme of ‘innovation and growth’. It is clear therefore that far from being contradictory or incompatible, the two objectives of becoming ‘world class’ and ‘fossil fuel free’ were presented as achievable in parallel, with the latter contributing to the former, while ‘technological developments and economic growth now provide a solid foundation for an ecologically sustainable society’ (City of Stockholm 2007c, p. 11). The Green Capital of Europe award in 2010 fits well with this parallel trajectory, acting as a kind of ‘sustainability fix’ (While et al. 2004) through which environmental actions and the ‘fossil fuel free’ goal could bring the prestige, extra (eco)tourism and new investments that are advertised as the main benefits of the award (European Commission 2010, p. 13). Indeed, the City of Stockholm took out a full page advertisement in Dagens Nyheter newspaper in December 2009 to ‘advertise’ ‘a world-class environmental city’ (City of Stockholm 2011b, p. 19). By contrast, other observers were far from certain that the two goals could be wholly compatible. As well as a number of social movements who have been active since the late 1990s in contesting the neoliberal tendencies of ‘competitive city’ discourses (Stahre 2004), the Green Party in Stockholm was particularly critical of the overarching influence and implications of the majority’s ‘world-class’ strategic planning document: ‘Vision 2030 conflicts with the creation of an environmentally

78     J. Rutherford

sustainable city and with the achievement of the city’s climate goals. The process should have been formulated in other ways than the vision of “Stockholm as a world-class city”. We question the extent to which this captures people’s vision of their Stockholm. It is our assessment that most Stockholmers simply want a good place to live, for themselves and their children’ (City of Stockholm 2010b, p. 16). They also criticized how this vision permeated down into the comprehensive City Plan which ‘is based on a false self-image and a short-term thinking… Climate change is a major issue in urban planning, but in the draft [of the City Plan] it is only sparingly taken into consideration’ (City of Stockholm 2010b, p. 17). The very ambitious fossil fuel free objective for 2050 did not meet with universal support either. There was a lack of a precise definition of what would actually constitute a ‘fossil fuel free’ city and debate about the methodology for measuring mitigation (Green Party representative interview, May 2010). In fact, ‘fossil fuel free’ in this case only concerned emissions from traffic, electricity and heating. Emissions associated with long distance travel, Arlanda airport and especially from consumption of goods produced elsewhere (which were estimated to represent half of Stockholm CO2 emissions) were therefore excluded from measurements: ‘I think that the politicians probably think that it includes all emissions but it only includes emissions from heating, cooling, electricity and traffic. So they might reach this target, I’m not sure if it is possible or not. But the problem is, when they say that they are fossil fuel free, it won’t be absolutely true’ (KTH researcher interview, March 2010). Moreover, but linked to this, is the fact that the ‘fossil fuel free’ goal was actually officially adopted and taken up as a policy objective by the municipality after a handful of City politicians saw the existing declining curve on the CO2 emissions graph for 1990–2005 (see Fig. 3.1) and decided that if the line was extended, it could be made to reach zero by 2050 (City of Stockholm environment department official interview, May 2009). Inevitably, given this debatable method and rationale for deciding on a major policy objective, both technicians within the municipality and other local environmental actors were dubious about both its achievability and the extent to which the current majority in

3  Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …     79

CO2 emissions/resident/year

6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1990

2000

2010

2020

2030

2040

2050

Fig. 3.1  The trajectory to ‘fossil fuel free’ (Source Based on City of Stockholm [2010c, p. 9])

power took the objective seriously (various interviews). The dual purpose of this ‘fossil fuel free’ policy for decarbonizing Stockholm but also marketing the city throughout the world became another tension between ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ policymaking (cf. Gustavsson et al. 2009, p. 68) in which the presence of concrete, material local issues and ways of dealing with them appeared at first glance to be at odds with the fluffy, discursive need for international recognition, leadership and ‘green’ credentials. Yet, there has been a material dimension to these attractive longterm goals which emerges when trajectories are connected to resource availability and use. One of the main factors highlighted by local practitioners as influencing the degree and form of municipal engagement in the energy–climate domain has been the availability of resources. There have been specific central government funding programmes for local environmental actions (see Granberg and Elander 2007, for details). Between 2004 and 2008, the City thus received government subsidies of around 80 million kronor for the financing of its energy and climate policy actions in the form of the KLIMP (climate investment) programme of the national Environmental Protection Agency. This allowed more measures to be taken by supplementing the City’s

80     J. Rutherford

own ‘Environmental Billion’ funds.6 The two pots of finance were closely intertwined: ‘It was easier to get money from the City if you got 30% or more from the national. But we also needed the City money to get the national money’ (City of Stockholm environment department official interview, May 2009). Other resources in terms of availability of personnel and work time have also been important, as the environmental department of the municipality has always tended to have a certain number of people working on climate mitigation, although this work and the associated actions were made more difficult during the occasional periods when City politicians wanted these people to work on other environmental issues or when they said there was less money to do climate policy (City of Stockholm environment department official interview, May 2009). After the majority’s decision to end the City environmental funds, the work required to put the ‘fossil fuel free’ goal into practice, increasingly took place within a context of persistent budget constraint: ‘We have seen for the past four years that people who are in charge of environment in Stockholm, they don’t get new money, they just have ad hoc projects or schemes on their day to day tasks…’ (Social democrat advisers interview, June 2010). The ‘environmental’ budget of the municipality was, in effect, cut by almost half between 2006 and 2009 ‘primarily for efficiency and prioritization of core business’ (City of Stockholm 2007a, p. 114), before being increased slightly to coincide with the Green Capital award. Nevertheless, municipal environmental work in 2011 had a budget more than 30% lower than in 2006, and constituted less than 1% of the City’s total budget.7 As a political adviser to the Moderate majority (interview, April 2010) stated: ‘Our bottom line is really result oriented… If you’re using tax paid money you should be 6These funds representing around a billion kronor (almost 100 million euros) for environmental projects in Stockholm between 2004 and 2009 came into being after the sale of the municipal energy company to Fortum in 2002 (City of Stockholm environment department official interview, May 2009). We should note that this sale generated 14.5 billion kronor (see Rutherford 2008), so actually only around 7% of this money was directed to the environment. Interviewees suggested that the remainder was used for various building and infrastructure projects, but also as a means of avoiding increasing municipal taxes. 7These figures were extracted from budget reports on the City of Stockholm website.

3  Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …     81

sure that you get some kind of refund or result with it, you should be really careful with this money’. This means that the hardest and most expensive measures for a ‘fossil fuel free’ city were to be put back to some point in the future in favour of ‘business as usual’ (Green Party representative interview, May 2010). The figures for budget restrictions and the reasoning behind them thus nuance any idea of a durable ‘green’ urban policy paradigm. Following the availability and evolution of budgets, staffing resources and flows of money is thus an important way in which energy–climate actions materialize and become sources of conflict in cities. This helps to connect up externally oriented discourses and aspirations such as ‘world class’, ‘green capital’ and ‘fossil fuel free’ with actual commitments to and practices of urban change. While environmental actions have contributed to international prestige for Stockholm, it is far from clear that the material benefits of this in terms of new resources and investment will be funnelled back into reinforcing these actions for the collective good. Ongoing work towards the ‘fossil fuel free’ objective must constantly prove its cost effectiveness and value for money which affects the forms and outcomes of work that can be done. In this way, there is an inherently material dimension to how discursive goals translate into everyday policy work and how this in turn produces, or not, change. This can also be seen when we turn to other specific areas of energy– climate policy.

The Municipality, the Heating Company and ‘Darkness’ on the Edge of Town Another major area of controversy has concerned the rather ambivalent position of the City of Stockholm with regard to the Stockholm district heating system. This ambivalence can be seen in material struggles around the physical aspects of the system, constantly rising heating bills for users and the energy mix and pollution from one particular plant. The district heating system covers nearly 80% of Stockholm’s total heating needs, is still being actively expanded, and has been, as indicated, a major part of urban energy policy for CO2 emissions

82     J. Rutherford

reductions. The system was formerly owned and run by the municipality, but between 1998 and 2002, a quasi-privatization process merged the municipal company with the Finnish energy company Fortum with the City of Stockholm keeping just 9.9% of the shares (but 50% of the influence through half the seats on the board) in the new entity called Fortum Värme. The Mayor of Stockholm argued at the time that the deal was good for Stockholm taxpayers and energy consumers since it limited the city’s business risks and freed up capital that could be invested in other projects, notably environmental projects. The problem has been that district heating is a technical monopoly (i.e. the owner of the network is the sole service provider), and there have been substantial costs involved for city centre households wishing to switch to alternative heat systems such as heat pumps (see Hellmer 2010). Indeed, Fortum Värme has been free to set its own prices according to competing alternatives, leading to price rises in Stockholm of over 60% in the ten-year period to 2011 (see Fig. 3.2). The price of district heating in Stockholm far surpassed that in other major Swedish cities, with this difference emerging especially in the period post-privatization (Nils Holgersson gruppen 2010). The City of Stockholm did not use its presence in the board of Fortum to contest the price rises and seemed happy with the financial benefits it received from its minority shareholding. ‘We only own half so we can’t tell what to do. All the decisions are though strictly economic’ (City of Stockholm environment department official interview, May 2009). At the same time, this increase of district heating prices was heavily contested by another part of the Stockholm municipality in the form of its housing companies which defended, logically enough, their tenants’ rights on the energy market. Indeed, one of the housing companies, Stockholmshem, became so fed up with the high prices of Fortum Värme that they sought to bypass the Fortum network in the city by reactivating heat production from old boilers of their own or by using geothermal heat pumps (Stockholmshem head of energy department interview, June 2010). In this case here, we have an internal set of conflicts in which some of the subsidiary companies of the City were actively contesting the services provided by another co-owned municipal company, while, in this reconfigured governance of a core local socio-technical system, the question of who was

3  Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …     83

Fig. 3.2  The rising price of district heating in Stockholm, 2000–2011 (Source Extracted by the author from Nils Holgersson reports, 2000–2011 [Nils Holgersson gruppen, n.d.])

ultimately accountable (and for what exactly) remained far from clear (cf. Wihlborg and Palm 2008). A further source of controversy concerned a single district heating plant in the city. On 29 May 2010, a group of protesters tried to gain access to the Värtaverket (värta means black or dark in Swedish) district heating plant run by Fortum Värme in the north east of Stockholm. Although nine people were arrested (Bolling and Svahn 2010), this highly organized and well publicized demonstration by the action group Shut It Down brought the ecological credentials of the city’s heating system (and, some would argue, of the city itself ) into question in the year in which Stockholm was the ‘Green Capital of Europe’. The issue was that this particular heating plant was still half-fired by coal, and given that the City was joint owner of Fortum Värme, this was seen as being contrary to the objectives of decarbonization promoted in the City’s climate policy. Although the company had outlined plans to partially convert the plant to biofuels with an aim of at least a 50% admix of biofuels by 2015, environmental groups and the city’s Green and Left parties argued that this was not quick enough, and in

84     J. Rutherford

particular, that Fortum had not stated whether and how it intended the plant to gradually become fossil fuel free in the longer term. In 2010 Värtaverket topped the Naturskyddsföreningens (Swedish Society for Nature Conservation) list of the worst environmental polluters in the Swedish district heating industry (Aberg 2010). This issue mobilized political opinion across the board. A 2010 report from the Left party suggested that the plant produced roughly the same quantity of CO2 equivalent emissions as all the cars in Stockholm, and that it was responsible for fully a quarter of the city’s total CO2 equivalent emissions (Holmbäck and Warlenius 2010). It also quoted a Fortum representative as saying that to decommission and replace the existing plant would cost in the region of 4 billion kronor, which the report authors calculated as being either the equivalent of the operating profit that Fortum made in just the first quarter of 2009 or the estimated cost of building 3 kilometres of the controversial proposed Stockholm Bypass road (see next section) (Holmbäck and Warlenius 2010). There was even evidence of tension and disagreement about this issue within the City. Fortum’s aim for at least a 50% admix of biofuels at Värtan by 2015 was calculated by the City as leading to CO2 emissions reductions of 235,000 tons/year or 0.3 tons/inhabitant/year (City of Stockholm 2010c). In their Action Plan for Energy and Climate (p. 36), written by the Environment Department, the City also raised (as a ‘conceivable measure’) the possibility of Fortum replacing this coalfired CHP plant with an alternative, cleaner plant—a move that would decrease emissions by another 265,000 tons/year or 0.3 tons/inhabitant/ year. It was clear that the City’s Environment Department considered this measure to be highly beneficial for Stockholm climate policy. However, several phrases in the main text of the 2010 Action Plan were revealingly corrected by errata at the end of the document (Table 3.1). While the possibility of replacing the Värtan plant with a cleaner alternative was considered as ‘unprofitable’ or ‘not economically viable’ in the main body of the report, this was corrected to ‘not technically feasible’ (p. 36), as the Left Party report cast doubt on the economic argument. Furthermore, the phrase identifying Värtan CHP Plant 6 as ‘the single largest source of green-house gas emissions in Stockholm’

3  Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …     85 Table 3.1  Changes to the text of Stockholm’s Action Plan for Climate and Energy Text in report

Correction in annex ‘errata’

An entire transition to renewable fuels An entire transition to renewable fuels is not considered being economically is not considered technically feasible viable by Fortum by Fortum The single largest source of green(deleted) house gas emissions in Stockholm is CHP Plant 6 in Värtan… Cost efficiency [of using renewable Cost efficiency [of using renewable fuels instead of coal] High fuels instead of coal] Low Source Extracted from City of Stockholm (2010c)

was corrected (i.e. deleted) in the Action Plan (p. 37). Other corrections attempted to nuance the potential of this ‘conceivable measure’ notably by stating that there would be municipal ‘need for reinvestment in the range of billions SEK to replace the lost CHP production capacity’ (p. 37) which would change the possible cost efficiency of such a measure from ‘high’ to ‘low’. This issue highlighted quite significant tension and even disagreements between the City’s environment division and the Fortum heating company not just to policy direction and responsibility for policy coherence, but crucially over different forms of knowledge and their flexible interpretation. In short, there has been a very real material politics to district heating provision in Stockholm through which things like the configuration of the technical system, heating bill increases, choices of energy mix and levels of pollution from plants have become sources of everyday struggle over both energy production and consumption, and the extent to which long-term energy–climate goals can be subject to compromise and trade-off in the here and now.

The Congestion Charge and the Motorway: Bypassing Climate Goals? The other main area of contention has concerned shifts in mobility and transport policy and their effects on urban energy and climate objectives.

86     J. Rutherford

The Stockholm congestion charge is a tax that has been imposed on the majority of vehicles in Stockholm ‘to deal with congestion and traffic disturbances’ (City of Stockholm 2010c, p. 11). It was first introduced as a trial between January and July 2006. A referendum was held in September 2006 in which a majority of residents of Stockholm municipality voted to implement it permanently. The charge was therefore introduced permanently during the first half of 2007. In 2010 the City calculated that traffic to and from the city centre had declined by an average of almost 20% per year, while greenhouse gas emissions ‘have decreased by just over one per cent as a result of congestion tax’ (City of Stockholm 2010c, p. 11). Another report by SLB Analys measured emissions reductions as 4% between 2006 and 2008 (SLB Analys 2009, p. 4). Compromise and conflict emerged though in the use of the money obtained from the congestion charge. The incomes received were originally supposed to be used to finance public transport improvements in the Stockholm region. The Moderate/Alliance majority decided, however, to use the money to partly finance a new six-lane bypass road (Förbifart Stockholm) aimed at displacing traffic from the city centre to the western outskirts and facilitating links between the north and the south of the region. This road was to cost approximately 27 billion Swedish kronor to be constructed and to be financed to the tune of 80% by congestion charge income (Swedish Society for Nature Conservation 2010). This decision became subject to virulent debate on the local level between the City government, opposition parties and environmental groups, and in particular between the Moderates who argued that ‘it is absolutely necessary to build it’ (Moderate Party representative interview, April 2010) and the Greens who argued that the project was a travesty which withdrew a much needed source of investment in local public transport (Öjemar 2010). Indeed, in interviews conducted in 2010 about political differences between parties on energy and climate work in Stockholm, the new bypass road was unanimously cited as the biggest area of conflict between the different groups. The bypass project was included in the comprehensive city plan voted by the City Council in spite of much opposition including from the Green Party and the Left party who wanted the ‘insane project’

3  Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …     87

(City of Stockholm 2010b, p. 23) removed from the plan (City of Stockholm 2010b, pp. 13, 22). Some argued that the Bypass project was ‘the clearest example’ of the City not wanting or being able to meet its own environmentalobjectives (City of Stockholm 2010b, p. 73). Here again, therefore, we have an arena of contention created and working through a politicization of various materialities. Most obviously, there has been a contested shift in the objects of policy orientation from public transport routes, suburban trains and collective city region mobility to road infrastructure, cars and individual level automobilities.8 But this shift has also been enabled by a complex infrastructure of cameras, databases and financial transfers which has proceeded to translate payment for access to the city centre into tarmac for the motorway bypass instead of into the maintenance and extension of the public transport system. In the longer run, there are clearly also concrete outcomes of this policy shift in terms of the changing mobility possibilities of different social groups, the upkeep and maintenance of trains and tracks, and the environmental effects on the declining curve of the CO2 emissions graph of financing car use over public transport.

Energy–Climate Issues and the Politics of Urban Materiality These policy controversies and contestations can be seen as the arenas within and through which energy–climate issues have come to matter in Stockholm. They come to matter in at least three ways which rework our understandings of the intersections between politics, urban materiality and energy transitions. First, focusing on the arenas of debate, i.e. the issues which matter to people on the ground, and through which energy–climate goals are being implemented, translated and contested, demonstrates the 8In

2007 the new Moderate majority also took the decision to transfer 165 million kronor from the Environmental Billion funds which was planned to be used for biogas projects to the City’s Traffic and Waste Management Committee for road maintenance (City of Stockholm 2011a, p. 2).

88     J. Rutherford

multiple or alternative analytical ways in which we can follow, trace or count energy and carbon flows in the urban environment. While the municipality of Stockholm has evidently been keen on highlighting its success in local climate policy by measuring and charting the city’s decreasing greenhouse gas emissions year by year, the contradictions, compromises and conflicts which lie behind the downward trend line on the municipality’s graphs serve to nuance this ‘success’ and constitute alternative ‘measures’ of flows. The areas of contention we have focused on can thus be seen as performances deviating from the official urban policy script (cf. Hubbard 2006). Instead of framing energy transition and climate change as a locally relevant issue (cf. Betsill and Bulkeley 2007), the tensions and conflicts around energy and climate issues in Stockholm may partly derive from the lack of connection between local issues (what matters to people) and the proposed policy responses, or indeed from deviations in the latter. Many people have been sceptic about both the achievability and pertinence of the ‘fossil fuel free’ discourse, but concretely it has been the transfer of public funds from the congestion charge away from public transport to road construction, the continuing use of a ‘dirty’ heating plant, the profit maximizing strategy of the heating company, and the decreasing resources for energy policy work which local actors have talked most about, discussed and contested. The tensions around budgets and resources, district heating and the congestion charge suggest indeed that any notion of success or good practice is blunted by a series of trade-offs (emissions reductions for heating price rises and profits, financing environmental policyby privatizing energy provision, regulating car use in the city centre but facilitating automobility in the outskirts…). Following the evolving, diverging positions, interests and knowledges of actors (including the opposing partisan views between the right-wing majority and the green and left-wing opposition), and the relations and (financial and other) flows between them is a way of highlighting both the always contested nature and repercussions of energy and carbon flows in cities and the potential ways in which change might come about. Second, this helps to raise the crucial issue of which or whose city is being prioritized in the formulation, implementation and contestation of energy–climate policy. The types and implications of city, urban

3  Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …     89

environment and energy/carbon flows underpinning urban life are likely to be quite opposing according to whether one is interested in promoting a ‘world-class’ Stockholm, a ‘fossil fuel free city’ or ‘a good place to live’. Following the details and the modalities of operationalizing these objectives and the changes of direction which have allowed politicians to shift resources away from one objective towards other, perhaps contradictory ones foreground these questions of who is speaking for what kind of city, how (based on, for example, what interpretation of which knowledge), why and with what forms of accountability. At the same time, it has been highlighted that we need to be aware of the conflicting and shifting positions of the actors involved, e.g. the multipositionality of the City of Stockholm in the district heating system, who can rarely be grouped together or made readily identifiable as a homogeneous coalition driving urban energy–climate policy in one coherent direction. The lack of a clear division of responsibility in some areas (and indeed a clear vision of ‘who is governing what?’) problematizes the issue of the extent to which the municipality can be held accountable for its decisions and policy orientations (when ‘the municipality’ is always multiple). This kind of ‘messy’ urban energy governance also implies that it remains wholly debatable the extent to which there is an ongoing shift to some kind of new dominant ‘green’ urban paradigm wherein shared green values drive environmental issues to structure or cut across whole urban political agendas. It is striking the relatively limited resources attributed to environmental issues even in the ‘Green Capital of Europe’ when education, care and transport still constitute the main policy priorities (see also Granberg and Elander 2007). Furthermore, there is a persistent context of compromise and trade-off, also highlighted in previous work on the politics of city-building in Stockholm and cities elsewhere (see, for example, Le Galès 2002), which results from both the presence of strong diverging interests (majority, opposition, social groups) and the limits to the strength and diffusion of green values, and thus to the environmentalization of urban policy (when a suburban motorway can, for example, be deemed more ‘necessary’ than ensuring coherence of actions and decisions with regard to the ‘fossil fuel free’ policy).

90     J. Rutherford

Third, the Stockholm case illustrates the centrality of urban materiality to debates and negotiations over low carbon urban futures. On a first level, it shows how climate mitigation discourse (‘fossil fuel free’) becomes confronted with the materialities of energy policy, whether it be technical infrastructure such as networks, plants and roads or everyday objects like heating bills, board meetings and the placards of protesters. The politics of urban transition is here a set of struggles over the evolving, everyday materialities and infrastructures that matter to Stockholm citizens. On another level, however, it suggests the need to go beyond materiality solely as static, fixed infrastructures or objects to a discussion of the dynamics of materiality through which transition is elaborated, operated and contested. There is indeed a performance, or a set of performances, of urban materiality (Latham 2016): work, activity, operation, and people generally fulfilling tasks to both sustain and evolve energy and climate matters. This is the case when it is the work of everyday policy implementation or the activity associated with the organization of protest and formulation of policy alternatives. Struggles over energy– climate issues in Stockholm are effectively performed through reordering, distribution and appropriation of material entities. The City’s emissions graph, the chimney of Värtaverket and the map of the bypass have organized certain linear flows and relations, but at the same time, each of these has meant different things to different groups and has been mobilized to support diverging interests. Indeed, it is through processes and practices of disordering and deflection of linearity that these objects come to matter: debate over the trajectory and implications of the emissions graph, protest at the heating plant because of what comes out of the chimney, the use of alternative sources of heating to combat price rises, contestation over road building and its financing. This suggests that the politics of urban energy and climate issues emerges not just over infrastructure and concrete objects per se, but more specifically in the processes of overflowing of these infrastructures and objects, and therefore the ways in which urban materiality is constantly appropriated through the practices and performances of varying groups and interests (see also Barry 2013).

3  Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …     91

This brings us back to the first point, because it proposes that charting sites and processes of material politics can be an alternative way of tracing the effectivity of urban low carbon transition, beyond quantitative carbon acccounting and measuring of energy flows in cities. Taking into account the multiple flows (of waste emissions, heat, people, money, best practice ideas…) related to urban energy–climate issues and the different orderings and disorderings through which they circulate helps to disrupt the linear pathways which normative transition discourse proclaims and enacts. Unpacking the diverse and undulating processes through which energy and climate issues come to matter in the urban arena is thus a useful means of tracing how transition is being performed, contested and repoliticized.

Conclusion There has been significant debate over the proposed visions for Stockholm’s future ‘green’ development. This debate was captured by the question of whether the city was concretely aiming to be both or either ‘fossil fuel free’ by 2050 and/or ‘world class’ in 2030, and by the different means and resources which were attributed to working concretely and materially towards these objectives. In unpacking not just these discursive visions and ideals, but also the more contingent political processes and struggles through which energy–climate policy has been actually formulated, implemented and contested in Stockholm, this chapter has contributed to deepening the level of analysis of urban energy–climate policies. It has gone beyond a simple reaffirmation of both an ‘implementation gap’ between generic, ambitious policy discourse and actual policy action, and an emerging ecological modernization agenda in which energy–climate policy is seen as creating new opportunities for urban development and growth which could inevitably and automatically contribute to the creation of ‘a world-class city’ in the near future. The chapter has argued that a core focus on material politics and everyday struggles around urban energy and climate issues is a useful means of grasping how long-term orientations are materially

92     J. Rutherford

translated here and now, in diverse ways by diverse urban actors, onto the local political stage. I argue that urban energy–climate issues inherently articulate transition, politics and materiality in shifting configurations. Transition must be seen as a heterogeneous process replete with potential for controversy and contention because change inherently operates through a set of urban materialities, not just represented by instruments, objects and infrastructures per se, but more performed by the multiple arrangements, mobilizations and control of these things by particular interests and groups. While this opens up the potential for a repoliticization of urban energy and climate issues, it also at the same time poses the practical question of how municipalities can conceive and implement durable energy and climate policies in a constantly shifting urban policy context. While energy, environmental issues and carbon management are sometimes portrayed as central now to the whole of urban policy, this must be nuanced by the still relatively limited resources actually attributed to green issues in many municipalities. This means that more often than not they need to be in symphony with other policies, needs and interests (as with the current ‘green growth’ agenda). When they conflict too much with more important priorities, they may be bypassed, reconfigured or even abandoned (as in the case of the financing of climate-neutral public transport from the congestion charge in Stockholm). These moments of the ‘unfixing’ of environmental– energy–climate priorities are important because they reveal the logic of reversibility which seems to dominate current policy in this field. Policy oriented towards embedding path dependencies in the form of large-scale physical infrastructures may be increasingly contested as it materializes a fixed, singular pathway of transition. More reflexive and adaptive policy is increasingly demanded, which might take into account more open notions of materiality and transition as explored in this chapter. The question that remains unclear though is how to mobilize more diverse ideas of urban materiality and urban change to construct stable, longer term actions for energy and climate issues which would prove to be durable and resilient in the face of threats of diversion of policy attention and resources to other short-term needs.

3  Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …     93

References Aberg, A. 2010. Här är fjärrvärmens största utsläppsbovar. Dagens Nyheter. Anshelm, Jonas. 2002. Det gröna folkhemmet - striden om den ekologiska moderniseringen av Sverige [The Green ‘People’s Home’—The Fight Over the Ecological Modernisation of SWEDEN]. In Naturen som brytpunkt: om miljöfrågans mystifieringar, konflikter och motsägelser [Nature as Turning Point: On the Environmental Issue’s Mystifying, Conflicts and Contradictions], ed. J. Hedrén. Stockholm: Symposion. Barry, Andrew. 2013. Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline. Chichester: Wiley. Betsill, Michele, and Harriet Bulkeley. 2007. Looking Back and Thinking Ahead: A Decade of Cities and Climate Change Research. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 12 (5): 447–456. Bolling, A., and C. Svahn. 2010. Nio gripna vid protestaktion mot Värtaverket. Dagens Nyheter. Bradley, Karin. 2009. Just Environments: Politicising Sustainable Urban Development. Doctoral thesis, School of Architecture and Built Environment, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), Stockholm. Bylund, Jonas R. 2006. Planning, Projects, Practice: A Human Geography of the Stockholm Local Investment Programme in Hammarby Sjöstad. Stockholm: Stockholm University. City of Stockholm. 1998. Action Programme Against Greenhouse Gases. Stockholm: City of Stockholm. City of Stockholm. 2003. Action Programme Against Greenhouse Gases. Stockholm: City of Stockholm. City of Stockholm. 2007a. Budget 2007 för Stockholms stad och inriktning för 2008 och 2009 samt ägardirektiv 2007–2009 för koncernen Stockholms Stadshus AB. Stockholm: Stockholms stad. City of Stockholm. 2007b. Minskade utsläpp av växthusgaser i Stockholms stad år 2015. Stockholm: Miljöförvaltningen, Stockholms stad. City of Stockholm. 2007c. Vision 2030: A World-Class Stockholm. Stockholm: City of Stockholm. City of Stockholm. 2010a. European Green Capital. Stockholms stad [cited 12 November 2011]. Available from http://international.stockholm.se/ Stockholm-by-theme/European-Green-Capital/. City of Stockholm. 2010b. Promenadstaden: Översiktsplan för Stockholm Bilaga: Beslut – utställning och antagande. Stockholm: City of Stockholm.

94     J. Rutherford

City of Stockholm. 2010c. Stockholm Action Plan for Climate and Energy 2010–2020. Stockholm: City of Stockholm. City of Stockholm. 2010d. The City of Stockholm’s Climate Initiatives. Stockholm: City of Stockholm. City of Stockholm. 2010e. The Walkable City Plan. Stockholm: City of Stockholm. City of Stockholm. 2011a. Avrapportering och avslut av Miljömiljarden. Stockholm: City of Stockholm. City of Stockholm. 2011b. Stockholm—The First European Green Capital: Final Report. Stockholm: City of Stockholm. City of Stockholm. 2013. Färdplan för ett fossilbränslefritt Stockholm 2050. Stockholm: City of Stockholm. European Commission. 2010. Stockholm, Green Capital of Europe 2010. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Fudge, Colin, and Janet Rowe. 2001. Ecological Modernisation as a Framework for Sustainable Development: A Case Study in Sweden. Environment and Planning A 33 (9): 1527–1546. Girardet, Herbert. 2000. Cities, People, Planet. Liverpool Schumacher Lectures, Urban Sustainability, April. Granberg, Mikael, and Ingemar Elander. 2007. Local Governance and Climate Change: Reflections on the Swedish Experience. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 12 (5): 537–548. Gullberg, Anders, and Arne Kaijser. 2004. City-Building Regimes in Post-war Stockholm. Journal of Urban Technology 11 (2): 13–39. Gunnarsson-Östling, Ulrika, and Mattias Höjer. 2011. Scenario Planning for Sustainability in Stockholm, Sweden: Environmental Justice Considerations. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (5): 1048–1067. Gustavsson, Eva, and Ingemar Elander. 2012. Cocky and Climate Smart? Climate Change Mitigation and Place Branding in Three SWEDISH Towns. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 17 (8): 769–782. Gustavsson, Eva, Ingemar Elander, and Mats Lundmark. 2009. Multilevel Governance, Networking Cities, and the Geography of Climate-Change Mitigation: Two Swedish Examples. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 27 (1): 59–74. Hellmer, Stefan. 2010. Switching Costs, Switching Benefits and Lock-in Effects—The Reregulated Swedish Heat Market. Energy & Environment 21 (6): 563–575.

3  Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …     95

Hilding-Rydevik, Tuija, Maria Håkansson, and Karolina Isaksson. 2011. The Swedish Discourse on Sustainable Regional Development: Consolidating the Post-political Condition. International Planning Studies 16 (2): 169–187. Höjer, Mattias, Anders Gullberg, and Ronny Pettersson. 2011. Images of the Future City: Time and Space for Sustainable Development. London: Springer. Holmbäck, Christopher, and Rikard Warlenius. 2010. Värtaverket: Lika stora utsläpp som från Stockholms alla bilar. Stockholm: Vänsterpartiet i Stockholms stad. Hubbard, Phil. 2006. City. Abingdon: Routledge. Krueger, Rob, and David Gibbs (eds.). 2007. The Sustainable Development Paradox. New York: Guilford Press. Latham, Alan. 2016. Materialities. In Urban Theory: New Critical Perspectives, ed. M. Jayne and K. Ward. Abingdon: Routledge. Le Galès, Patrick. 2002. European Cities: Social Conflicts and Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lundqvist, Lennart J. 2000. Capacity-Building or Social Construction? Explaining Sweden’s Shift Towards Ecological Modernisation. Geoforum 31: 21–32. Lux Research. 2012. Technologies for Future Cities: Integrating Efficiency, Sustainability, and Environmental Concerns. Boston: Lux Research. Magnusson, Dick. 2011. Between Municipal and Regional Planning: The Development of Regional District Heating Systems in Stockholm from 1978 to 2010. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 16 (4): 319–337. Metzger, Jonathan, and Amy Rader Olsson (eds.). 2013. Sustainable Stockholm: Exploring Urban Sustainability in Europe’s Greenest City. London: Routledge. Newman, P., T. Beatley, and H. Boyer. 2009. Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change. Washington, DC: Island Press. Nils Holgersson gruppen. 2010. Fastigheten Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige - en avgiftsstudie för 2010. Stockholm: Nils Holgersson-gruppen. Nils Holgersson gruppen. n.d. Fastigheten Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige [cited 13 March 2012]. Available from http://www.nilsholgersson.nu/. Öjemar, F. 2010. Förbifart Stockholm är ett vansinnigt projekt. Dagens Nyheter. Profu. 2012. Handlingsplan för en fossilbränsleoberoende transportsektor år 2030 - delrapport 2, Preliminär rapportversion för seminarium 18 januari 2012. Stockholm: Svensk Energi.

96     J. Rutherford

Regionplanekontoret. 2010. RUFS 2010: Regional utvecklingsplan för Stockholmsregionen. Stockholm: Regionplanekontoret, Stockholms läns landsting. Rosol, Marit, Vincent Béal, and Samuel Mössner. 2017. Greenest Cities? The (Post-)Politics of New Urban Environmental Regimes. Environment and Planning A 49 (8): 1710–1718. RTK. 2002. RUFS 2001: Regional utvecklingsplan 2001 för Stockholmsregionen. Stockholm: Regionplane- och trafikkontoret, Stockholms läns landsting. Rutherford, J. 2008. Unbundling Stockholm: The Networks, Planning and Social Welfare Nexus Beyond the Unitary City. Geoforum 39 (6): 1871–1883. SLB Analys. 2009. The Effects of the Congestion Tax on Emissions and Air Quality. Stockholm: SLB Analys. Stahre, Ulf. 2004. City in Change: Globalization, Local Politics and Urban Movements in Contemporary Stockholm. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28 (1): 68–85. Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. 2011. Sweden’s Environmental Objectives. Stockholm: Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. Swedish Government. 2008a. Regeringens Proposition 2008/09: 163 - En sammanhållen klimat- och energipolitik – Energi. Stockholm: Regeringskansliet. Swedish Government. 2008b. Regeringens Proposition 2008/09: 162 - En sammanhållen klimat- och energipolitik – Klimat. Stockholm: Regeringskansliet. Swedish Government. 2009. Climate and Energy Policy for a Sustainable Future—Memorandum 11 March 2009. Stockholm: Regeringskansliet. Swedish Government. 2010. The Swedish National Action Plan for the Promotion of the Use of Renewable Energy in Accordance with Directive 2009/28/EC and the Commission Decision of 30.06.2009. Stockholm: Regeringskansliet. Swedish Government. 2011a. Sweden—An Emissions-Neutral Country by 2050. Available from http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/5745/a/181428. Swedish Government. 2011b. Sweden’s Second National Energy Efficiency Action Plan. Stockholm: Regeringskansliet. Swedish Society for Nature Conservation. 2010. Trängselavgifter nödvändiga mot bilköer. http://www.naturskyddsforeningen.se/natur-och-miljo/klimat/ transport-och-infrastruktur/trangselskatt/. Tolf, Jonas. 2013. Systematic Climate & Energy Action Work in Stockholm. Stockholm: City of Stockholm Environment & Health Administration.

3  Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …     97

Vail, Benjamin. 2008. Ecological Modernization at Work? Environmental Policy Reform in Sweden at the Turn of the Century. Scandinavian Studies 80 (1): 85–108. While, Aidan, Andrew Jonas, and David Gibbs. 2004. The Environment and the Entrepreneurial City: Searching for the Urban ‘Sustainability Fix’ in Manchester and Leeds. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28 (3): 549–569. Wihlborg, Elin, and Jenny Palm. 2008. Who Is Governing What? Governing Local Technical Systems—An Issue of Accountability. Local Government Studies 34 (3): 349–362.

4 Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition in Paris

Introduction In the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Paris, Raoul Dufy’s monumental fresque La fée électricité (The spirit of electricity) stands out.1 This spectacular 600 m2 panoramic mural commissioned for the 1937 International Art and Technology Exhibition aimed, according to the brief given to Dufy by the Paris Electricity Distribution Company, ‘to promote the role of electricity in the life of the nation and especially the crucial social role played by electric light’ (MAM 2018). It combines a view of the social history and the technological development of electricity with Greek mythology as the thunderbolts of Zeus interconnect power plants and nature is linked to architecture, as seen in the gods of Olympus encircling the ultramodern achievement of the Ivry sur Seine generation station: ‘This dual narrative thread is resolved in an apotheosis as Iris, the messenger of the gods and daughter of Electra flies through the light above an orchestra and the capital cities of the world

1The

title has also been translated more directly as ‘The electricity fairy’, but this does not capture as well, in my view, the sense of a widespread diffusion of a life-sustaining current or phenomena.

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Rutherford, Redeploying Urban Infrastructure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_4

99

100     J. Rutherford

disseminating all the colours of the spectrum’ (MAM 2015). Looking from right to left, we are brought gradually to the city as technological modernity mobilizes nature and interconnects cities and urban lives across the world. Dufy’s work projects recognition of the importance of energy for cities and the global–local interconnection of societies and a depiction of the heroic Promethean promise of energy futures as technological power flows magically across the planet. This chapter explores how visions and notions of ‘energy transition’ come to be grounded in the Paris region. Through a focus on three ongoing sites and processes of change, I show how this transition actually involves a parallel set of distinctive concerns around low carbon, municipal control of infrastructure and its accountability, and the continuing role of nuclear power. Each of these concerns emerges through debates and contests (or knowledge controversies) around the make-up, functioning and use of particular objects or materials (resources, pipes, contracts, reports, radiators). Current Parisian reveries and promises of a sustainable, decarbonized, remunicipalized City of Light are produced by and productive of tensions and struggles over how energy infrastructures and flows come to matter in the French capital. As the details of Dufy’s tableau reveal, there is a very real material politics to urban fantasies which enrol energy in particular ways and for particular interests into current and future socio-technical apotheoses. I suggest that understanding the nature, modalities, outcomes and possibilities of urban transition in Paris necessitates a double, intertwined move. First, it is very tempting to read what is going on in Paris on the energy transition front in relation to, or in comparison with, other cities where progress is more advanced or appears to have achieved more tangible results. Ignoring issues of comparability of measures and indicators, this would lead to a focus on the factors or reasons for the relative lack of success so far or for the belittled place of Paris on some generic global trajectory or pathway to renewable energy use or decarbonized energy systems. If we take measures of CO2 emissions as an example, these suggest that transition in Paris is something of a struggle with stable rather than declining figures (see Mairie de Paris 2012a), and that, whether it is the 20% reduction by 2020 on

4  Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition …     101

a European level, the Factor 4 reduction by 2050 on a national level and/or the 25% reduction by 2025 on a municipal level, Paris is therefore not decarbonizing fast enough. The chapter eschews this view of Paris as untransitioning or not transitioning, which is based on a narrow, homogeneous definition or understanding of transition processes in which absolute quantitative endpoints, results or desires can be used to capture or analyse the significance or spirit of the far wider, more complex and sometimes hidden set of processes and practices through and for which transition is actually being done. This is in keeping with research which has conceived energy/low carbon transitions as emerging heterogeneous development processes rather than pathways with fixed singular endpoints or aims (see, for example, Bulkeley et al. 2011; Bridge et al. 2013). Here, the urban becomes a crucial nexus for energy transitions in the work of and debate and interplay between many varied actors and interests (Rutherford and Coutard 2014), pointing to recognition of diverging points of view on future urban energy configurations in specific contexts. There is, indeed, a fundamental tension or controversy between different actors, groups and interests in Paris over even defining and framing the issue, as well as over the content and processes of operation of any ‘transition’.2 In this context, we need to avoid foreclosing debate around what might constitute a productive site, arena or practice of future urban change. A more processual perspective is adopted here to privilege exploration and excavation of where, how, why and by/for who transition work is (actually or potentially) being done, thus unsettling and disrupting habitual understandings and frames of reference focused solely on extracting carbon or increasing renewable energy percentages in official statistics and documents. This focus on emerging transition processes and practices, irrespective of measurable results, then means rethinking the relationship between the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ in transition—specifically, the role 2As

one interviewee put it for example: ‘We would like the term “energy transition” to disappear and to be replaced by “climate, air, energy”. At least that would be clear, because in my opinion in two years the energy transition will not be fashionable and everyone will have forgotten what it is’ (City of Paris official interview, May 2013).

102     J. Rutherford

of urban materiality in socio-technical change. The work of transition always involves ways of acting on and reconfiguring urban materiality for particular interests, which is an inherently political process, so that struggles over what matters or making things matter have to be seen in a conjoined material and political sense. Indeed, many of the tensions and struggles over Paris socio-technical systems emerge around the flows, infrastructures and materialities which make up the systems and their functioning. Barry’s work (2013) discussed in Chapter 1 is particularly relevant here as artefacts and relations of energy systems become fundamental to the conduct and possibilities of Parisian transition politics. This means focusing on overlaps, blurring and recombinations of actors, objects and technical configurations in a co-productive process wherein it is difficult to disentangle or to define any particular individual components without referring to their relational constitution and effects.

Live in the City of Light: Contentious Infrastructures and Heterogeneous Transitions In this section, I focus on three infrastructural-urban material arenas wherein part of the salience of ‘the political situation’ of transition is negotiated: in decarbonizing district heating systems, in control over electricity distribution and in linking electric heating to nuclear futures. These reflect a technical and political focus in Paris on enactment of transition through debating and making changes to socio-technical systems where the mandate of local policy actors is concentrated (Ged 2015), but where infrastructure also demonstrates its capacity to escape control or management to some degree. Other arenas are available—energy efficiency and building retrofit, eco-urban projects, air quality, transport systems and mobility—and, by exploring these instead, some of the objects and flows under study would change, but there would still be a political process of materially constituting transition possibilities, which is the basis of what I’m trying to get at here.

4  Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition …     103

Decarbonizing Heat Systems: Pipes, Resources and ‘Gruyère Politics’ There is much work going on in and around the city on different levels to address climate and energy issues and to meet various decarbonization goals. One important emerging focus for this work has been urban heating provision. Paris has one of the oldest and most extensive district heating systems in Europe. There is an explicit policy objective both on a city and on a regional level to enlarge and interconnect the district heating system to increase economies of scale and to diversify and improve the flexibility of the system, e.g. render it more resilient by using more than one resource. Paris municipal plans and actors make reference to using its position as owner of the heat infrastructure and co-owner of the Compagnie Parisienne de Chauffage Urbain (CPCU) distribution company to extend the network to other parts of the city currently heated by less efficient fuel or electricity (Mairie de Paris 2012b). The regional level climate air and energy master plan (SRCAE) of December 2012 outlined an ambitious goal for a 40% increase in connections to heat systems by 2020, representing 450,000 extra buildings, to be achieved by extension of existing systems and interconnection of networks (Conseil Régional d’Ile-de-France and Prefet de la Région d’Ile-de-France 2012). But how these objectives are to be met, and how the current heat system can be reconfigured for transition, are contentious issues. It is not clear for many actors how the goal of 40% more connections to heat systems by 2020 is to be achieved. As of 2015, growth in connections was around 1.5% per year, which is a long way from the goal, such that a real connection policy needs to be outlined and implemented (heating company official interview, May 2013). It is not evident either which is the best level for investment and heat load. Many suggest a collective and mutualised approach, albeit across different territories (Paris and the inner ring of municipalities, or the new Paris Métropole inter-municipal cooperation structure…), but this would require somebody to take a lead and to organize things, and urban governance has been in a state of flux in Paris in recent times.

104     J. Rutherford

Furthermore, heating systems are varied and contentious bits of urban materiality. Objectives of interconnection, mutualisation and economies of scale require overcoming the technical and contractual difficulties of linking together different systems. The CPCU Paris-centred network is a steam system, while systems in surrounding municipalities use hot water. There are thermodynamic limits to the extent to which energy can be transferred between a hot water system at 80 °C and a high-pressure steam/vapour system at 230 °C. These different technologies were one reason, along with local political tensions, preventing the Batignolles planning project in the north-west of the city sending heat ‘easily and cheaply’ across the municipal border into neighbouring Clichy Levallois (City of Paris official interview, May 2013). Interconnection of heat systems is also problematised by the different types of existing contracts through which municipalities have conceded their own systems to particular operators, e.g. distribution only as in the case of Paris or also production as in other municipal contracts. The lengths of each contract and the dates when they are up for renewal also vary greatly. French public contract regulations (the Code des Marchés Publics ) prevent municipalities from modifying or stopping a particular contract, so combining or mutualising separate systems across municipal boundaries would require, in theory, separate contracts to be up for renewal at the same time and to have similar conditions of operation. Interviewees referred to the ‘tangle’ or ‘minefield’ of contracts stopping what would appear to be common-sense technical connections such as the use of recuperated heat from EDF’s Ivry electricity plant to the east of the city which is currently just lost (City of Paris works department official interview, May 2013). Heating pipes are also presented as a political nightmare. They are placed under the road rather than the pavement due to their diameter, and so necessitate costly major street works for their repair and maintenance. These works also require permits from local authorities who are rarely keen for streets to be regularly dug up due to unpopularity with local residents. The City of Paris works department cites this local opposition as an important factor on the extension and maintenance of the CPCU system, which can lead in some areas where there has been an accumulation of works to local politicians blocking decisions

4  Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition …     105

for any new street works (City of Paris works department official interview, May 2013). Digging up roads, even for urgent maintenance, is ‘almost impossible’ for a 12 month period prior to local elections (heating company official interview, May 2013). A major biomass plant project in the north-east of Paris, which was a major part of plans for further decarbonizing Paris’s heat system, was abandoned when it was estimated that laying the pipes linking the plant to the existing CPCU network would have been as costly as building the plant itself due to them traversing five municipalities. For at least one interviewee using the analogy of a hard cheese full of holes, this inherent degree of permanent contestation represents the substantial difficulties of working with the Paris ‘gruyère’ (heating company official interview, May 2013). Another area of uncertainty and tension in heat systems concerns ways to drastically increase the proportion of renewable and recuperated heat in the energy mix of systems. It is not clear, for many actors, how this can be achieved. In spite of the use of just over 40% waste incineration (recuperated energy) in CPCU’s energy mix, until recently the company found it difficult to reach the level of 50% renewable and recuperated heat. This threshold triggers both a decrease in VAT level from 19.6 to 5.5% thus permitting a reduction in customer tariffs, and a process of so-called ‘classification’ of networks allowing the City of Paris to force new buildings and planning projects to connect to existing heat networks which is an important element in ensuring a return on infrastructure investments. Biomass resources have represented around 3% of the mix in the region (or 0.1 Mtep), yet this is supposed to increase to 30% of the mix (or 1.2 Mtep) by 2020 according to the SRCAE. This increased use of biomass is a primary instrument to meet local climate and energy plan objectives. Plans are to use an existing plant and replace half the coal with wood pellets that are not humid and burn quite easily, and can be used in the same boilers. But this demands an increase in logistical capacity for transport and storage necessitating substantial investment given current limits to local availability and access to biomass resources. The wood has therefore been sourced initially at least from Canada and Ukraine because they have an established supply chain and industry which France does not yet have. Some observers unsurprisingly question

106     J. Rutherford

the carbon efficiency of long-distance imports of wood to meet climate and energy goals (various interviews). Furthermore, in the longer term, the Paris region is not the only French region orienting its climate and energy plan around biomass, leading to prospective competition for resources where France is unlikely to be able to produce enough wood for all (City of Paris works department official interview, May 2013). The very definition of biomass has also come under interrogation. Wood from construction projects and wood pallets are classed as ‘waste’ by French legislation, and so are subject to a restriction on their treatment. Some actors denounce the contradictions of a system which is supposed to be trying to create a biomass industry as part of a drive to energy transition, and yet which is exporting perfectly usable wood pallets to Sweden (Senior advisor to City of Paris politician interview, May 2013). In the SRCAE, geothermal energy is also supposed to increase from 3% to 13% of the regional energy mix by 2020. But geothermal energy requires a lower temperature heat network than CPCU’s vapour network (City of Paris works department official interview, May 2013). There can also only be one geothermal well or sink within a certain perimeter to avoid overextraction problems, which can create intermunicipal problems if the area crosses boundaries (City of Paris official interview, May 2013) or even competition over what is actually a limited resource even though the Ile-de-France region is located on the large Dogger aquifer (City of Paris works department official interview, May 2013). The heavy initial investment required for either large-scale biomass or geothermal production appears to be a significant barrier (heating company official interview, May 2013). Networks using these resources would need to connect to thousands of homes to guarantee any kind of heat load and a return on investment, and the lack of this demand base has led to abandoning of possible projects (City of Paris official interview, May 2013). In sum, resource flows, infrastructure adjustments, contractual and regulatory issues and their techno-political interpretation and mobilization constitute major arenas of struggle over how to organize provision of low carbon heat for Paris to meet its climate and energy objectives.

4  Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition …     107

Contract and Control: Contested Properties of Electricity Distribution After many years of being taken care of behind the scenes, electricity distribution has become a local matter again in Paris and other French cities. The City of Paris owns its electricity distribution system but it has been run by EDF since 1955 under the terms of a 55-year public service concession contract. Following electricity sector reforms, vertical separation of activities led to the creation of a wholly owned subsidiary ERDF in 2008 for distribution in most of France (as a local public service monopoly) with EDF concentrating on production and sale.3 The distribution contract came up for renewal at the end of 2009 in a context of debate over apparent lack of EDF/ERDF investment in the city’s electric grid, which was linked by the press to a series of blackouts and power cuts in the city (Bezat 2010). The contract became the core element in technical, administrative, financial and legal debate and wrangling over urban electricity provision. It was notably a key point of focus for local politicians, tasked with implementing a local climate– energy plan, to retake an interest in and regain some control over a system and a public service that had become shaped largely to meet the particular interests of EDF. High tension emerged over a low tension grid, as shown by the detailed investigations and reports produced by national and regional public accounting courts,4 the complex legal and administrative procedure, and the mediatization of the stakes, process and outcome. The process of negotiation of renewal of the contract became a dispute over the actual system itself both in terms of ownership of some of its components, and control of the system and the interests which were to be privileged through this control. In particular, there were diverging

3Local

electricity supply is also a separate public service. The City of Paris has, however, attributed a single public service concession for both services (distribution and supply) to ERDF and EDF (as separate but closely linked companies). For the Regional Court of Accounts, this is ‘a source of confusion and opacity’ (Chambre Régionale des Comptes d’Ile-de-France 2010, p. 2). 4These administrative tribunals have the task of overseeing and verifying the accounts of public authorities and local governments.

108     J. Rutherford

views of whether this was Paris’s network to be shaped according to the needs of the capital, or a local network within ERDF’s national system with the maintenance and safeguarding of the latter as the primordial concern. The City of Paris remains the owner of all infrastructure and equipment between the distribution substations, where voltage is stepped down from RTE’s transmission grid, up to and including customer meters. However, it emerged that there were some divergences over bits of property and infrastructure as an inventory had not been kept upto-date during the EDF concession. This is a crucial question for accounting, for legal issues and for calculation both of investments required in the delegated system and the annual return or royalty (redevance ) that the municipality obtains based on the performance of ERDF, and which Paris redistributes to help poorer households pay their energy bills. There was dispute over the financial value and provisions for investment and renewal of the ageing, amortized infrastructure, and the complex accounting methods for calculating these. The Regional Court of Accounts criticized the mode of calculation used by ERDF (Chambre Régionale des Comptes d’Ile-de-France 2010, p. 3). This was linked to contestation over ownership of some assets (meters, substations…) (Baupin and Gassin 2009), and their value or rate of depreciation, which directly affects investments which are calculated according to the gross value of assets (FNCCR 2015, p. 39). The investment value of the assets (and thus the provision made for maintenance and renewal of the Paris system) in EDF/ERDF’s accounting rapidly declined from around 1 billion euros at the end of 2001 to only 350 million euros at the end of 2009, i.e. the investment required to return the infrastructure to the City in its ‘original’ state would be three times less. Local politicians were heavily critical of the situation, even appearing on DailyMotion (Energie 2007 2009) to denounce the ‘pillaging’, ‘hemorrhage’ and ‘evaporation’ of money from the Paris system into the accounting books and results of EDF on a national level (Baupin and Gassin 2009).5 5A 2009 audit identified a level of underinvestment in the Paris network to the tune of between 750 million and 1 billion euros, so it is an ageing infrastructure which has been 60% amortized (compared to a national average of 39%) (Baupin and Gassin 2009).

4  Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition …     109

As well as a dispute around control over electricity distribution and ownership of parts of the system, this was at the same time a dispute about knowledge of the system, transparency and circulation of information. The City refused to accept and validate EDF’s annual reports for both public services of distribution and supply because they did not contain sufficient technical and financial information to allow it to monitor the evolution of its system. When ERDF carries out investment and maintenance work in the distribution system, the City is totally reliant on ERDF for information about the nature and extent of the work. Yet, the Regional Court of Accounts found that annual reports ‘contained little information about the means, technical and human notably, put in place by EDF to reach its objectives’ (Chambre Régionale des Comptes d’Ile-de-France 2010, p. 13). ERDF is working on a national level with hundreds of concessions and the technical functioning and interconnection of distribution networks means it is difficult to extract and provide information about one local system (Cour des Comptes 2013, p. 121). There is a knowledge controversy then about the scale (maille ) of extraction and provision of information, or over where the boundary might be between a Paris ‘inside’ and a national ‘outside’.6 So before taking a decision on the prolongation of the contract at the end of 2009, and the prospective terms of this, the City conducted three ‘internal’ audits itself of the state of affairs for technical, property and financial-legal concerns. As the City of Paris politicians involved in negotiations observed understatedly at the time: ‘After decades of unilateral management and within a framework which doesn’t give much room to local authorities, reaffirming the rights of the City has not been without trouble’ (Baupin and Gassin 2009, p. 2). Yet, notably given the uncertainty over the continuing regulatory status of distribution monopolies, the City of Paris was unprepared to do anything other than adjust the terms of its contract with ERDF-EDF. A compromise was eventually negotiated leading to a prolongation of the

6It

is only since the end of 2013 that ERDF has been obliged by State Council (Conseil d’Etat ), the administrative supreme court, to provide detailed disaggregated technical and financial information about each of the contracts that it runs.

110     J. Rutherford

existing contract for 15 years, which was itself contested by a competing electricity company. This contained a number of clauses clarifying investments and procedures, regarding provision of information notably. It also opened the possibility for the City to potentially remunicipalize the system and service before then if regulations and conditions were to allow, which is viewed as important in safeguarding local capacity in the context of the need to constantly track and update evolving Paris climate–energy plans in the coming years (Ville de Paris, ERDF, and EDF 2009). This conflict involving contract negotiation, accounting reports, legal wrangling and technical expertise brought an amortized infrastructure back to life, and recreated a degree of local capacity and control over a socio-technical system in transition.

Electric Heating and Nuclear Futures The nuclear question and its place in the energy mix in France has long been a highly sensitive and divisive one, bound up in industrial strategy, government energy policy and national identity among other things (Hecht 1998; Topçu 2013). The terms set for the ‘national debate’ on energy transition in France from 2011, and indeed in the broader Grenelle environmental discussions from 2007, deliberately excluded nuclear power, thus refusing to frame it as an issue or a question up for debate. There is so much capital, expertise and vested interests sunk into nuclear infrastructure in France that alternatives have long been very difficult to envisage or politically taboo to put on the agenda. Widespread availability of electricity and relatively low electricity tariffs since the 1970s have combined with EDF’s past push for increasing electricity consumption to justify and make use of its investments in nuclear power plants since the 1960s.7 Effective and persistent lobbying since then has generally ensured the importance and growth of

7Indeed,

at this time electricity began to be produced in quantities which vastly surpassed demand: ‘we didn’t know at all who was going to consume it all’ (EDF engineer, quoted in Weiler 2016).

4  Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition …     111

electricity use. Around 75% of French electricity production currently comes from nuclear plants. The nuclear issue has, nevertheless, become more discussed in recent years, following the Fukushima disaster and in relation to the age of production plants across France. Recent government policy had envisaged reducing the proportion of nuclear in the electricity mix to 50% by 2025, but it has now rowed back on this to beyond 2030. Meanwhile, in 2015, for the first time a French government agency published a report envisaging a 100% renewable, non-nuclear national future, albeit focused on techno-economic issues and without any mention of EDF (ADEME 2015; see Sinaï 2015; Gueugneau and Lindgaard 2015). While the national level is primordial in the governing and functioning of France’s electricity system, there is also an arguably increasing recognition of the urban dimensions to this system through the sheer ‘weight’ of large cities and especially Paris in terms of energy demand. The electricity grid has long been oriented towards ensuring Paris’s energy security in particular, and provision of certain strategic parts of the capital region such as La Défense, Saclay and new nodes of the Grand Paris initiative continues to focus attention (EDF regional official interview, March 2015). Yet the reemerging national debate around nuclear also comes to matter in the Paris urban arena through interconnections between a series of specific issues including grid mix, finegrained energy efficiency measurements and building performance, local policy objectives, domestic heating radiators and individual practices of comfort. The production of knowledge, expertise and opinion around these issues sustains an idea of a variable and contested ‘performance’ of the urban fabric in climate and environmental terms. A succession of analytical reports have been produced by Paris planners, ‘grounding’ ambitious objectives in the existing urban fabric of Paris, and using a variety of methods (cartography, thermography, modelling, scenariobuilding…) to translate technical knowledge about the evolving relationship between networks and buildings into policy choices (APUR 2013, 2014). But even this fine-grained analysis has not produced consensus.

112     J. Rutherford

One recurring issue has been what to do (or not) about the high proportion of historic Haussmannian homes and buildings in central Paris with electric heating (around 40%). The SRCAE regional plan translates national objectives into aims for 5% electricity consumption reduction by 2020 (on 2005 level) and 10% reduction by 2050, explicitly mentioning the need to reduce electric heating in this regard (Conseil Régional d’Ile-de-France and Prefet de la Région d’Ilede-France 2012, p. 15). Analysis by APUR planners suggests that individual meters have been shown to reduce consumption by 25% (APUR 2013, p. 9), but this has long been a controversial issue. In the discussions leading to the creation of the first Paris climate plan of 2007, APUR analysis showed buildings with individual electric heating to be quite good from a CO2 emissions perspective as they had easily adjustable radiators in apartments whose inhabitants were often young professionals who tended to have an environmentally aware behaviour and to switch radiators off during the day while they were at work. There were many buildings with collective gas or fuel systems where consumption was far less controlled and more polluting (APUR 2007).8 The APUR reports thus endorsed electric heating over other forms and suggested installation of individual meters in apartment buildings heated by fossil fuels which was argued as stimulating more virtuous behaviour from residents compared to when heating was just part of general collective charges (APUR planner interview, March 2015). However, in one of the clearest examples of tensions over transition objectives in Paris, the reports ended up being censored and their publication delayed by green party politicians who were part of the political majority at the time in the Paris council. Their absolute priority was to contest nuclear power, and therefore electric heating, even more than CO2 emissions. In more recent years, electric radiators have in particular come to be held directly ‘responsible’ for increasing peak consumption levels (Juilliard 2013). Indeed, RTE’s annual reports demonstrate this impact 8In

the study, individual electric heating consumed less than 100 KWh/m2/year compared to collective gas or district heating at around 250 KWh/m2/year. The former also produced far less CO2 at 89 kg/inhabitant compared to 665 kg/inhabitant for fuel heating (APUR 2007, summary on p. 48).

4  Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition …     113

(e.g. RTE 2012; see Fabrégat 2013). The high proportion of electric heating is a French and Paris specificity, developed or ‘invented’ (Weiler 2016) to help justify French industrial policy of massive investment in nuclear production of electricity by EDF in the past (Lelievre 2017) to alleviate the nation’s energy dependence which was keenly felt particularly during the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Around a third of French homes (more than 9 million homes) have electric heating (Berghmans and Rüdinger 2017). It has been estimated that France has as many electric radiators as the rest of Europe put together, as developers were obliged in the past by EDF and government policy to instal electric heating systems in their buildings, although many developers and property owners were happy to do so, as installation costs were low and then it was/is the tenants who pay the electricity bills (Lelievre 2017; Weiler 2016). The consequences of this past choice are still debated, defended by those close to the incumbent energy company (Le Ngoc 2017) and attacked by others as ‘catastrophic’ for its costs in terms of rising bills, increasing energy precarities, blackout risks and ecological inefficiencies (NégaWatt 2009a; Weiler 2016). It is estimated for example that 3 KWh of energy are needed for every 1 KWh of electric heating consumed as two-thirds of production is lost in cooling towers and through grid transport (Weiler 2016). As for the previous vignettes, tensions are culminating towards ‘breaking point’ in widespread recognition of the need to now take a strategic, systemic and long-term decision about French energy futures. Longheld infrastructure inertias and lock-ins are being looked at again as ‘peak management’ becomes ever more fragile and for some reveals itself to be a ‘politically correct’ term for an electricity system working for a minority against the majority (NégaWatt 2009b). The high proportion of electric heating and of nuclear in the French energy mix means that there is a constant and delicate real-time balancing act between production and consumption, and anticipation of consumption levels, especially in cold winter periods. This is in spite of oversized infrastructure permitting electric heating in millions of homes. It is calculated that every temperature drop of 1 °C in France in winter brings online extra consumption equivalent to the city of Paris (NégaWatt 2009b).

114     J. Rutherford

This tends to lead to now ageing 40-year-old reactors working flat out in winter months and being backed up by a combination of fossil fuel-driven plants and the cheapest (and therefore rarely the cleanest) available electricity on the European market bought by RTE, the grid manager (Weiler 2016). A significant question now is whether to ‘extend the lives’ of these nuclear reactors or to replace them, and if so how and when to do this, or whether to look at other options involving mass development of renewables9 and building retrofits (following on from RT 2012 energy efficiency regulations). For many actors, improving the energy efficiency of the building stock is the key first step for any French energy transition, but the power of EDF and other big players and the continuing hold of a solution through large-scale infrastructure mean that a productionist logic continues to hold reign. So even here a highly ideological and charged issue around the proportion of nuclear power in the energy mix becomes grounded and a site of dispute through material engagement of Parisian residents, energy companies and urban planners with radiators, peak loads and building efficiency measures. The 2015 energy transition legislation attempted to capture the main stakes, but it does not set out a clear pathway about how to achieve many of its specific objectives and there remain ‘multiple uncertainties’ about energy system futures with regular political shifts and the heavy degree of lock-in to existing infrastructure configurations (Berghmans and Rüdinger 2017).

Effective Materiality These three vignettes highlight something of the use of debates over and practices of infrastructure reconfiguration in ‘energy transition’ work in Paris. They also illustrate the inherently contested nature of the ongoing making of energy future-proof urban fabrics. More technology, more production and circulation of information, and more knowledge and reflexive

9A Greenpeace study showed that an electricity future based on renewables would provide more value for money than renewing nuclear plants (Greenpeace 2014).

4  Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition …     115

feedback in socio-technical systems does not reduce the possibility or the intensity of dispute and disagreement (it does not produce consensus), but instead leads to new sites and matters of politics with indeterminate (and contingent) bounds and significance (Barry 2013, p. 10). The three arenas constitute particular knowledge controversies about or around infrastructure, through which a wider ‘political situation’ around the nature, modalities, outcomes and possibilities of energy transition is debated, negotiated and effected. Disputes emerge and circulate around pipes, resources and energy mixes, contracts, finance, meters and urban projects, recombining bits of infrastructure and the urban fabric with the production of information and circulation of knowledge about these, as well as with stories, narratives and discourses about urban futures which together become highly politicized. They emerge in or through different spaces which reflect at once the technical functioning of infrastructures, the presence of distinctive forms and sources of knowledge and expertise about these, and often diverging techniques of communication or circulation of opinion and information (in private negotiations between stakeholders, in legislative arenas, on social media and in the press, in public presentations, etc.). The political constitution and operation of urban transition thus cannot be dissociated from, and indeed works through, a host of otherwise rather prosaic material encounters and connections, such as the interlinking of steam and hot water heat systems with different thermodynamic properties, the accounting techniques for valuing an electricity distribution network and how this impacts future reinvestment ratios, and measures and calculations regarding building performance on energy efficiency criteria. Each material encounter filters, mediates between and translates varying interests, visions and actions, thus contributing effectively to shaping the realm of what is possible in doing transitions (see Braun and Whatmore 2010; Bulkeley et al. 2016). The contours of local knowledge controversies—about the technical functioning, economic calculations, modes of transparency, circulation of information, etc.—make up the meaning of the political situation. The energy arenas examined also suggest differing ways in which, or processes through which, infrastructure comes to matter or to be opened to controversy, i.e. when their significance, value, operation or

116     J. Rutherford

behaviour becomes of interest to particular groups. Three examples of the distinctive effectivity of infrastructure can be sketched here. First, there is something here about demonstration and transparency, about highlighting certain things (and not others), and about where the boundary lies between visible and invisible, public and private, or something that matters and something to be ignored. Information has come to light in all three arenas and helps to open debate on certain points, but other information is withheld such that the realm of the politics of infrastructure is inherently bounded by accessibility of data. Public demonstration in the case of expert reports or the information circulated by Paris politicians about the electricity distribution contract places matters in the public record with a view to producing agreement and accord, but these become subject to debate. Following Barry and examining the material politics of infrastructures demonstrates that the more information circulates and the more issues are discussed and debated, the more disagreement and dissensus is produced, new sites and arenas of politics result, and indeed ‘could virally multiply’ (Barry 2013, p. 182). Second, in a process of revendication, materials become open to airings of claims or possibilities as to what, or indeed whose, they are or what they stand for. Objects are seized or appropriated as part of a territorial strategy or an aim to make things work for specific purposes, and in some cases they come to exceed their immediate constitution. In the three arenas, this is especially the case at particular times (when contracts are up for renewal, in accordance with changing legislation and regulations) or through particular calculations (for lowering VAT, market prices of coal and gas, or intermittence of renewable energy production v. grid load charge). These may be seen to represent shifting and contested adequations (spatial, technological, institutional-territorial) as actors seek new commensurations between production and consumption, control and concession, density and sprawl, and the present and the future. Third, actors must take seriously the active role and recalcitrance of matter and materials in rendering infrastructure configurations open to debate. Components or elements of energy systems have certain qualities or behave in certain, unruly ways such that there is some difficulty to master or to cohere different matters, objects or understandings or views of objects and their performances and operations. Paying

4  Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition …     117

more attention for example to the intrinsic thermodynamic properties of energy, and their political consequences, becomes essential (Barry 2015). Accepting this recalcitrance of matter implies that some degree of agency is devolved to obstreperous objects, and that actors must adjust their strategies as a consequence.

Conclusion In discussing the terms, forms and outcomes of a sustainable, energy efficient Paris, we are perhaps visualizing as vividly as Dufy the future techno-political possibilities of urban energy. Infrastructures are a vital, animating force or essence of energy transition processes in Paris. They capture and materialize the spirit of a transition which is actually a parallel set of concerns involving, among other things, low carbon, municipal control and accountability, and the continuing intertwining of nuclear power and electric heating. In their circulations, flows and stabilities they reveal and highlight key issues and contentions, they become open to claims and appropriations, and they defy, resist and remain unruly. Stakeholders in the city have become differently organized around, and indeed by, particular material sites, objects, resources and infrastructures in attempts at creating and sustaining visions and implementing actions towards urban transition. This chapter has explored some of the diverse array of material arenas around which energy transition actions and developments in Paris have become effectively contested and thus come to matter, as a way of charting possibilities and constraints of change present in the urban fabric. Different bits or components of socio-technical systems become politicized in distinct ways and at particular times, whether it is contracts, production plants, pipes, steam or radiators. I attempted to distinguish between some of the processes and knowledge controversies at work in making/doing material politics, and their underlying notions of materiality as a form of relationship between ourselves and our physical world. Public transcripts of transition aims and efforts in official plans and strategies differ vastly from the everyday processes and practices of transition in people’s work and lives. There is not just an implementation gap between what cities and organizations say they are doing or going to do and what

118     J. Rutherford

they actually do, but also between what they publish and measure as objectives and areas of activity to achieve these and the less public, less recorded work, activities and ‘events’ which actually go on. The nature, modalities and outcomes of transition can thus be conceived as a delicate collective navigation of the workings of the material world and how it is mobilized according to political contexts and constraints. Collective here refers to an always loose and provisional set of arrangements and relations rather than any clear organization of shared interests, which underscores the difficulty in envisioning and enacting the degree of transformative socio-technical change connoted by the term ‘energy transition’. Nevertheless, as we continue to explore emerging transition processes, two issues which merit further reflection concern our approach to agencies of change and our need for stories depicting possible pathways. It may be productive to further explore a more distributed, relational and heterogeneous notion of agency—as situated in, around and between particular matters and materialities—in analysing activity, capacity and capability to effect transition. Many of the artefacts and components tracked through the various developments in Paris perform or do things in a way which often escapes or resists full control. This seems to require some sensitivity to the unruly liveliness and potentials of matter in formulating political actions and strategies. Furthermore, and coming back to Dufy’s depiction of the cultural politics of electricity, it may be useful to engage in more exploration of the role of narratives, fictions and fantasies in (re)materializing the multiple processes of transition and imagining and envisioning very real shifting relations between people and objects and new ways in which things are understood, used, circulated and experienced. In this regard, French theorist Armand Mattelart (1999, p. 178) identifies the ‘thaumaturgic’ virtues of infrastructure networks through history, and ‘the gap between prophecies based on the democratic potential of networks and the trajectory of realpolitik in their establishment’. What this chapter has begun to reflect on, by exploring the process of urban transition through the effective materialities of energy infrastructure reconfiguration, is a bridging of this kind of gap. By focusing on always ongoing enrolments, deployments and disputes around infrastructure—the

4  Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition …     119

operational processes and politics through which transition comes to matter in the city—we develop a more open understanding of socio-technical change. Through this, we might begin to have faith in and forge new ‘reticular utopias’ (Mattelart 1999) grounded in what matters to people and to their everyday struggles for social and ecological reproduction of meaningful urban living spaces.

References ADEME. 2015. Vers un mix électrique 100% renouvelable en 2050: rapport final. Paris: ADEME. APUR. 2007. Consommations d’énergie et émissions de gaz à effet de serre liées au chauffage des résidences principales parisiennes. Paris: APUR. APUR. 2013. Une plateforme pour un PLU thermique (séminaire 10 juillet 2013). Paris: Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme (APUR). APUR. 2014. Un Plan Local Energie (PLE) pour Paris et la métropole (Note N°81). Paris: APUR. Barry, Andrew. 2013. Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline. Chichester: Wiley. Barry, Andrew. 2015. Thermodynamics, Matter, Politics. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 16 (1): 110–125. Baupin, Denis, and Hélène Gassin. 2009. Concessions de distribution électrique à ERDF : retours sur l’expérience parisienne. Paris: Mairie de Paris. Berghmans, Nicolas, and Andreas Rüdinger. 2017. Pour ne pas subir la transition, inventer le système électrique de demain. La Tribune, 16 June 2017. https://www.latribune.fr/opinions/tribunes/pour-ne-pas-subir-la-transitioninventer-le-systeme-electrique-de-demain-738245.html. Bezat, Jean-Michel. 2010. La chambre régionale des comptes reproche à EDF d’avoir sous-investi dans la capitale. Le Monde, 28 September 2010. Braun, Bruce, and Sarah Whatmore (eds.). 2010. Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bridge, Gavin, Stefan Bouzarovski, Michael Bradshaw, and Nick Eyre. 2013. Geographies of Energy Transition: Space, Place and the Low-Carbon Economy. Energy Policy 53: 331–340. Bulkeley, H., V. Castan Broto, M. Hodson, and S. Marvin (eds.). 2011. Cities and Low Carbon Transitions. London: Routledge.

120     J. Rutherford

Bulkeley, Harriet, Pauline McGuirk, and Robyn Dowling. 2016. Making a Smart City for the Smart Grid? The Urban Material Politics of Actualising Smart Electricity Networks. Environment and Planning A 48 (9): 1709–1726. Chambre Régionale des Comptes d’Ile-de-France. 2010. Rapport d’observations définitives - Ville de Paris: Délégation du service public de distribution de l’énergie électrique dans Paris, exercices 2003 et suivants. Paris: Chambre Régionale des Comptes d’Ile-de-France. Conseil Régional d’Ile-de-France, and Prefet de la Région d’Ile-de-France. 2012. Schéma Régional du Climat, de l’Air et de l’Energie (SRCAE) de l’Îlede-France. Paris: Conseil Régional d’Ile-de-France and Prefet de la Région d’Ile-de-France. Cour des Comptes. 2013. Rapport public annuel 2013—Les concessions de distribution d’électricité: une organisation à simplifier, des investissements à financer. Paris: Cour des Comptes. Energie 2007. 2009. Concession de la Ville de Paris: entretien avec Denis Baupin. Paris. http://energie2007.fr/. Fabrégat, Sophie. 2013. Consommation électrique: une exception française peu durable. Actu-environnement, 22 January 2013. https://www.actu-environnement.com/ae/news/consommation-production-electricite-charbon-pointe-17587.php4. FNCCR. 2015. Guide l’élu local et intercommunal: énergies. Paris: FNCCR (Fédération nationale des collectivités concédantes et régies). Ged, Anne. 2015. Perspectives on Transition Pathways in Paris. Paris: Agence Parisienne du Climat (APC). Greenpeace. 2014. Le coût de production futur du nucléaire exploité au-delà de 40 ans. Paris: Greenpeace France. Gueugneau, Christophe, and Jade Lindgaard. 2015. Energie: le rapport caché sur une France 100% renouvelable. Mediapart, 8 April 2015. https://www. mediapart.fr/journal/france/080415/energie-le-rapport-cache-sur-une-france100-renouvelable?page_article=1. Hecht, Gabrielle. 1998. The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity After World War II. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Juilliard, Jean-François. 2013. Madame Duflot, vous devez interdire le chauffage électrique! Libération, 25 January 2013. https://www.liberation.fr/terre/2013/01/25/madame-duflot-vous-devez-interdire-lechauffage-electrique_876155. Le Ngoc, Boris. 2017. Le chauffage électrique, talon d’Achille ou idée reçue? Revue Générale Nucléaire (SFEN), 31 January 2017. http://www.sfen.org/ rgn/chauffage-electrique-talon-achille-idee-recue.

4  Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition …     121

Lelievre, Adrian. 2017. Le radiateur électrique, l’autre exception française. Les Echos, 25 January 2017. https://www.lesechos.fr/25/01/2017/lesechos. fr/0211703876444_le-radiateur-electrique–l-autre-exception-francaise.htm. Mairie de Paris. 2012a. Bilan du Plan Climat 2007–2012. Paris: Mairie de Paris. Mairie de Paris. 2012b. Plan Climat Energie de Paris: Grandes Orientations. Paris: Mairie de Paris. MAM. 2015. The Electricity Fairy by Dufy. Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. http://parismusees.paris.fr/en/oeuvre/electricity-fairy-dufymusee-dart-moderne. MAM. 2018. La fée électricité. Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. http://www.mam.paris.fr/en/oeuvre/la-fee-electricite. Mattelart, Armand. 1999. Mapping Modernity: Utopia and Communications Networks. In Mappings, ed. D. Cosgrove. London: Reaktion Books. NégaWatt. 2009a. La pointe d’électricité en France… zéro pointé! (dossier de presse). Paris: Association NégaWatt. NégaWatt. 2009b. Pointe électrique en France: “l’absurde conjugaison du nucléaire et du chauffage électrique”. Le Moniteur, 8 December 2009. https://www.lemoniteur.fr/article/pointe-electrique-en-france-l-absurdeconjugaison-du-nucleaire-et-du-chauffage-electrique.1489024. RTE. 2012. Bilan électrique 2012. Paris: RTE. Rutherford, Jonathan, and Olivier Coutard. 2014. Urban Energy Transitions: Places, Processes and Politics of Socio-Technical Change. Urban Studies 51 (7): 1353–1377. Sinaï, Agnès. 2015. 100% d’électricité renouvelable en 2050, l’étude de l’Ademe qui dérange. Actu-environnement, 8 April 2015. https://www. actu-environnement.com/ae/news/etude-ademe-100-pourcents-electricite-renouvelable-2050-24292.php4. Topçu, Sezin. 2013. La France nucléaire: l’art de gouverner une technologie contestée. Paris: Le Seuil. Ville de Paris, ERDF, and EDF. 2009. Avenant n°6 au traité de concession du 30 juillet 1955 pour la distribution de l’énergie électrique dans Paris. Paris: Ville de Paris, ERDF and EDF. Weiler, Nolwenn. 2016. Très coûteux, polluant et inefficace: l’absurdité française du chauffage électrique. Basta!, 13 December 2016. https://www. bastamag.net/Precarite-energetique-surcout-emissions-carbone-l-absurditefrancaise-du.

5 Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures: Permeability and Politics of the Closed Loop of Hammarby Sjöstad

Introduction From Hamburg and Portland to Tianjin and Masdar, new visions and material enactments of the eco-city of the twenty-first century are being deployed on scales ranging from the district to entire new tabula rasa cities (see, e.g., Joss et al. 2013, for a range of case studies). The templates, models and productions of these urban interventions are coming to represent one dominant view of what urban sustainability is. They circulate and reproduce internationally through global networks of practitioners, architects and design experts, and through their array of technological ‘solutions’, taking on a performative quality by being eminently adaptable to almost any urban context. The Arup-led project at Dongtan near Shanghai encapsulates this neatly having been widely disseminated and discussed for a number of years as an exemplar eco-city in spite of the fact that it had not been built and ended up never leaving the drawing board (Chang and Sheppard 2013). Stockholm is a key node in this global vanguard of green urbanism, as demonstrated by it winning the European Commission’s inaugural Green Capital of Europe award in 2010 (see Chapter 3), by the constant stream © The Author(s) 2020 J. Rutherford, Redeploying Urban Infrastructure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_5

123

124     J. Rutherford

of global visitors the city attracts to its sites of ‘sustainable urbanism’, and by a number of recent reports studying the city’s exemplary ‘green growth’ (OECD 2013; LSE Economics of Green Cities Programme 2013; World Bank 2010). Infrastructure systems are central to this image and process, as underlined by the recent promotion of the ‘SymbioCity’ model, a trademarked joint government and business initiative branding ‘sustainability by Sweden’ (SymbioCity 2015), which draws inspiration in part from the role of Stockholm’s socio-technical networks in ‘holistic and sustainable urban development’ (see Hult 2013). The particular focus for these ever greener and more sustainable socio-technical systems in much of the literature is on specific ecodistricts within Gothenburg, Malmo and Stockholm. By concentrating various technologies and rebundling and interlinking material and resource flows at an ostensibly circumscribed local level, there is held to be greater possibilities for a demonstrable and tangible urbanism which grounds sustainability efforts on a scale which is both manageable for planners and practitioners and replicable or transferable in or to other contexts either immediate or afar. As the SymbioCity initiative states, this ‘unlocks synergies between urban systems to save resources while driving growth’ (SymbioCity 2015). How infrastructure has come to be a core component and process in such green city building has not, however, been greatly explored in a critical and situated manner. Much of the grey literature, and some academic analysis, too readily accepts at face value both the sustainability credentials of urban projects and strategies as a whole, and the innovative functioning and technical neutrality of the infrastructures and technologies underpinning them. While there has been useful work in an industrial or territorial ecology vein looking at the detailed workings of socio-technical systems in eco-districts or in cities more broadly (for an exhaustive review, see Barles [2010]), this needs to be complemented and extended by a perspective which locates far-reaching urban political debates and shifts as taking place around and through particular infrastructure nodes and material flows. This chapter explores the complex and contested processes and practices involved in rebundling infrastructure systems in Stockholm, which are not always the focus of the story of ‘sustainable urbanism’ in the

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     125

Swedish capital, but which are, as argued throughout this book, intrinsically constitutive of urban socio-technical change. Focusing on the well-known eco-district of Hammarby Sjöstad, I trace here some of the important disjunctures between visions, discourses, deployments and practices in and around the circular reconfiguration of energy, waste and water systems, within the context of wider debates and tensions over future urban planning in the city. The aim is thus to pierce Stockholm’s ‘green city’ front and, as in Chapter 3, get to the far more pertinent questions about the tensions, conflicts and struggles over infrastructure configurations and resource flows through which cities like Stockholm are constantly being made and remade, and indeed how, by who and for who this is being done (see also Freytag et al. 2014, on Freiburg). I analyse the ongoing development of Hammarby Sjöstad, starting from the ‘official transcript’ or model of project development and aims in terms of environment and infrastructure including its ‘closed loop’ and more efficient urban metabolism objectives, and the plants, infrastructures and circulating energy and material flows through which these objectives are materialized. I move on to consider some of the ways in which the project has been unsettled, deviated and challenged, including the disconnect between the expected role of residents and observed practices, and the technical and practical limits to integration and recycling of flows. Emerging outcomes in terms of policy learning and transfer are also discussed.

From Consensus to Controversies By reading all the planning and promotional material on Hammarby Sjöstad and talking to City officials, one would think that the project was the very epitome of consensual sustainable urban development. Yet, as Dick Urban Vestbro, a KTH planning professor and former City politician (Left party), revealingly notes in a paper on the project’s conflicts: ‘Almost all the available documents on Hammarby Sjöstad fail to provide information about the political controversies in planning the area. The main explanation for this deficiency is probably the fact that

126     J. Rutherford

these documents have been written by municipal civil servants who are afraid to write something that may offend either of the political blocs in the City. By ignoring the differences in perspectives the reasons for changes in policy become obscure’ (Vestbro 2005, p. 1). Vestbro’s point, in short, is that foregrounding the politics of urban development is the only way to focus on how and why urban change comes about. This observation starkly portrays something of the currently dominant evacuative politics of urbanism and helps to explain the ­ seduction of sustainability for local officials and technicians positioned uneasily between ‘political blocs’. Common discourses and actions of urban sustainability can be seen to be not about transformative change at all, but the exact opposite—the reproduction of (the ability to sustain) existing ways of doing, and in this sense, innovation and technology are often not about changing or about doing differently, but provide a new socio-spatial ‘sustainability fix’ for the extant status quo (While et al. 2004; Keil and Boudreau 2006; Laidley 2007). While sustainability is always enabled and constrained, forged and enacted in particular ways under conditions of capitalist social relations (Krueger and Agyeman 2005; Krueger and Gibbs 2007; Luke 2003), Vestbro’s observation hints at its more troubling and depoliticizing arrangements through which the voicing, let alone staging, of alternative urban futures is silenced (Swyngedouw 2007). The relevant documents ‘fail to provide information’, and so views are oriented and decisions taken based on particular framings and partial knowledge which emphasize the myth of straightforward application of shared visions and understandings—‘a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus, agreement, accountancy metrics and technocratic environmental management’ (Swyngedouw 2009)—as opposed to issues and controversies. It is therefore only by explicitly politicizing the technical (cf. Barry 2001), and focusing on competing visions, uncovering hidden struggles and outcomes in terms of winners and losers, and thereby highlighting that there are possible alternatives, that we can hope to understand the urban as an inherently contested terrain of debate over societal futures. As Braun observes, this demands

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     127

‘that urban sustainability be seen in terms of urbanization processes, and as fundamentally a political rather than a technical or design problem’ (Braun 2005, p. 640). Over the next sections, I explore the politics of urban materiality and circulation through a focus on the Hammarby Sjöstad eco-district project in Stockholm, its multiple narratives, its mobilization of urban infrastructure flows and systems, and its scalar, technical and functional limits. A number of stories and histories have been written about the ongoing development of Hammarby Sjöstad from various viewpoints, and it is not the intention here to provide a complete outline or overview of this project which can be found on the project website and elsewhere (see, e.g., City of Stockholm 2014a; Pandis Iveroth and Brandt 2011; Svane et al. 2011; Bylund 2006; Vestbro 2005). The focus here is on the ‘environmental profiling’ of the project and its enrolment of technologies, infrastructures and network-based services, not so much in some kind of identifiable and measurable ‘sustainable’ urban planning, but more as an arena in which conflict and struggle over metabolic flows inherently shape the socio-ecological landscape and outcomes of urban development (Theys and Emelianoff 2001). While Hammarby could be read as part of a general push towards postFordist waterfront regeneration and the reconciling of urban growth and competitiveness with environmentalism (see Laidley 2007), there is a distinctive way into ecological urban change here which locates transformative change in material circulation processes. Equally, while the evident, now well-known limits of such emblematic eco-districts would seem at first to preclude the Hammarby project as a focus for critical study, I suggest that its visibility and the still dominant consensual, uncritical view of the project as a green icon both in Stockholm and more widely requires unsettling. I focus therefore successively on three material circulation processes—around modelling and envisioning, reordering of material flows, and evaluation and transfer—which, I argue, are part of an emerging urban metabolic politics around Hammarby which reworks its particular configuration of planning, ecology, infrastructure and urban futures.

128     J. Rutherford

Fig. 5.1  Hammarby Sjöstad

Modelling Urban Infrastructural Ecologies The Hammarby Sjöstad 30-year planning project in Stockholm is the result of a disappointment. An urban regeneration initiative conceived in the early-mid 1990s as part of Stockholm’s failed bid for the 2004 Olympics, it has transformed an old port and industrial area of around 180 hectares just to the south of the city centre1 into a contemporary residential and work area (Fig. 5.1) which, when completed, should host some 11,500 apartments, 26,000 residents, 200,000 m2 of office and commercial space and 36,000 people daily (Hammarby Sjöstad

1It was framed as “a natural extension of the city” (City of Stockholm 2014a) in a period when urban planning policy in Stockholm was oriented by ideas of densification and ‘building the city inwards’.

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     129

official interview, August 2013).2 Had Stockholm won the Olympics, the site would have been the Olympic village and would have looked very different. Instead, over the last twenty years, it has become a cornerstone both in the municipality’s plan during the 2000s to build 20,000 much-needed new apartments across the city and in the vision of creating an emblematic ‘sustainable’ urban district which would boost the visibility of ‘world class’ Stockholm on the global stage (City of Stockholm 2007). The project undoubtedly benefited from the Swedish planning system which attributes a local planning and land use monopoly to municipalities, and from the Swedish tax system whereby local taxes are paid to municipalities. Both these points give great political and economic power to municipalities with regard to local planning and land use, and these have been cited by local actors as crucial elements in explaining the Hammarby process (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013; Hammarby Sjöstad architect interview, August 2013). Around 90% of the land in Hammarby Sjöstad was owned by the City and for the remaining privately owned land (Lugnet and Sickla Udde) the City made agreements that owners would get land elsewhere in the city (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013), or ‘expropriated’ and paid compensation well above market rates to save time (Vestbro 2005, p. 3). The project also benefited from Local Investment Programme (LIP) money from the State (see Bylund 2006). After development and construction a ‘mixed system’ operates whereby some buildings are rented apartments (hyresrätter, run by mostly municipal housing companies), but other buildings are cooperativeowned with apartments sold to private owners who each hold a stake in the cooperative (bostadsrätter ). The balance between the two is held by many to be a function of the majority in power in the City at the time, with the Social Democrats favouring the former and the Moderates preferring market-driven development. In any case, the hyresrätter system is checked by a rent control system in which publicly owned

2There

were around 20,000 residents as of 2015. The original project was due for completion in 2018, but there remains ongoing work and a new focus on ‘renewing the new city’.

130     J. Rutherford Table 5.1  Aims and operational goals set by the city in 1996 for the Hammarby Sjöstad project Sector

Objective

Energy

Total supplied energy was not to exceed 60 kWh/m2; within this electricity was not to exceed 20 kWh/m2 Water consumption per person reduced by 50% compared to new housing in the inner city Reduction of 20% in weight of recyclable and waste material 80% of travel by public transport, cycling, foot All stormwater runoff from the area to be treated

Water Waste Mobility Stormwater

Source City of Stockholm (1996)

housing companies set rent levels which private companies must f­ollow (Hammarby Sjöstad architect interview, August 2013). While the Moderate-led majority of 2006–2014—and its predecessor in 1998– 2002—did not sell off land which was previously leased, it did sell some of the municipal rented blocks of flats to the coops of the people living there. In the mid-1990s the aim (of the left-green coalition) was to have in the project around half rented and half cooperative-owned buildings, but in practice now it’s about a third rented and the rest are flats that can be bought (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013). An Environmental Programme (EP) was created for the project in 1996–1997 because of the Olympics bid.3 The EP was constructed around the idea that the Hammarby project should be ‘twice as good’ in terms of environmental impact as would be an equivalent urban planning project (or newly built house) in another part of the city at that time (the mid-1990s). ‘Twice as good’ goals were set across the board for all sectors of the project, although only some quantitative indicators were mentioned (see Table 5.1). When work started in the mid-1990s, planners were able to build on the fact that the City of Stockholm owned the water, energy and waste companies which had been instructed by municipal politicians 3As one interviewee explained, ‘The only reason they made the Environmental Programme was because Sydney, one of the reasons they got it in 2000 was their Environmental Programme, so Stockholm said they should make the Environmental Programme a bigger part of the bid to win. But then they didn’t’ (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013).

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     131

Fig. 5.2  Infrastructure integration in miniature at Hammarby Sjöstad, 2007

to work together with the planners on a district-level recycling model for the whole project.4 This was crucial for the articulation of planning and technical systems, and for fostering cooperation between the different entities and actors. One of the cornerstones of the project came to be therefore the creation of a recycling model based upon ‘systems integration’ (Pandis Iveroth et al. 2013) and tailored localized infrastructural configuration for all housing developments (Fig. 5.2). The resulting Hammarby model (Fig. 5.3) was therefore an important part of the Environmental Programme from the start ‘to show the cycles and how everything is connected’, but ‘a model building on what was

4This

ownership and control of utility companies was seen by some practitioners as crucial to the idea of constructing a recycling model: ‘I don’t think it would have been possible today, when we only still have one of them, and the other two are more or less private’ (Hammarby Sjöstad planner interview, May 2005).

132     J. Rutherford

Fig. 5.3  Loop closing and systems integration: the Hammarby model (final iteration) (Source Lena Wettrén, Bumling AB)

already there’ (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013) combined with new technologies and innovative system solutions. Most of what is produced by the district in the form of waste (domestic waste or wastewater) was to be reinjected into the district in the form of energy (electricity, district heating and cooling, and transport fuel). As the City of Stockholm’s Environmental Programme for the area outlined: ‘The natural cycles should be closed at as local a level as possible’ (GlashusEtt and City of Stockholm Development Office 2011). The incremental construction of this Hammarby model is a story in itself as the planners and utility engineers devised and constantly adjusted their diagram through discussion and negotiation of technical possibilities. Earlier iterations (see Pandis Iveroth et al. 2013) show the

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     133

model moving from an early wastewater focus due to the lead taken by the Stockholm Water Company to an ever more complex interconnection of systems, plants and sinks, translating the increasing coordination between engineers of the water, energy and waste companies. The omnipresence and performative power of this diagram—resting upon a constant effort to clarify for mass consumption an increasingly complex process of infrastructure integration—over the last 15 years in ‘selling’ Stockholm as a sustainable city cannot be underestimated. The model materialized on the ground into a number of proposed ‘green technologies’ shown on a Hammarby Sjöstad environmental map (see Table 5.2). This alternative technological system vision thus appeared to echo modernist rationales of more and more infrastructure as a harbinger of progress and emancipatory futures, but it instilled three major differences. First, its circular economy and objectives of re-use and sobriety contrast with the traditional infrastructure model of linear flows (from resource to use to waste) and ever-increasing consumption and growth. Second, it is developed on, or at least gives an impression of being developed on, a much smaller, decentralized, geographical scale than modernist large centralized technical systems. Third, it rests on a much more systemic, inter-sectoral approach with the aim of promoting joined-up solutions for water, wastewater, solid waste and energy, involving the Stockholm Water Company, waste companies, and energy providers Fortum and Fortum Värme together. Monitoring of the gradual deployment of the Hammarby model throughout the district was to be required, and in particular, ‘Follow-up and evaluation can be done by measuring and recording of resource consumption for water, heat and electricity’ (City of Stockholm 2005). Mention was even made of an ‘individual measuring system for each apartment’ (Alliance to Save Energy 2002, p. 66). The technologies and service systems put in place in Hammarby Sjöstad were clearly meant to deliver reduced resource consumption and thus contribute to the promotion of ‘sustainable’ lifestyles and a visibly ecological urban district.

134     J. Rutherford Table 5.2  ‘Green technologies’ deployed or to be deployed within Hammarby Sjöstad Water

Waste

Energy

Prepared soil for filtration of storm water from streets

Envac automatic collection system by pneumatic tube infrastructure Collection centre for the stationary pneumatic waste disposal system Docking points where the refuse collection lorry connects to the pneumatic waste disposal unit Collection point for ­hazardous waste

Solar cells on GlashusEtt and other buildings

Storm water basin with wetland for storm water from streets Storm water basin with filtration

Channel for storm water from buildings and gardens only Green roofs and yards collect storm water locally Sjöstadsverket experimental wastewater treatment plant Henriksdal wastewater treatment plant

Pumpstation for wastewater Nutrient recovery through urine separation techniques

Solar panels on buildings to heat tap water Fuel cell in GlashusEtt

Biogas cookers in approx. 1000 apartments Passive houses Geothermal heat for one housing block Fortum’s thermal power plant supplying district heating and district cooling from treated wastewater and biofuels

Source Compiled from Hammarby Sjöstad environmental map (and other sources)

Out the Loop: Permeability and Politics For all the state-of-the-art modelling of material and energy circulations and proposed technology innovations, Hammarby Sjöstad is neither new nor particularly exceptional in itself. There is not, never was, and

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     135

never was planned to be, a closed loop at the Hammarby Sjöstad scale. Contrary to popular belief, and many press articles, the politicians never had a vision at the time of creating Hammarby as an autonomous bit of the city (Hammarby Sjöstad architect interview, August 2013). The technical and functional boundaries of the district are extremely porous. Each iteration of the Hammarby model shows the central role of important external sites and components of the proposed metabolism of the district. In the final iteration (Fig. 5.3), the agricultural land on the left, the Högdalen combined heat and power plant, the drinking water plants near Lake Mälaren,5 environmentally friendly electricity production6 and the sea are essential translocal components without which Hammarby’s circular metabolic system would not function: ‘Hammarby was never meant to be an independent eco-city. When we were working with the planning, we didn’t discuss a thing like this. This sort of definition is given to us from outside’ (Hammarby Sjöstad architect interview, August 2013). Furthermore, the project was based to a very large extent on existing infrastructures, and to some extent on infrastructure systems or sectors which were already integrated, or at least ‘talking’ to one another, for example ‘because of widespread environmental awareness and the energy crisis of the early 1970s’ (Pandis Iveroth et al. 2013, p. 224). This included: the Högdalen combined heat and power plant which has been incinerating waste for heat production since around 1970; the Hammarbyverket thermal power plant which opened in 1986 and has been connected to Högdalen since 1991 and to the central network of Fortum’s district heating system for several years7; and Henriksdal 5Water

production takes place at Norsberg (60% of production for Stockholm) and Lovö (40% of production for Stockholm) drinking water plants close to Lake Malaren where the water is taken from (Myllymaa 2002). 6Electricity is produced, transported, distributed and sold based on the Nord Pool system, so it is difficult to trace the origin of electricity consumed in Stockholm in the Nordic countries (or further afield as Vattenfall have activities in Germany and Poland). 7The Fortum district heating system is calculated to run on a hierarchy of base load, mid load and peak load plants in which Hammarbyverket operates only as a mid load facility. Base load plants for the central-south network are Värtaverket, which is still part run on coal, and Högdalenverket CHP plants. This means that it is nigh on impossible to distinguish which plant serves which part of Stockholm and when, i.e. to follow exactly where the ‘water molecules’ go (Fortum Värme official interview, August 2013).

136     J. Rutherford

wastewater treatment plant which has been operating since the 1940s8 and which was sending treated wastewater to the Hammarby thermal power plant for heat production before the redevelopment project as well.9 The new ‘green technologies’ which were integrated into this existing infrastructure system have also produced mixed results. Some work such as the stormwater channelling and treatment and the automatic waste collection system. However, some, like the solar installations10 and the fuel cell demonstrator, do not, while others were never made fully operational, notably the Sjöstadsverket experimental wastewater treatment plant next to Henriksdal which was downsized, while the planned techniques for urine separation were abandoned.11 In summary, as a local official readily admitted: ‘All the big infrastructure and plants were already built. And the techniques for heating, water and sewage, that has been traditional, they aren’t new. The only new thing here for water is to take care of the stormwater locally’ (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013). Little wonder then that one of the architects of the project suggests that ‘The recipe is actually quite simple…’ (Hammarby Sjöstad architect interview, August 2013). Competition between existing and proposed new technologies has been highlighted as one factor behind limited uptake of some technologies. Green (2006) and Mahzouni suggest that Stockholm Energi and then Fortum have been very reluctant to use or promote systems

8Around two thirds of Stockholm households were connected to Henriksdal plant and a third to the Bromma treatment plant (Myllymaa 2002). 9The whole of the treated wastewater flow from Henriksdal is now sent to Hammarbyverket, where heat pumps recover heat for the district heating network (Email communication following Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013). 10The total installed solar capacity is, in any case, extremely small at 55 kW, which pales in comparison with the far larger production facilities for heat or cogeneration. Part of the problem is the lack of a feed-in regulation in Sweden which currently stops small-scale decentralized energy systems from selling their production to the grid (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013; HS2020 official interview, August 2013). 11Vestbro argues that this was a direct decision of the conservative right-wing majority because of its impact on urban form: ‘Abandoning experiments with urine separation in multi-family housing meant that local access roads could be made more modest since they did not have to accommodate trucks emptying the urine tanks’ (Vestbro 2005, p. 8).

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     137

which would have competed with the existing district heating network: ‘Stockholm Energy Company was not interested in investing in solar thermal collectors which would compete with the existing district heating network as an eco-friendly solution. The Company has already invested in district heating and it would require a change in the Company’s selection of heating sources’ (Mahzouni 2014, p. 13). This fits with Fortum’s more recent antipathy towards the prospect of some housing cooperatives in Hammarby Sjöstad installing heat pumps as a greener, cheaper alternative to district heating (Fortum Värme official interview, August 2013).12 Furthermore, the deregulation of the Swedish electricity market during the process of building Hammarby Sjöstad clearly problematizes any guarantee of the use of green and/or locally produced electricity (e.g. through solar photovoltaic), as residents can, individually or as cooperatives, basically choose their own electricity provider on the Nordic market according to their own criteria. Tensions are also present in the material flows and connections between infrastructure systems. The main component of the City of Stockholm’s Waste Plan adopted in February 2013 was to dramatically increase the production of biogas from organic waste from a level of around 12% to reach the 50% national goal by 2018. Demand for biogas has however outstripped supply: ‘The demand for biogas for waste trucks, buses and cars is way beyond this so Stockholm imports biogas from a lot of other cities as well…’ (City of Stockholm waste department official interview, August 2013). Yet, the vagaries of the municipal procurement process where everything has to be sent out for tender does not preclude some curious, even contradictory, decisions such as that which outsourced biogas production for the City to plants outside the Stockholm region even though the City has its own water company capable of doing this: ‘The service of making biogas from Stockholm

12Some

housing associations in Hammarby Sjöstad are fed up with the price of energy (HS2020 official interview, August 2013) and with the fact that they argue that the construction companies who built housing in the eco-district failed to deliver on their promises and obligations to provide energy efficient apartment blocks and instead, by cutting their own costs at the time of construction, effectively ‘passed on to residents’ the cost of energy efficiency (Lundberg 2013).

138     J. Rutherford

waste has gone to Uppsala 80 km north and Södertalje 50 km south and not to Henriksdal which is owned by the City and which is in the middle of everything… But they didn’t make a good enough offer, Stockholm Vatten. It’s a bit stupid but that’s the way it works’ (City of Stockholm waste department official interview, August 2013). On a local level, there have been constant problems with ensuring the quality of organic waste collected as biogas production requires a very particular, ‘pure’ organic waste. Locks have even been placed on organic waste inlets in Hammarby Sjöstad (Fig. 5.4) at the demand of the City to stop residents putting non-organic waste in by mistake (Envac official interview, August 2013). In fact, officials within the City’s waste management department mentioned that they had problems for a few years selling it as organic waste ‘so it ended up being burnt in Högdalen in spite of all the efforts made by all the households and the different tubes for sorting…’ (City of Stockholm waste department official interview, August 2013). At the same time, a circular economy has been instigated throughout the waste sector to such an extent that there is now ‘a lack of waste’ for energy production as ‘our plants are designed to handle more than they have access to’ (Envac official interview, August 2013). This has led to a recent experiment by Fortum and the City of Stockholm with imports of waste from outside Sweden, including in one infamous case welcoming in Spring 2012 a ship carrying 3500 tons of household garbage from Naples in Italy (Fortum 2012, p. 10), the publicity around which forced Fortum to issue a statement denying it was in business with the Neapolitan Mafia (Nordstjernan 2012). Furthermore, the City of Stockholm actually pays Fortum for the waste they take care of at Högdalenverket (“it’s probably a good business for them”: City of Stockholm waste department official interview, August 2013), leading to observations that Fortum is effectively receiving a double income: for taking care of the City’s waste, and then from selling the heat produced from the waste back to the City (Researchers interview, August 2013). Infrastructure practices and behaviours have not been significantly altered or made more ‘sober’. ‘Sustainability’ in Hammarby Sjöstad has been viewed as ‘75%’ the outcome of innovative technical system deployment and ‘25%’ from the contribution of residents

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     139

Fig. 5.4  Organic waste chute in Hammarby Sjöstad

(Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013) in a very particular form of socio-technical configuration. The idea was to provide high performing technologies which would reduce the need for residents to make efforts of their own, but this technological formatting of behaviours does not work. Both local officials and City planners mention a figure of 30–40% for achieved reductions in environmental impact since the beginning of the project, i.e. not ‘twice as good’ but not that far off either (Skillbäck 2010; Freudenthal 2010), but this is greatly contested.

140     J. Rutherford

The 100 litres per resident per day objective for water use has not been achieved, while the 60 kWh/m2/year objective for energy consumption in apartments—‘the key operational objective of the Hammarby Sjöstad environmental program’ (Mahzouni 2014, p. 1)—was finally abandoned in 2007 and increased to 100 kWh. It was realized that 60 kWh was much too ambitious to be ‘imposed’ by the city planners on already designed (and in some cases already built) buildings: ‘At that time (the mid-1990s) that was very tricky… it’s like you set the bar for the high jump at 5 metres. So that has changed, and it’s now 100 kWh/m2, since 2007…’ (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013). This decision has led to a slightly perverse situation where, instead of leading the way, the energy goal for the Hammarby Sjöstad project is actually now 10 kWh more than the Swedish national goal for new build (90 kWh/m2): ‘The reason is that this program is static while the goal for Sweden is evaluated from time to time’ (Email communication following Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013).13 As part of housing associations or cooperatives within Hammarby Sjöstad, each household pays for most of its services in its rent. Water, heating and waste (and collective electricity) are paid for in this way, with only electricity (network charge and consumption) and gas paid for individually. As a result, actual consumption levels are not very visible to residents unless they pay close attention to how infrastructure services are bundled up with apartment rents. In any case, surveys of some of the first residents to move into Hammarby Sjöstad illustrated that people appreciated the nice surroundings but were not prepared to make sacrifices to live there: ‘People moved to Hammarby Sjöstad not because of its environmental qualities, but because they wanted a house in an attractive area, close to the city centre and still with access to green spaces and pleasant views of an interesting water landscape’ (Vestbro 2005, p. 9). There was resistance from residents

13The HS2020 group produced a report of a study of around 100 residential buildings in the district which showed energy performance varying between 55 and 185 kWh/m2 with an average of 117 kWh/m2, highlighting the very diverse quality of buildings (HS2020 2013). This study has, however, been contested by KTH researchers for its reliance on performance data from a variety of different consultant firms which used different methods at different times.

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     141

on key sustainability objectives. For example, people came en masse to evening meetings in the environmental information centre building to argue against moves to reduce the number of parking spaces in the district (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013). Vestbro also questions the ‘high environmental standards’ that could possibly have been expected given the district’s large apartments with ‘oversized windows’ and multiple balconies, and the architects’ overall neo-modernist fascination with glass, steel and other metals which are energy intensive in production (Vestbro 2005, p. 9). The information centre (GlashusEtt) has been located directly in the district from the outset of the project expressly to help residents appropriate green behaviours with regard to energy, waste, water and mobility. People learn here to use and dispose of particular objects ‘correctly’ and to develop specific techno-ecological skills which minimize the externalities of their consumption habits. Like the waste disposal bins, located in front of residential buildings where people can witness each other performing their green duty (Fig. 5.5), the visible presence of this centre illustrates the broader social significance of individual technological practices for the district as a whole (see Brand 2007). It is quite emblematic, however, that the head of the information centre now spends more time informing international delegations about the district than the local residents.14

Learning the Eco-City: Measurement, Evaluation, Transfer These observations about environmental impact and consumption practices are further nuanced by the lack of follow-up and measuring of the EP and the deployment of the Hammarby model that has actually been carried out over the last twenty years. This was one of the principal critiques made by KTH researchers in the evaluation exercise of

14There is an average of 12 international study visits per week (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013).

142     J. Rutherford

Fig. 5.5  Waste inlets in a Hammarby Sjöstad courtyard (visible from apartment buildings)

Hammarby Sjöstad they were asked to perform in 2008 by the City of Stockholm’s executive office. The Environmental Load Profile (ELP) life cycle analysis, on which practitioners had placed a lot of faith because of its supposed capacity to monitor accurately the performance of the district, proved to be less than adequate. The 30–40% reductions mentioned above and used by the City to show reasonable performance (if not quite ‘twice as good’) derive from a report by Danish consultants Grontmij AB (2008). The graphs in this report appear to show effective reduced environmental impact, albeit for only four areas of the district. However, a number of limitations can be mentioned: data were obtained from the developers themselves so there is little means of independent verification; the reference level against which performance is compared is from ‘the technology level current in the early 1990s’ whereas the district’s buildings

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     143

studied were developed much later; finally, and most importantly, the report refers to ‘the source data for calculating heating, electricity and water usage, and certain information regarding technical solutions employed in the buildings’ which is unclear about whether the figures for energy and water usage are actual figures of consumption from residents after the buildings were completed and occupied, or merely ‘calculations’ anticipating what this usage could or should be. On this last point, interviewees suggested that the data used in the report was a mix from different times and from different stages of construction and contains a heavy component of ‘theoretical’ projection rather than actual consumption measures (Researchers interview, August 2013). In any case, the purported individual metering in apartments never materialized (various interviews, August 2013). The evaluation report carried out by KTH researchers (Pandis and Brandt 2009; see also Pandis Iveroth and Brandt 2011) observes the general success of the EP and its holistic, integrated approach in generating broad capacity and interest and in raising the profile of the project on a local, national and international scale. But it also makes a number of critiques of the planning process including its unrealistic and fuzzy operational goals (e.g. energy use) based mostly on technology deployment, the absence of data gathering and following of the EP, and the lack of capacity and power for the City to bind construction companies and developers to the goals, partly because the EP was introduced when building had already started, but also because of the contradiction in the City’s need to both attract developers to the project and to incite them to buy municipal land, and to promote ecological construction. So it has proved difficult to evaluate how close to ‘twice as good’ the project has actually come. What it has achieved is based though on moderate metabolic flow reductions rather than technology innovation (Pandis Iveroth et al. 2013a, b). The Hammarby model outlines a ‘vision’ for the district’s metabolic flows that cannot be accurately quantified in practice. The model and the ‘twice as good’ objective were in practice merely the vision initiated at the demand of or for the attention of politicians to make it ‘quick and easy to understand’. Meanwhile the actual targets ‘were based on what the technicians within the Stockholm

144     J. Rutherford

Vatten treatment plant, Fortum or Stockholm Energi as it was then, thought was possible. Sometimes it was close to twice as good, but… But what was twice as good… because often you didn’t even know where the standard was at the moment, so… how to compare twice as good, twice as good compared to what?’ (Researchers interview, August 2013). At the end of the day, even some of the people long involved in the Hammarby project offer a quite modest appraisal of what has been achieved in strictly local terms: ‘Hammarby is a little bit better. That Hammarby is doing fine, but it is a showcase, an example, a good example, and then we can explain about the rest. What is more impressive that we have such a big use of those infrastructure systems all over Sweden. It’s much more impressive that 80% of the energy use in Sweden is renewable than Hammarby’s doing fine’ (Hammarby Sjöstad architect interview, August 2013). Planning and political attention and resources have also moved on elsewhere. Its main role now is, in many respects, in policy learning and transfer of experience both locally to Stockholm’s latest urban sustainability demonstration project at the Royal Seaport—‘a much newer “eco-profiled” city district in Stockholm’ (Carlsson-Mård 2013, p. 259)—and beyond to eco-cities in other parts of the world (see Hult 2015). The new focus for the City’s sustainability attention is the Norra Djurgårdsstaden (Royal Seaport) project to the north-east of the city centre. This ‘Hammarby 2.0’ development for 10,000 new homes is in the process of construction with an overall aim for climate neutrality (‘fossil fuel free’) in 2030 (two decades in advance of the City’s same goal for the whole of Stockholm). The links between the two projects are explicitly stated by the municipality: ‘Stockholm Royal Seaport benefits from the environmental experiences drawn from the Hammarby Sjöstad city district. This area of Stockholm includes well-developed public transport links and advanced waste management and recycling options, implying a lifestyle change focusing on sustainability’ (City of Stockholm 2014b). The new project also has its own EP which has, this time, been from the outset a part of the negotiation over contracts with developers (Mahzouni 2014, pp. 8–9). But interviewees questioned the extent to which the lessons from the Hammarby process had been effectively learned by those now planning the Royal Seaport, and whether

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     145

some of the mistakes were not in danger of being reproduced. For example, there are still no plans to install individual meters in apartments in the Royal Seaport project for measuring household consumption in spite of this being a point which was highlighted as crucial by assessments of Hammarby Sjöstad (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013). Furthermore, sponsoring of the Royal Seaport project and its ‘climate neutral’ objectives by the Clinton Foundation was achieved through inadvertent use of the Hammarby ELP ‘theoretical’ energy consumption data (Researchers interview, August 2013). The links between the two projects are therefore much more complex than a simple process or transfer of policy learning between one and the other.

Situating Material Circulation Processes Behind the green façade of Hammarby Sjöstad lie a number of tensions and conflicts which betray the complex process through which this eco-district has come to be. These issues and struggles are fully intertwined in its making and meaning with infrastructure systems and technological flows proving to be a crucial juncture where these take place and come to matter. The aim has been to show how socio-technical system organization and metabolic flows and interconnections produce and circulate not just fluids and materials for local access and use, but also particular visions, models, ecological modes of residence, measures and learning possibilities. In short, I maintain that urban futures and possibilities are circulated through and between the heating pipes, waste removal inlets, water systems and recycling plants, which explains why they are always already political matter. This urban metabolic politics or politics of material circulation works through at least three parallel and overlapping processes in the case here. First, in modelling, envisioning and storytelling, Hammarby practitioners and city politicians negotiate boundaries for the project and the degree of porosity and autonomy, thus setting up the locale for intervention. The corollary of this process is that this orders and enrolls groups and publics, and locates the project within a bigger story/future. While this was a key task at the outset, there has also

146     J. Rutherford

been a recurrent need to adjust the vision and objectives to actual functioning (or dysfunctioning) and to relocate Hammarby within changing and contested urban narratives (from Olympics bid to Green Capital, as sustainability node or contribution to ‘world-class Stockholm’). Second, in organizing material flows, technicians and practitioners arrange connections, access and functioning, and rebundle infrastructure configurations in particular ways. Modes of organizing infrastructure and resource flows implicitly draw on claims made about the technical domain and how this contributes to the making of an eco-district. The use of interconnection between usually disparate systems and of informational techniques for reordering flows and functioning are ways of rendering visible (and public and governable) infrastructural operations and control logics (Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2016). Third, through measurement, evaluation and transfer, there is will to demonstrate learning and success, and to inform both within project boundaries and elsewhere in the city and in other cities. A variety of expertise is drawn upon to extract meaningful data which abstracts succinct and salient elements while veiling experience and information which is viewed as less pertinent. This is all exported and might offer a pathway to replication elsewhere, such that the process of transfer becomes a primary mechanism for sustaining the original story. But how Hammarby and its various material and discursive components and processes are framed as, or stand in for, urban socio-technical change is a multiple and contested issue. The project takes on various guises and its limits and wider significance can be interpreted in different ways according to the ‘political situation’ it is linked to or of which it comes to form a part (cf. Barry 2013). First, Hammarby Sjöstad is not and never was an exceptional space in itself. It is a space concentrating what are, in the Swedish context, quite ordinary metabolic flows which constantly perforate the boundaries in and out of the district, pre-existing infrastructure systems (and underperforming infrastructure innovations), and (as far as we can see) practices of water and energy use and waste production which are barely distinctive from those of average Stockholm residents elsewhere in the city. An extraordinary aspect of the project is how a small group of local

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     147

actors have been able to ‘market’ and perform the district around the world based almost solely on its image as a kind of ‘excessive’ simulation (Leach 1999), environmental discourse and very little in the way of measurable results.15 As such, the project has to be read as revealing more about environmental governance struggles and the technical and political inertias and impasses of reconfiguring urban metabolisms and green innovation than it does about the technical, optimal circulation of material and energy flows around a supposedly ‘sustainable’ city. It is also clear that Hammarby Sjöstad’s metabolic flows and exchanges have to be related to the logics and processes of the wider political economy of urban development in the city, including issues around the control, ownership and governance of land and infrastructure (see Metzger and Olsson 2013). The connections between the EP, the rebundling of infrastructure systems and decisions about land use and property merit further clarification. From some perspectives, including within the municipality,16 the Hammarby project constitutes a clear case of at least partial eco-gentrification with the selling off of public land to developers and then to relatively wealthy households: ‘At the beginning it was modest, but now the prices have gone up. So the people living there have made a good business out of it’ (HS2020 official interview, August 2013). The amount of publicly owned, leasehold housing has persistently been reduced in the face of a push towards privately owned properties. These kinds of logics must have inevitable, but uncertain, consequences on material and energy flows. The fact that the City imposed environmental measures on developers who pushed their prices up so that only wealthier households can now afford to buy an apartment in the district resembles a form of ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ (Fig. 5.6). The ongoing processes, practices 15Some

critical researchers in Stockholm argue indeed that the international marketing of Swedish environmental technology has been one of the main aims of the City of Stockholm’s recent urban policy and projects (Wangel 2013). This fits with the idea that the projects are a showcase for other things. 16The ‘social integration’ department of the municipality was extremely critical of the progressive reorientation of the project away from the 50% provision of rental housing by municipal housing companies that had been outlined at the beginning of the project (City of Stockholm social integration department official interview, May 2005).

148     J. Rutherford

Fig. 5.6  Waterfront apartment buildings, Hammarby Sjöstad

and struggles over the meanings, modalities and outcomes of urban socio-technical change in Stockholm demand close attention for what they reveal about evolving social equality, inclusion and welfare concerns more widely. Furthermore, there are all the questions about privatization and commercialization of infrastructure and network services (see Rutherford 2008) and how this impacts on urban metabolisms. The evolving business model of Fortum, based in recent years on extracting value from Stockholm households for Finnish shareholders through rising prices, cannot be dissociated from the technicalities of district heating provision in the city (its use of particular plants as base, medium and peak loads, its links with neighbouring heat companies…). The HS2020 citizens association has mentioned the possibility of disconnection from the heat network and the installation of heat pumps for some properties in Hammarby Sjöstad if certain conditions about price and ecological quality of Fortum’s heat are not met (HS2020 official interview, August

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     149

2013). But any widespread shift from collective district heating provision to a succession of separate decentralized heating systems would have serious repercussions on energy flows and costs in the city. There are then questions here about the nature and meaning of planning, best practice, scales of sustainability, project evaluation and policy learning. For all the planning work and documents produced at the start of the project to set a clear pathway and define objectives, Hammarby has been an emergent, constantly undulating process in which anything ‘static’ such as a fixed energy efficiency goal has had to be re-evaluated even to the point where its exemplarity is erased in the face of a need for workable options. Shifting positions, priorities and resources reinforce the importance of temporality in planning—planning is always concerned with the future so as soon as an eco-district is built in the present, it becomes the past (see Beauregard 2015). As attention, resources and work has shifted from Hammarby Sjöstad to elsewhere, sustaining sustainability (“renewing the new city”) becomes the mandate of other actors, who have to pick up the baton left by the planners, including doing the work that was envisaged, but not completed, during the project such as measuring and ‘improving’ energy consumption (HS2020 2013). Analysis of material circulation processes in Hammarby Sjöstad highlights an urban metabolic politics in which infrastructures and resource flows become contested arenas for wider debates about urban possibilities and futures. These are ongoing processes and debates, and just as it is crucially important to uncover them and situate urban sustainability as a grounded political matter rather than an exercise in enhancing local technical functioning, it is essential to continue to track these processes and the political contours they enact in order to remain attentive to modalities and outcomes of maintaining sustainability over time.

Conclusion Timothy Luke’s (1995) analysis of the Biosphere 2 experiment captured how the eternal contradiction of ‘closed loop’ projects for space exploration is that they always fail to sustain the boundary between inside and outside, as ‘the endosphere turned out to be an exosphere, where the only

150     J. Rutherford

environment in which it was possible to survive was outside ’ (Höhler 2008, p. 78; see also Marvin 2016). The permeability of Hammarby Sjöstad operates in a similar frame. While the project was never conceived as autarkic in its day-to-day functioning, the coherence of its internal green objectives and agenda are constantly exposed to ‘external’ processes, deviations and conflicts. Any transcendence of crucial contextual and constitutive processes and relations proves to be mythical. This chapter has analysed some of the contested processes and practices around the rebundling of infrastructure systems in Stockholm, through which one variant of urban socio-technical change is operated. The disjunctures and overflows between vision, discourse, practice and material politics have reconfigured energy, waste and water systems in profound ways. Infrastructure and resource flows of materials, waste, energy and money are constantly reshaped, often along channels which were not planned or foreseen; models, diagrams and objectives become performative and circulate particular visions and ideas widely; technology does not always work or works in unexpected ways or is used for alternative interests; policy learning is subject to inertias and trade-offs between ‘local’ situated urban development and wider political economies; urban materiality becomes an active participant in the city… These deviations speak to an urban metabolic politics uncovered by identifying the ways in which storylines, resource flows and infrastructure, and the constant search for urban improvement relate and intertwine. Thus, even in a highly programmatic, ‘anaesthetic’ urban project (Leach 1999), pulling back the sustainability shroud reveals tensions and struggles which may constitute the beginnings of alternative approaches to technocratic environmental governance and top-down management of technology provision and use. Indeed, continued monitoring and analysis of political struggles over urban development are required especially in cities like Stockholm where an often depoliticizing mantra of sustainability and its associated urban technological governing practices makes it difficult to see any sustainable city other than the immediately visible official exemplar. A focus on urban infrastructures and resource flow configurations is very useful for exposing the diverse material political processes through which eco-city integration and circularity is both operated and limited. While these goals and processes

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     151

need in particular to be made more inclusive rather than supporting increasingly exclusive enclaves, following infrastructures both reminds us of the occasional intractability of a material world which, more often than not, cannot be contained within boundaries and helps to envision productive thinking and action around interconnections, interdependencies and collective organization.

References Alliance to Save Energy. 2002. Watergy: Taking Advantage of Untapped Energy and Water Efficiency Opportunities in Municipal Water Systems. Washington, DC: ASE. Barles, Sabine. 2010. Society, Energy and Materials: The Contribution of Urban Metabolism Studies to Sustainable Urban Development Issues. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 53 (4): 439–455. Barry, Andrew. 2001. Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society. London: Athlone. Barry, Andrew. 2013. Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline. Chichester: Wiley. Beauregard, Robert. 2015. Planning Matter: Acting with Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brand, Peter. 2007. Green Subjection: The Politics of Neoliberal Urban Environmental Management. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31 (3): 616–632. Braun, Bruce. 2005. Environmental Issues: Writing a More-Than-Human Urban Geography. Progress in Human Geography 29 (5): 635–650. Bylund, Jonas R. 2006. Planning, Projects, Practice: A Human Geography of the Stockholm Local Investment Programme in Hammarby Sjöstad. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Carlsson-Mård, Daniel. 2013. Stockholm Royal Seaport: A New Eco-Profiled City District. In Planning and Sustainable Urban Development in Sweden, ed. M.J. Lundström, C. Fredriksson, and J. Witzell. Stockholm: Swedish Society for Town and Country Planning. Chang, I-Chun Catherine, and Eric Sheppard. 2013. China’s Eco-Cities as Variegated Urban Sustainability: Dongtan Eco-City and Chongming EcoIsland. Journal of Urban Technology 20 (1): 57–75.

152     J. Rutherford

City of Stockholm. 1996. Hammarby Sjöstad: Environmental Programme. Stockholm: City of Stockholm. City of Stockholm. 2005. Hammarby Sjöstad (Project Website). Available from http://www.hammarbysjostad.se/. City of Stockholm. 2007. Vision 2030: A World-Class Stockholm. Stockholm: City of Stockholm. City of Stockholm. 2014a. Hammarby Sjöstad—A Leader in Sustainable City Development. Available from http://www.hammarbysjostad.se/. City of Stockholm. 2014b. The Stockholm Royal Seaport Project. Available from http://bygg.stockholm.se/Alla-projekt/norra-djurgardsstaden/In-English/ Stockholm-Royal-Seaport/. Fortum. 2012. Miljörapport 2012: Högdalenverket. Stockholm: Fortum. Freudenthal, Erik. 2010. Hammarby Sjöstad, Unique Environmental Project in Stockholm. Stockholm: GlashusEtt. Freytag, Tim, Stefan Gössling, and Samuel Mössner. 2014. Living the Green City: Freiburg’s Solarsiedlung Between Narratives and Practices of Sustainable Urban Development. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 19 (6): 644–659. GlashusEtt and City of Stockholm Development Office. 2011. Hammarby Sjöstad—A New City District with Emphasis on Water and Ecology. Stockholm: GlashusEtt and City of Stockholm Development Office. Green, Anna. 2006. Hållbar energianvändning i svensk stadsplanering. Linköping: University of Linköping. Grontmij AB. 2008. Report Summary—Follow Up of Environmental Impact in Hammarby Sjöstad: Sickla Udde, Sickla Kaj, Lugnet and Proppen. Stockholm: Grontmij AB. Höhler, Sabine. 2008. ‘Spaceship Earth’: Envisioning Human Habitats in the Environmental Age. GHI Bulletin 42: 65–85. HS2020. 2013. Under 100 - att lyckas med energi i Hammarby Sjöstad. Stockholm: HS2020. Hult, Anna. 2013. Swedish Production of Sustainable Urban Imaginaries in China. Journal of Urban Technology 20 (1): 77–94. Hult, Anna. 2015. The Circulation of Swedish Urban Sustainability Practices: To China and Back. Environment and Planning A 47: 537–553. Joss, Simon, Robert Kargon, and Arthur Molella. 2013. Eco-Cities in PanAsia: International Discourses, Local Practices. Journal of Urban Technology 20 (1): 1–5.

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     153

Keil, Roger, and Julie-Anne Boudreau. 2006. Metropolitics and Metabolics: Rolling Out Environmentalism in Toronto. In In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, ed. N. Heynen, M. Kaika, and E. Swyngedouw. London: Routledge. Krueger, Rob, and Julian Agyeman. 2005. Sustainability Schizophrenia or “Actually Existing Sustainabilities?” Toward a Broader Understanding of the Politics and Promise of Local Sustainability in the US. Geoforum 36 (4): 410–417. Krueger, Rob, and David Gibbs (eds.). 2007. The Sustainable Development Paradox. New York: Guilford Press. Laidley, Jennefer. 2007. The Ecosystem Approach and the Global Imperative on Toronto’s Central Waterfront. Cities 24 (4): 259–272. Leach, Neil. 1999. The Anaesthetics of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. LSE Economics of Green Cities Programme. 2013. Stockholm: Green Economy Leader Report. London: London School of Economics and Political Science Economics of Green Cities Programme. Luke, Timothy. 1995. Reproducing Planet Earth? The Hubris of Biosphere 2. The Ecologist 25 (4): 157–162. Luke, Timothy. 2003. Global Cities vs. ‘Global Cities’: Rethinking Contemporary Urbanism as Public Ecology. Studies in Political Economy 70: 11–33. Lundberg, Elina. 2013. NU ska Hammarby sjöstad bli ekoreko. Södermalmsnytt. Luque-Ayala, Andrés, and Simon Marvin. 2016. The Maintenance of Urban Circulation: An Operational Logic of Infrastructural Control. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 (2): 191–208. Mahzouni, Arian. 2014. The ‘Policy Mix’ for Sustainable Urban Transition: Lessons from the City District Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm. Mimeo. Marvin, Simon. 2016. Volumetric Urbanism: Artificial ‘Outsides’ Reassembled ‘Inside’. In Beyond the Networked City: Infrastructure Reconfigurations and Urban Change in the North and South, ed. O. Coutard and J. Rutherford. Abingdon: Routledge. Metzger, Jonathan, and Amy Rader Olsson (eds.). 2013. Sustainable Stockholm: Exploring Urban Sustainability in Europe’s Greenest City. London: Routledge. Myllymaa, Tuuli. 2002. Stockholm Water Supply and Sewerage. Research Note. Nordstjernan. 2012. Sweden Burns Mafia Garbage. Nordstjernan. OECD. 2013. Green Growth in Stockholm, Sweden. OECD Green Growth Studies. Paris: OECD.

154     J. Rutherford

Pandis, Sofie, and Nils Brandt. 2009. Utvärdering av Hammarby Sjöstads miljöprofilering - vilka erfarenheter ska tas med till nya stadsutvecklingsprojekt i Stockholm? Stockholm: KTH Avdelningen för Industriell Ekologi. Pandis Iveroth, Sofie, and Nils Brandt. 2011. The Development of a Sustainable Urban District in Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm, Sweden? Environ Dev Sustain 13: 1043–1064. Pandis Iveroth, Sofie, Stefan Johansson, and Nils Brandt. 2013a. The Potential of the Infrastructural System of Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm, Sweden. Energy Policy 59: 716–726. Pandis Iveroth, Sofie, Anne-Lorène Vernay, Karel Mulder, and Nils Brandt. 2013b. Implications of Systems Integration at the Urban Level: The Case of Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm. Journal of Cleaner Production 48: 220–231. Rutherford, J. 2008. Unbundling Stockholm: The Networks, Planning and Social Welfare Nexus Beyond the Unitary City. Geoforum 39 (6): 1871–1883. Skillbäck, Martin. 2010. Hammarby Sjöstad. Stockholm: City of Stockholm Development Administration. Svane, Örjan, Josefin Wangel, Lars Engberg, and Jenny Palm. 2011. Compromise and Learning When Negotiating Sustainabilities: The Brownfield Development of Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm. International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development 3 (2): 141–155. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2007. Impossible “Sustainability” and the Post-political Condition. In The Sustainable Development Paradox, ed. D.C. Gibbs and R. Krueger. New York: Guilford Press. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2009. The Antinomies of the Post-political City: In Search of a Democratic Politics of Environmental Production. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (3): 601–620. SymbioCity. 2015. SymbioCity: Sustainability by Sweden. Available from http:// www.symbiocity.se/. Theys, Jacques, and Cyria Emelianoff. 2001. Les contradictions de la ville durable. Le Débat 113 (1): 122–135. Vestbro, Dick Urban. 2005. Conflicting Perspectives in the Development of Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm. Mimeo. Wangel, Josefin. 2013. Hammarby sjöstad är ingen hållbar stadsdel. Available from http://hammarbysjostad.info/hammarby_news/ hammarby-sjostad-ar-ingen-hallbar-stadsdel/.

5  Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …     155

While, Aidan, Andrew Jonas, and David Gibbs. 2004. The Environment and the Entrepreneurial City: Searching for the Urban ‘Sustainability Fix’ in Manchester and Leeds. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28 (3): 549–569. World Bank. 2010. Eco2 Cities: Ecological Cities as Economic Cities. Washington, DC: World Bank.

6 Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban Systems: Reflections on Ordering and Disordering the City

Introduction: Grappling with Smart Urban planning has long been about technologically mediated efforts at urban improvement. Belief in progress through technology was one of the main drivers in the making and remaking of many cities through the twentieth century, and this may well have attained its zenith in the emergence and proliferation of initiatives broadly grouped under the moniker of smart urbanism. For many, the pace of urban change is speeding up through smart technology, and things are becoming more interconnected, but it is not clear whether this constitutes just a degree of difference or something substantively different. What does smart add, enhance or allow to be done differently in the urban arena? Governments, public agencies and private companies have embedded a vast array of systems, software, devices and sensors in cities for varying reasons, constituting a pervasive digital infrastructure capable of providing massive amounts of geolocational data about all kinds of activities and interactions. Many smart city projects aim to draw on these new streams of information to forge detailed, transversal and often real-time perspectives on urban life ostensibly to aid and improve city planning, © The Author(s) 2020 J. Rutherford, Redeploying Urban Infrastructure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_6

157

158     J. Rutherford

management and functioning. Using everything from public transport smart card databases to air and noise pollution sensors, often brought together through tech company platforms or analytical tools, smart urbanism offers an appealing vision of efficient and sustainable urban futures through maximizing the value of urban information and creating new knowledge about everyday flows and happenings in the city. Critiqued as top-down and technocratic in their aims and operations, these initiatives also seek to draw on the more distributed production of information and content by citizens as they move about, or inhabit, the city. For all the recent ubiquity of smart urban projects, practitioner and policy discourse, and a furore of work in and around urban studies concerned with interpreting meanings, modalities and outcomes of this, there is a sense in which we are still struggling to grasp what might be distinctive about smart urbanism. In terms of content, many versions of smart urbanism appear to revolve around or emerge out of a conflation or synthesis of three elements: interconnection of networks and rebundling of infrastructure systems; mass deployment of sensors, screens and surfaces and associated processes for monitoring, recording, circulation and feedback from these in real-time; and promotion of an adaptive, flexible, on-demand, individualized urban experience. By combining more and deeper technology deployment throughout the urban fabric, the interconnection of heterogeneous systems, and an ‘enhanced self-sufficiency’ or ‘individualized, autonomized spatiality’ (Michael 2009, pp. 95–96), ‘smart’ becomes a prime field of experimentation and testing of new socio-technical configurations in the city (Karvonen and van Heur 2014; McLean et al. 2016), and the inevitable solution to a host of big problems ranging from climate change to the provision of public services under austerity. Halpern et al. (2013, p. 278) call this marriage of sustainability and bandwidth ‘a fantasized ­transformation in the management of life — human and machine — in terms of increased access to information and [thus] decreased consumption of resources’. Cugurullo (2018) argues that these discourses of integration and cohesion of smart-eco elements hide a fundamental incompatibility and lead to fragmented, grotesque cities in practice. Critical analysis of how, why and for whom these developments are being put to work in the city is essential (Hollands 2008; Kitchin 2014;

6  Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban Systems …     159

Luque and Marvin 2015). The generic corporate-led version of the smart city, driven by market logics and technology fixes that are deployable anywhere, claims to improve urban functioning in myriad smooth and unproblematic ways. Yet this clearly runs the risk of erasing the very distinctiveness of the urban—its heterogeneous, place-based, material and political vitality—in favour of standardized, controlled spaces for the clear-cut application of given solutions (Viitanen and Kingston 2014; Söderström et al. 2014; McNeill 2015). Smart urbanism can be placed in a long lineage of the reshaping of social relations by the ‘contingency with bias’ (Graham and Marvin 1996) of information and communications technologies. As Mattelart (1999, p. 169) has argued, communications technologies ‘have been, are and will remain the object of contradictory claims: they lie at the heart of confrontations for global control’. In this way, it is essential to study how integrated infrastructures, data gathering and on-demand individual services are configured in highly political ways in terms of access, use, experience and analysis of results. While tracking and analysing the material implementation of smart urban projects is seen as one way to go beyond broad-brush critique of corporate discourse and exceptional cases which always promise more than they deliver (Shelton et al. 2015; Kitchin 2015), studying smart in practice is still plagued by the issue of whether practitioners are doing anything substantively different in the name or through the frame of smart. Initiatives may be linked to a variety of local stakes and requirements and implemented in situ in quite distinctive ways. In the rest of this short chapter, I use a brief analytical vignette of the reconfiguration of energy system flows in a district level smart grid project near Paris to explore the question of the difference that smart makes in situ or in context to try and understand the still fuzzy question of what smart actually is, and what its added analytic and/or practical value might be. While there is a distinction between urban smart grids focused usually on conciliation of production and consumption of energy and more transversal smart city projects (see Bulkeley et al. 2016), I suggest that the following story speaks to broader implications of smart and its temporalities, boundaries and scales, and technological agency and control, which are discussed subsequently.

160     J. Rutherford

Reconfiguring ‘Energy, Digital and the City’ As we saw in Chapter 4, the Paris region requires ever more ‘intelligent’ work to link up production and consumption of electricity. Ilede-France imports more than 90% of its electricity while demand for energy is projected to increase. Meanwhile, the peak load charge is already increasing much more rapidly than actual consumption. This means that during particular short periods in winter there is a sudden, temporary boost in demand which places stress on the electricity system to deliver the required amount of energy. Renewable energy generation is often small-scale and intermittent in its supply. Furthermore, at peak times, the French electricity system relies on carbon-intensive production which goes against climate goals and does little to reduce regional energy dependency. The system must therefore have the capacity to produce, transport and distribute sufficient supply to meet these occasional peaks, as well as the knowledge and expertise to be able to monitor and anticipate as closely as possible when and where these are likely to take place. This has become a crucial issue for energy in the Paris region, illustrating a wider shift in infrastructure from a traditional concern for flow management to a form of event- and scenario-based technological management (Picon 2015). A number of overlapping measures and actions have been initiated to respond to this issue, with the overarching aim to flatten the load charge and to realize ‘better consumption of electricity’ (ERDF official, quoted in ERDF 2011, p. 52). Smart meters are being rolled out to provide more data and information to electricity providers about consumption patterns and quantities. Smart grid projects are being introduced to experiment with mutualization of demand—‘agglomerating several consumption models’ (ERDF official, quoted in ERDF 2011, p. 52)—and with local production. Here, the aim is to interconnect buildings and neighbourhoods to share local renewable energy supplies or to bundle loads together to create more coherent, and less differentiated, temporal electricity demand. The IssyGrid project in southwest Paris is the first operational smart grid project in France. It markets itself as a ‘laboratory’ or ‘window

6  Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban Systems …     161

of know-how in the domain of energy, digital and the city’ (IssyGrid 2016). It is located in a municipality with a long-term interest and expertise in deploying ICT in its projects (City of Issy-les-Moulineaux official interview, August 2015). It was one of the leading French ‘cybercities’ in the 1990s with an innovative ICT strategy. As a R&D public–private partnership between large companies,1 local start-ups and the Issy municipality, initiated in 2012 for a period of five years, the project represents a ‘mixed economy’ mode of contracting and doing urban projects in France where local authorities involve private partners in the financing and operation of projects rather than doing everything themselves and only ‘using public money’ (city official in Lelong 2016). Through ‘collegial governance’ (IssyGrid 2016), various distinct logics coalesce around Issygrid, creating a coalition of political economic interests brought together by ‘smart’. It is at once a playground to test new technologies, devices, techniques and business models (corporate interests) as well as electricity load management (EDF, ERDF), and to reduce energy bills (Issy municipality) and improve city branding and publicity with internal (political) and external (growth) objectives (Issy). As of April 2016, the project vaunted that ‘all the elements of an urban smart grid’ were in place (IssyGrid 2016). In terms of material infrastructure, this meant that more than 1000 homes (with 2200 inhabitants), as well as five office buildings and part of the local street lighting system, had been connected in two city districts. Two energy storage systems, three PV production facilities and a state-of-the-art smart electricity distribution substation were deployed. Control is achieved through 14 interconnected information systems, a data platform for ‘energy supervision’ which provides real-time readings, and a system which forecasts anticipated local PV production. In the longer term, the project is supposed to cover 2000 homes, 5000 i­nhabitants, 10,000 workers and 160,000 square metres of offices in the city (IssyGrid 2016; Petrucci 2017).

1These

are Alstom, Bouygues Immobilier (lead partner), Bouygues Energies and Services, Bouygues Telecom, EDF, ERDF, Microsoft, Schneider Electric, Steria and Total.

162     J. Rutherford

The project is a prime example of an ‘experimental’ approach to ‘optimising energy consumption’ to ‘consume better, less and at the right time’ (Ville d’Issy-les-Moulineaux, n.d.) through making ‘realtime’ adjustments between energy production and increasingly variable energy demand. But it is not without difficulties and tensions with three sets of challenges present from the outset (project coordinator in Lelong 2016, City of Issy-les-Moulineaux official interview, August 2015). First, it requires intervening in the existing urban fabric with buildings which were not designed to exchange data and energy flows. Second, there are complex regulatory issues concerning both what a local municipality can do autonomously within a national electricity system, and the extent to which it is possible to produce and analyse data collected from the domestic sphere. Third, there are ongoing difficulties in getting buy-in from residents to participate in the project. These issues reflect the problematic top-down nature of the exercise with a substantive disconnect between the coalition initiating and coordinating the project and the households whose energy consumption is the focus of the objectives and is supposed to be made visible, and thus manageable and more ‘efficient’. Real-time energy consumption monitoring and tracking aims to ‘optimise’ the district systems by creating a local and temporally differentiated ‘energy profile’ to flatten peak load electricity demand, thus reducing CO2 emissions by creating less need for supplementary fossil fuel energy at certain times, and improve both the balance of the network now and in its future dimensioning (IssyGrid 2016). Homes are equipped with both smart meters and domotic systems allowing inhabitants to view their energy consumption hour by hour. Visualization of energy flows thus signals to users how changes can be made to improve their consumption (project coordinator in Lelong 2016). A software management platform developed by a local start-up enables this data to be transmitted to IssyGrid, but to comply with data protection regulations, it is collected hourly as a package of 10 comparable homes to safeguard anonymity. Issy officials spent 12 months working with CNIL, the French data privacy agency, to develop procedures for anonymity while collecting and circulating data. The project has thus been the forerunner in establishing new rules on a national level for regulating the use of energy

6  Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban Systems …     163

consumption data (City of Issy-les-Moulineaux official interview, August 2015). The aggregation process is done by servers and the data is then sent to the IssyGrid platform with an electronic signature. Any breach would modify the signature and automatically shut down the collection of data (IssyGrid 2016). As well as their own data, inhabitants can see the aggregated figures for their building and neighbouring buildings, the idea being that they can compare their consumption against these ‘averages’ which is held to stimulate virtuous behaviour. Visibility here aims to promote a new civic engagement or even a new form of citizenship with individuals contributing to the collective good. As Halpern et al. (2013, p. 287) argue, ‘Through this promise of omniscience and omnipresence viewers/users/ consumers can exceed their human limitations thanks to the automated collection and analysis of data that are suddenly easy to access’. IssyGrid has also started producing data which links electricity consumption throughout the day in particular buildings with available and forecasted local PV production. This is meant to allow residents to anticipate whether some of their electricity consumption can be delayed to when local production is at its highest level, although it is unclear what proportion of residents would actually do this. The project also provides a dashboard display for real-time data to visualize performance and to engage residents. Many residential and office buildings in the district have already been built to green standards with low energy consumption levels, so the data flows add an extra layer on top of absolute building performance to allow temporal shifts to further improve network functioning. A new electricity distribution substation in the area allows monitoring of local PV production and storage of electricity in recycled electric vehicle batteries. Excess PV production during the day can thus be stored until peak local demand in the evening. Reflecting a motto where ‘to govern is to foresee’, the Issy municipality and its collaborators are attempting to increase the controllability and predictability of local energy flows by deploying integrated systems for the production of information. Issy thus deploys an anticipatory governance agenda to seek assurance within a wider vision of smart urbanism promoted at the national level ‘where the exchange between governor and governed will be accelerated’ (CGDD 2012, p. 3). This is a configuration ‘that allies ecology and digital’ (IssyGrid 2016;

164     J. Rutherford

Ville d’Issy-les-Moulineaux 2015), and speaks to an ‘autonomous city’ discourse (Ville d’Issy-les-Moulineaux, n.d.) which relocates production, distribution, storage and consumption of energy to the local scale to reduce dependence on long-distance energy flows. In sum, this appears to be a new socio-technical complex to rework technology, temporality and space in energy systems, ostensibly for user-oriented goals. But there remain important questions about the extent to which the municipality’s search for increased local autonomy and capacity for control can be implemented through partnership with large global companies with their own logics and vested interests. IssyGrid may be seen as a configuration to sustain the growth and expansion of an existing top-down system ‘based on existing assets’ (IssyGrid 2016). As an IssyGrid project document states, ‘This realistic approach allows us to deploy a territorial energy optimization policy at least cost without questioning previous or future infrastructure choices’ (IssyGrid Project, n.d.).

Decrypting Smart Grids and Flows The discussion of the IssyGrid project reveals a number of pertinent issues. We find an activation of intrinsic urban intelligence through some form of transversal articulation or rebundling of previously distinct systems, a form of real-time monitoring, loops of information and recursive feedback, and a certain degree, or at least the promise, of individualization of system use. More broadly, the project in Issy reveals an emerging mandate and capacity for local authorities to facilitate experimentation on their territories, to test local responses to ‘big’ issues such as energy and climate. This is framed as a kind of anticipatory governance (‘to govern is to foresee’). It demonstrates a lot of technology (new and old) and interconnection/integration with objectives of local autonomy (e.g. buildings and neighbourhoods in Issy) or efficient transversal urban functioning. Even if the IT and digital flows and layers are usually implicit or behind the scenes, they are nevertheless an increasingly important component of the systemic process. Sensors and measures contribute to the functioning, maintenance and improvement of systems, constituting a digital platform above or across

6  Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban Systems …     165

traditional infrastructures which allows near real-time knowledge and feedback for constant adjustment, evaluation and learning through processes of reflexive governance (Plantin et al. 2018). This technology connects and constitutes authorities, providers and residents in new ways, although residents are not actively present in projects and are mobilized as rather homogeneous and rational ‘contributors’ that are enrolled in configurations in self-evident ways. In organizational terms, the p ­ roject works through a coalition of political and private utility actors and investments with apparently different interests and competences. They manage to loosely coalesce and fuse around these sites and push forward a collective agenda and objectives, perhaps around a need to ­reflexively manage and react to residential demand patterns. As one technology provider stated: ‘in these kinds of projects, the home is the holy grail’.2 However, as we briefly saw, this new collective configuration is not without tensions, contradictions and conflicts which constrain how things are done. Smart promotes infrastructure transformation and socio-technical change by enabling the emergence of a local grid supported by local energy production and demand-side management to test or ‘demonstrate’ a degree of autonomy from ‘distant’ national infrastructure. Production and consumption are contiguously organized and the possibilities of energy storage, home domotics and forecasting techniques allow for the partial recomposition of energy temporalities by anticipating when and how generation and demand can be best aligned. The production of visibility of flows is intended to engage residents in the creation of a more efficient system. Smart civic engagement here means reacting to signals to reduce or displace energy use temporally to benefit the whole community. Smart arrives or emerges in Issy for particular reasons including previous experience and the presence of ICT actors. Near real-time technologically mediated flows and circulations are adjusted by local specificities in infrastructure and urban governance, and notably come

2Atos

official, in Rencontre autour du compteur intelligent et de la plateforme Smart Home d’Atos seminar, Issy-les-Moulineaux, September 2015.

166     J. Rutherford

up against the slower rhythms and different temporalities of urban planning and regulatory changes. Smart then clearly transforms, and is transformed by, urban materiality both as new artefacts and technologies (sensors, meters, grids) are inserted into the urban fabric, and as buildings, networks and relations are made commensurate through the work of data production and circulation. Data interconnects and allows correspondence across time and space of things which are otherwise distinct and separated. There are at least three ongoing and overlapping issues or areas of reflection to which the Issy vignette speaks as part of an overarching concern with the question of how smart is being done and with what implications. A first issue is about the concurrent times and rhythms of urban change, or the potentially anachronistic relation between policymaking and planning temporalities on the one hand and exponential technology (and code and data power) development and deployment on the other (cf. Sodah 2014). There is a sense of planning being about future worldmaking, but projects depreciate almost instantly or become outdated before being finished, and attention and resources move on. In this way, smart urbanism’s constant production and circulation, or streaming, of information resembles what Barry (2013, p. 14) calls a ‘projective device’: ‘they enable companies, governments, managers, engineers and investors to extend their understanding into the future, by envisaging certain actions, without necessarily ever knowing precisely what exists in the present’. How can we learn in/from projects that never seem to be in the present, or are always on the move, in/from urban environments that are constantly being upgraded or rebooted? Governance seems to need to be ever more reflexive and develop continuous feedback loops. Policy does not move in anything like real-time so who governs/decides/monitors if and when we consider very advanced smart cities…? Or, even before we get to those big questions, whose knowledge do we use and under whose control are we going to incrementally, but instantly, roll out new urban configurations? A second issue is about the boundaries and scales of experiments. What kind of template is provided by these smart/eco improvement projects? They are usually located in small districts of bigger cities, feeding off implicit or explicit aims for some sort of autonomy or local

6  Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban Systems …     167

organization of systems and flows. Furthermore, problems crop up when projects begin to be extended, suggesting that their logics and dynamics function only or ‘better’ at a small scale or in a confined context. If this is the case, then this raises the issue of how such templates become more than experiments or trials. Do they have to be upscaled or rolled out more widely as is usually thought in policy discourse? The OECD argues that eco-districts are particularly good sites for developing templates of innovations which can then be upscaled to wider areas: ‘The eco-district therefore appears to afford a rough template for mixing an array of eco-innovations into a modular system that can, in turn, be flexibly scaled up to the smart city-region’ (OECD 2013, p. 94). In this era of ‘fast’ policy exchange, transfer and mobility, the ideas, configurations and lessons of Hammarby Sjöstad (Chapter 5) and Issy are more likely to be transferred to a succession of other ‘bounded’ sites across the globe than to trickle up to effect change in their immediate geographical regions. This translocal transfer is certainly one way in which local actors measure their ‘success’. But projects can already, and especially, serve their purpose in terms of the opportunities for local learning, feedback and improvement that they proffer, and it is here that smart urbanism is particularly effective because it is inherently about optimizing and capturing urban intelligence, monitoring and analysing information flows for improvement possibilities. This suggests the potential of perpetual experiment, sustaining a ‘perpetual beta city’ (Leo Hollis, quoted in Poole 2014), through which experiment is the outcome or goal rather than a means or modality to something else. Is there a distinction between testing urban configurations and mainstream urban planning, or is the city now just a permanent laboratory (cf. Karvonen 2018)? This recognizes both the iterative process of urban improvement and the inherent performativity of projects and initiatives as the functions and outcomes of even small-scale smart stretch well beyond immediate territories or boundaries. The public focus on a project like Issygrid and the production of exemplarity done by circulating knowledge about the project has, for example, undoubtedly transformed and reproduced the project itself and its associated processes. As the urban reaches out further and further beyond its traditional or administrative boundaries, on what scale do we conceive of smart urbanism?

168     J. Rutherford

A third issue is whether and how these projects reflect forms and degrees of technology and infrastructure deployment that now exceed human limitations and capacities for control. Throughout this book, an underlying question has been about what networked cities look like when agency or intervention is devolved or distributed beyond policy actors, utility companies and residents? What distinctive material urban politics does this create? And in smart urbanism this can be pushed further as we envisage an urban fabric layered with so much ‘autonomous technology’ (Winner 1977) that virtual loops and/or the circulation of information governs/decides/does at least as much as local practitioners and residents, as we can begin to see in the Issy ‘dashboard’. With the sensing, monitoring and manipulation of material flows at the heart of smart urbanism, to what extent has the resultant potential for real-time feedback loops become as important as the material flows themselves? Is this ‘the art of augmenting cities’ and ‘the development of a new materiality’ (Danielou and Ménard 2013)? This may evolve into consideration of distributed forms of intelligence, and sentience and consciousness of technology, where flows and networks and systems have some level of self-organization and control that is potentially greater than human capacity for managing these complex systems. Are we not already deploying an urban intelligence which will soon bypass human intelligence reaching Kurzweil’s (2005) ‘singularity’, or at least interconnected technologies and infrastructures which have greater capacity to organize, manage and control the city than we do? Picon (2015) poses this stimulating and worrying question, and it is clearly worth doing so given the complexity of our cities and their apparent ungovernability: who really is piloting the urban these days, and for whom?

Conclusion: Feeling for Disorder The Issy case shows local work at the interface of energy systems, digital networks and the urban environment which produces sociotechnical change. Energy flows are made visible and thus actionable, both to local authorities and energy companies who can coordinate and integrate between production and consumption, and to citizens who

6  Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban Systems …     169

are supposed to adjust their demand and behaviour accordingly. The mutual constitution of digital and urban, and the intrinsic embedding of information within cities that this connotes, raises important qualitative questions about the diversity of types of information, the different ways in which these are used, and the varying possibilities of access, all of which both reflect and shape the cities we currently live in. If analysis of even small-scale projects ends up asking more and new questions, then such is the unstable, uncertain nature and implications of the smart city. These are implementations of urban experiment, demonstration and improvement through particular rebundled technology configurations, whether these are called ‘smart’, ‘sustainable’ or whatever. They reconfigure urban systems by enhancing learning processes and possibilities, and by facilitating information flows and circulation of data or knowledge that can be fed back into the system. But at the same time as thinking through and conceptualizing what smart urban systems do, their aims and purposes, and how they go about achieving this, the issues of temporality, space/scale and agency of urban improvement discussed in the previous section suggest that it is equally essential to reflect on deviations of projects, or on what might be called the off-screen space of smart urbanism, i.e. what is happening that does not always appear in the neat narrative or main story (cf. Easterling 2014). In Issy, as in Hammarby Sjöstad in Chapter 5, official attempts to impose or promote order and predictability on the urban almost inevitably produce messiness and imperfection. The smooth, rational and uncomplicated urban future of many smart city visions always ends up colliding with the disorder, clutter and muddling through of the actually existing urban. We come back in some ways to the concerns of Kevin Robins who saw in the cybercity discourses of the 1990s an anaemic ‘virtual urbanism’ at odds with the lively disorder and uncomfortable and antagonistic nature of urban life: ‘Among those who are now considering the possibility spaces of contemporary urbanism, the key distinction is not that between optimists and pessimists, but between those who look to order and those who feel for disorder’ (Robins 1999, p. 57). As smart technology adds or envisages the addition of multiple layers of virtual flows to manage and orient urban functioning, it is worth foregrounding the messy configurations and overflows of material

170     J. Rutherford

and energy flows, the politics of urban metabolism through which the disordered city persists and changes. One tendency has been to try obstinately to simplify the context of intervention, to erase any distinctiveness in the urban environment, and to create a flat, generic plane to optimize project roll-out. This is fundamentally at odds with the nature of smart and what it allows, and antithetical to any basic view of what the city is and how it functions and is experienced. Smart offers new and multiple perspectives or viewpoints on city operations and events which were usually not possible or visible previously (Greenfield 2017). What is needed therefore is urban policy for, or aggregating the potentials of, these multiple happenings. Smart urbanism demands to be incarnated and enacted through fleshy embodiment, incorporation and interaction between the jumbled mix of peoples, communities, ideas and things which are the very social and political basis of urban life and which form the material conditions of possibility of urban change. Far from ‘clearing up’ the mess of the urban through technology, smart interventions could amplify the inherent disorder, difference and discordance of the city through reconfigurations that are visible and traceable, but also allow debate and contestation over the many modalities and implications of ‘improving’ urban functioning and experience.

References Barry, Andrew. 2013. Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline. Chichester: Wiley. Bulkeley, Harriet, Pauline McGuirk, and Robyn Dowling. 2016. Making a Smart City for the Smart Grid? The Urban Material Politics of Actualising Smart Electricity Networks. Environment and Planning A 48 (9): 1709–1726. CGDD. 2012. La ville intelligente: état des lieux et perspectives en France. Paris: CGDD. Cugurullo, Federico. 2018. Exposing Smart Cities and Eco-Cities: Frankenstein Urbanism and the Sustainability Challenges of the Experimental City. Environment and Planning A 50: 73–92.

6  Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban Systems …     171

Danielou, Jean, and François Ménard. 2013. L’art d’augmenter les villes: (pour) une enquête sur la ville intelligente. La Défense: PUCA (MEDDE). Easterling, Keller. 2014. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso. ERDF. 2011. Repères et enjeux de la distribution d’électricité: dialogue avec ERDF. séminaire du 8 juin 2011, ERDF, Paris. Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 1996. Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. London: Routledge. Greenfield, Adam. 2017. Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. London: Verso. Halpern, Orit, Jesse LeCavalier, Nerea Calvillo, and Wolfgang Pietsch. 2013. Test-Bed Urbanism. Public Culture 25 (2): 272–306. Hollands, Robert G. 2008. Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up? City 12 (3): 303–320. IssyGrid. 2016. IssyGrid premier smart grid de quartier opérationnel en France (dossier de presse). Issy-les-Moulineaux: IssyGrid Project. IssyGrid Project. n.d. IssyGrid. Available from http://issygrid.com. Karvonen, Andrew. 2018. The City of Permanent Experiments? In Innovating Climate Governance: Moving Beyond Experiments, ed. B. Turnheim, P. Kivimaa, and F. Berkhout. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karvonen, Andrew, and Bas van Heur. 2014. Urban Laboratories: Experiments in Reworking Cities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (2): 379–392. Kitchin, Rob. 2014. The Real-Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism. GeoJournal 79: 1–14. Kitchin, Rob. 2015. Making Sense of Smart Cities: Addressing Present Shortcomings. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8: 131–136. Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking. Lelong, Jean. 2016. IssyGrid: une expérimentation à l’échelle d’un quartier. La Gazette des Communes, 21 March 2016, 52–53. Luque, Andrés, and Simon Marvin. 2015. Developing a Critical Understanding of Smart Urbanism? Urban Studies 52: 2105–2116. Mattelart, Armand. 1999. Mapping Modernity: Utopia and Communications Networks. In Mappings, ed. D. Cosgrove. London: Reaktion Books. McLean, Anthony, Harriet Bulkeley, and Mike Crang. 2016. Negotiating the Urban Smart Grid: Socio-Technical Experimentation in the City of Austin. Urban Studies 53 (15): 3246–3263.

172     J. Rutherford

McNeill, Donald. 2015. Global Firms and Smart Technologies: IBM and the Reduction of Cities. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40 (4): 562–574. Michael, Mike. 2009. The Cell-Phone-in-the-Countryside: On Some Ironic Spatialities of Technonature. In Technonatures, ed. D. White and C. Wilbert. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. OECD. 2013. Green Growth in Stockholm, Sweden. OECD Green Growth Studies. Paris: OECD. Petrucci, Melissa. 2017. IssyGrid, le premier smart grid français, atteint la maturité, 5 September 2017. Les smart grids: toute l’actualité des smart grids 2017. Available from http://les-smartgrids.fr/issygrid-premier-smartfrancais/. Picon, Antoine. 2015. Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence. Chichester: Wiley. Plantin, Jean-Christophe, Carl Lagoze, Paul Edwards, and Christian Sandvig. 2018. Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook. New Media and Society 20 (1): 293–310. Poole, Steven. 2014. The Truth About Smart Cities: ‘In the End, They Will Destroy Democracy’. The Guardian, 17 December 2014. Robins, Kevin. 1999. Foreclosing on the City? The Bad Idea of Virtual Urbanism. In Technocities, ed. J. Downey and J. McGuigan. London: Sage. Shelton, Taylor, Matthew Zook, and Alan Wiig. 2015. The ‘Actually Existing Smart City’. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8: 13–25. Sodah, Sonia. 2014. Politics Is Failing to Find Solutions to Our Changing Lives. The Observer, 28 December 2014, 33. Söderström, Ola, Till Paasche, and Francisco Klauser. 2014. Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling. City 18: 307–320. Viitanen, Jenni, and Richard Kingston. 2014. Smart Cities and Green Growth: Outsourcing Democratic and Environmental Resilience to the Global Technology Sector. Environment and Planning A 46: 803–819. Ville d’Issy-les-Moulineaux. 2015. Digital Fort’s Eco-District: From a 19th Century Military Building to a District Showcasing the Metropolis of the Future. Issy-les-Moulineaux: Ville d’Issy-les-Moulineaux. Ville d’Issy-les-Moulineaux. n.d. IssyGrid: 1er réseau de quartier intelligent en France. Available from http://www.issy.com/issygrid. Winner, Langdon. 1977. Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

7 Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures

In analysing the ‘fateful’ presence of ‘social futures’ in people’s everyday lives, John Urry (2016) observes the inherent paradox that futures are always mysterious and difficult to know and predict, and yet the task of anticipating them is a necessary one for many different organizations and bodies: ‘the time of the future is now…’ (p. 7). Likewise, Robert Beauregard (2015) reminds us that urban planning is always intrinsically concerned with making and negotiating city futures, but this is done through engagement with an existing diverse material world full of both stabilized relationships and ‘open possibilities’ (p. 171). In this book, I have argued that infrastructure is a core site and process of always emerging urban socio-technical futures. Adopting a relational socio-technical perspective in which technological components and social relations are always already intertwined, urban infrastructure has been studied as a constantly emerging material political configuration or achievement, comprised of a shifting set of struggles over constitutive parts, relations, qualities and effects of infrastructure which forge potentials and limits of urban socio-technical change. In this short conclusion, I highlight and discuss further three main points developed

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Rutherford, Redeploying Urban Infrastructure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_7

173

174     J. Rutherford

throughout the book, about why infrastructure matters, how infrastructure comes to matter, and what can be gained from pursuing explorations of urban infrastructure futures.

Urban World-Making: Why Infrastructure Matters A driving argument across the chapters has been to demonstrate infrastructure to be a key site and process of urban transformation that is being redeployed to enact diverse sustainable strategic urban futures. Through providing essential services and resources, through connecting together (and thus defining at least to some extent) people, communities and territories, and through reinforcing tensions and debates around particular visions, components and distributions, infrastructure comes to constitute contested negotiations of possible collective futures—socio-material enactments of what may be sustainable, low carbon, smart cities of tomorrow. As a policy instrument, infrastructure is mobilized to transform visions, imaginaries and discourses of improvement into physical socio-technical systems which claim to extend suburban living spaces (Chapter 2), clean and green the waste and pollution outputs of a city (Chapter 3), produce new efficiencies and forms of control over energy flows (Chapter 4), integrate and relocalize material resource flows (Chapter 5), and harmonize production and consumption of energy (Chapter 6). As such, infrastructure is a primary tool of sustainable urban planning practice, capable of providing tangible results such as the CO2 emissions reductions directly attributed to the extension and greening of district heating infrastructure systems in Stockholm and more recently in Paris. The focus of the chapters has been on engagements with the materialities of infrastructure, through which actors acknowledge that its technological components and physical properties have wider effects and consequences. Whether it is about suburban development, low carbon, energy transition, eco-city integration or smart, urban infrastructure matters within sustainable city-making processes because it enables urban futures to be constituted materially. Suburban infrastructure planning in Chapter 2 was, for example, conceived as finding ways

7  Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures     175

to allow different configurations to exist and to co-evolve, requiring understanding and coordination of technological functioning, routines and responsibilities created through material entanglements, as well as the diverse concerns and interests of those present. In turn, methodologically, infrastructure can be a fruitful, grounded location from which to study the material emergence of these futures. This emergence concerns reconfiguration of mostly existing infrastructure from ‘within’ to meet new ecological constraints and requirements. Even new ecodistricts like Hammarby Sjöstad rely on existing socio-technical systems rather than new technical innovations (Chapter 5). Current transformations of infrastructure can be seen as at once the presupposition, medium and outcome of an ongoing search for desirable urban futures that must nonetheless flow out of extant conjunctures. Both Graham and Marvin (2001) and Edwards (2002, p. 191) argue that infrastructures demonstrate the co-construction of technology and modernity. In this vein, Larkin suggests that, as well as a technical function of service delivery or circulation over distance, infrastructures articulate a distinct collective sense of possibility or symbolic meaning where ‘they emerge out of and store within them forms of desire and fantasy’ (Larkin 2013, p. 329). Indeed, Larkin’s argument is that this ‘poetic’, aesthetic or affective dimension to infrastructure is no less material and political than its technical, physical and functional dimension (see also Murphy 2016). Infrastructures constitute progress, modernity, and bring future worlds into being. As well as mediating vectors for access to water and electricity, eco-modernity now demands particular forms, qualities and configurations of infrastructure for ensuring sustainable, low carbon, smart urban futures. It follows, of course, as we have seen throughout, that there is a politics to these framings and constitutions of infrastructures, modernities and futures. As Gandy (2014, p. 222) observes ‘In some cases the upgrading of infrastructure networks, especially if linked to urban redevelopment projects or other forms of land speculation, can itself become a tool of governmentality that serves to sharpen and reinforce social inequalities’. From the chapters, I argue that we have also moved to understand ‘infrastructure’s political address—the way technologies come to represent the possibility of being modern, of having a future…’ (Larkin 2013, p. 333), or how urban infrastructure comes to matter.

176     J. Rutherford

Material Politics: How Infrastructure Comes to Matter The chapters have demonstrated that infrastructure is not an existing foundation upon which pre-existing rational politics takes place, but it is both constitutive of new political possibilities around urban futures, and shaped itself by these. In tracking water, carbon, energy and information flows through the urban fabric—charting the effectivity of material sites and processes of socio-technical change (Chapters 3 and 4)—this research analysed how infrastructure comes to be formative of potentials for wider change. This required focusing at once on: rationales for development, circulation and uptake of technologies and flows; how infrastructures become materialized and are made visible and political; and their broader sociopolitical implications. As we have seen, infrastructure becomes a part of plans, of ideal trajectories, of ideas around how to change entrenched unsustainable path dependencies. It also surges into view at particular key moments when decisions have to be made (e.g. around contracts) or in times of crisis. It intersects more broadly with issues of ownership, responsibility, coordination, finance etc., and can become part of the story around these issues or a device through which issues are foregrounded or negotiated. Tensions and conflicts running through infrastructure thus become crucial to the unfolding of infrastructure processes and to understanding inherent struggles over emerging pathways to ‘sustainable’ urban futures. At the same time, I argue that active, vibrant infrastructure is vital to this material politics. We have seen that socio-technical systems are rarely passive in their make-up, functioning and activity. Exploring and understanding infrastructure always involves taking into account its dynamic and fluid deployment, lively and leaky constitution (Graham and Thrift 2007) and the shifting exchanges enabled and constrained. While there has long been a sense that infrastructures by their very nature exceed the control of particular individuals and groups—gaining ‘momentum’ in this way (Hughes 1987; Edwards 2002, p. 221)—there is increasing recognition of a need to ‘take account of the distinctive kinds of effectivity that material objects and processes exert as a

7  Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures     177

consequence of the positions they occupy within specifically configured networks of relations’ (Joyce and Bennett 2010, p. 5). Using a number of focused cases, the chapters explored the propensity of the material world to escape full control, as the entities, flows and objects of infrastructure circulate, stabilize, mutate and resist within distributed networks of relations which collectively effect change. Without decentring human intentionality, and indeed reinforcing it in many ways, another view of urban vitality emerges through the mutually constitutive malleability of human and material activity. I argue then that the chapters have especially shown how infrastructure comes to matter in material political terms, that particular political processes are at work in urban infrastructure change, as the components and properties of infrastructure become enrolled in negotiations and struggles over urban world-making. In order to capture this politics of urban socio-technical futures, I discuss briefly three ways in which urban infrastructure reconfigurations become politicized or come to matter across the chapter stories, using notions of demonstration, deviation, and assumption. A material politics of demonstration includes, but is not limited to, the most visible forms of contestation and protest around infrastructure issues and projects. In Chapter 3 most clearly, activist and environmental groups in Stockholm protested vigorously against ongoing use of a fossil fuel heating plant and against diversion of public funds to the construction of a bypass road in the period when the city was vaunted as the Green Capital of Europe. There is also continuing fervent debate in France around nuclear energy and its ties to EDF and government promotion of electric heating in French homes when there are held to be more efficient heating provision systems especially in dense urban areas such as Paris (Chapter 4). But demonstration is also about activities which reveal or make visible or render exemplary or comprehensible in other ways. Indeed, I would argue that much of the politics of infrastructure derives from the work of a variety of actors in attempting to reveal properties and relational workings of infrastructure components (hence the focus on knowledge controversies in Chapter 4 for instance). There are examples of this kind of material political activity in

178     J. Rutherford

all the chapters, whether it is the performative power of the Hammarby Sjöstad recycling model in Chapter 5 which attempts to summarize and then divulge the efficient systemic circulations between different infrastructures to further encourage ecological activity and citizenship, or the visualizations of energy flows in smart grids (Chapter 6) via meters, platforms and dashboards through which various publics become enrolled in projects, or the publicization of the large scale municipal investment in water infrastructure systems (Chapter 2) which is meant to show how seriously local politicians and planners are taking the need to reconfigure zones of residence. In Chapter 5, there is also the project evaluation process involving criteria and measures to demonstrate how virtuous and successful a particular initiative has been over a number of years. The point is that these demonstrations reveal a particular take or narrative around infrastructure reconfigurations, which makes infrastructure actionable or governable, but which then become arenas of actual or potential1 contest in which other perspectives can emerge, including from the unruliness of infrastructure itself (e.g. water seepage in Chapter 2, thermodynamic constraints in Chapter 3). By focusing the aims and activities of a project or initiative on particular material objects or processes and offering specific, but always partial, claims about their functioning or purpose, these objects or processes are made political by becoming open to other divergent readings and assertions. A material politics of deviation emerges through the relational activities of differing actors which lead to digression and detour from/ of storylines, trajectories and linear flows associated with sustainable urbanism and infrastructure objectives. The starting point of all the chapters was some form of sustainable objective as outlined in municipal planning documents or strategic city plans, and which engaged practitioners and associated actors on a set pathway to reaching goals by a certain date. The subsequent analysis in each chapter problematized these objectives and showed not just that they are inherently contested 1I would argue that we are yet to see a full demonstration of the politics of smart urbanism, for example, as we are only now beginning to understand many of the ramifications and possible consequences of deploying infrastructure for capturing and synthesizing people’s everyday activities (e.g. energy consumption) and circulating real-time digital flows from this data.

7  Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures     179

by other actors present or become a source of struggles over future directions, but that these contests and struggles are the actual material content and constitution of urban infrastructure changes through which futures are negotiated. Tensions and contests over infrastructure could be sourced in the disjuncture between governmental or ‘expert’ framings and actions and how components and materials actually work, function or are taken up in ways ‘excessive’ to bureaucracy and decision-making. In one way, it is the low carbon, sustainable, smart framings by practitioners which become an infrastructure upon which other actors suggest, do, behave or contest in different ways in order to try to begin to enact alternative pathways. Charged discussions over the content, form and modalities of long-term electricity distribution contracts (Chapter 4), over lessons to be taken from one sustainability project about infrastructure performance for learning in a new project (Chapter 5), and over how a clear objective such as ‘fossil fuel free city’ becomes translated materially into new heating or mobility infrastructure (Chapter 3) are the actual ways in which urban socio-technical change comes about as apparently solid and stable objects and measures such as contracts, performance measures, policy reports and heating pipes become taken up and interpreted in differing ways and thus become contingent and multifaceted sites of controversy and debate which may lead to other perspectives and possibilities. Again then, the argument here is to suggest politics as constitutive of transformations rather than as merely the outcome of these processes. Through these political deviations, transitions from present to future configurations become materialized less as simple straight lines than as undulation and disordering. Rather than something that must be necessarily overcome, disputes over claims to and practices of urban improvement/enhancement can be productively seen in terms of impurification as ‘the very gist of what constitutes the emergence and transformation of environments, as well as their practices and imaginings’ (Gabrys 2009, p. 671). Mike Michael (2009, pp. 100–101) argues that ‘In the place of an environmental politics grounded in a purified version of nature, we need a politics that addresses the complex and dynamic impurifications of technonatures… a “politics” that encompasses the fact that political actors emerge from (and are mediators of ) these very technonatural complexities’.

180     J. Rutherford

Beauregard pleads for planners to abandon their all-controlling, onefor-all, exclusionary tendencies and to become open to and entangled with ‘the anomalous, the informal, the deviant, and the unexpected’ (Beauregard 2015, p. 170). In short, a material politics of deviation and impurification moves away from evoking (a return to) pure nature and/ or (a prospect of ) clean green smart, and towards a techno-ecological politics sustained by hybridity, overflowing and divergence, recognizing that we inhabit and experience multiple environments, our knowledge of which is increasingly technologically mediated and contested (White and Wilbert 2009). A material politics of assumption can also be identified across the chapters, involving processes and practices through which different actors undertake to make sites, objects and systems their own, molding interpretations of these to fit their interests and purposes, often to the attempted exclusion of others or other uses. This cuts across all chapters as diverse actors and sets of interests position themselves in relation to sustainable policy objectives and directions of change proposed by specific policy documents. In Chapter 2, for example, many local residents have ‘bought in’ to a municipal water infrastructure plan which offers them a more sustainable, cost effective access to water services, meaning that they take on responsibility to self-organize and create routines and divisions of labour to maintain equipment and systems (making do). Others are less inclined to accept municipal regulatory encroachment into what they perceive to be the freedom of their living space, which leads to a quite distinct taking on or ‘inhabiting’ of infrastructure (doing differently). In Chapter 4, the extent to which local actors engage with the heating pipes, resource mixes and radiators through which big energy transition objectives become materialized depends on a host of factors often revolving around their capacity to integrate material engagements with infrastructure components into existing technical and political systems and interconnections/cooperations. In Hammarby Sjöstad (Chapter 5), the supposed recipe for sustainability of 75% systems contribution—25% residents’ contribution outlines a very particular form of assumption where residents need to make less effort because their consumption and behaviours are largely formatted through technology deployment. The subsequent issues and problems,

7  Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures     181

from underperforming technologies to the unwillingness of people to make sacrifices for ecological living, suggest that a rigid fixing of expected roles and performances of human and non-human actors cannot in practice be taken for granted. This politics of assumption can also involve another kind of laying claim where particular actors try to make links between ‘local’ components and processes of projects and ‘wider’ issues and debates. Infrastructure here takes on another ‘role’ or guise. In this regard, the analysis in Chapter 5 identified how the broader significance or ‘political situation’ of the Hammarby Sjöstad project could be drawn out as part of narratives of green branding, eco-gentrification or service privatization. It is likely that further work on local smart grid configurations (Chapter 6) will continue to be linked to broader national discussions about data circulation and privacy. Finally, assumption like demonstration also implies thinking about absences, exclusions and those who are less visible or able to make themselves heard. This may be particularly the case with regard to future configurations when perhaps some socio-technical relations are unclear, uncertain or yet to make themselves discernible. These material political processes share two traits. First, they are ways of trying to sustain or create capacity of action or engagement over time, and beyond specific immediate changes to infrastructure configurations. ‘To govern is to foresee’ is the motto to which an urban smart grid project is ascribed in Chapter 6, which captures the sense that anticipation and clairvoyance are pertinent modes of urban intervention with infrastructure as the medium or conveyance of the future. Second, they are forged around or through relations or engagements with particular materials, objects and entities which may be infrastructures ‘as a whole’ or specific components of systems. Demonstration, deviation and assumption are processes through which things become enrolled into collectives for differing purposes. They are about actors attempting to reveal properties of entities and components—the thermodynamic qualities of heat flows (Chapter 4), the high cost of building a motorway bypass (Chapter 3)—or attempting to put these properties to work for particular interests, or making allowances for their activity and functioning. The political dimensions and outcomes of infrastructure have long been clear, but in studying emerging city-making processes and

182     J. Rutherford

the central role of infrastructures in these, we begin to see the material/ infrastructural dimensions to politics and political activities: ‘infrastructure not only has a politics but is a politics’ (Amin and Thrift 2017, p. 84; see also Barry 2001). A substantial portion of actions, choices and decisions about urban futures generally is constituted by or through engagements with the technical and material world. These may well be (new) obligatory points of passage to sustainable urban futures, which is also, perhaps especially, a recognition that we as humans are only one of many actors in emerging collective socio-technical worlds. There is a sense that we need to rethink questions of ‘who’ and ‘where’ in an age of shifting relations between humans, technology and the physical environment. Agency and action are more distributed than ever, and urban vibrancy and dynamics cannot be contained neatly within city boundaries or policy mandates (Otter 2017). Reworking or redeploying of infrastructure is shown to be contributing to or operating quite fundamental shifts in human—environment relations, or ‘technonatures’ (White and Wilbert 2009). It does so notably by forging efforts to bypass or transcend perceived or actual limits (spatio-temporal, ecological, technical) in the organization and governing of ‘sustainable’ urban lives (of extant human–environment relations in the networked city). Infrastructure in the anthropocene can no longer constitute an instrument for unfettered and limitless growth as in the past, when system expansion begat further expansion (Coutard 2010). Yet, material enactments of emerging urban socio-technical futures, framed as low carbon, smart etc., can be seen as a means to create new technological opportunities out of the constraints of sustainability. From massive municipal investment in suburban water systems (Chapter 2) or a bypass road (Chapter 3) to smart logics of real-time commensuration of energy production and consumption (Chapter 6) via infrastructure integration and eco-districts (Chapter 5), infrastructure reconfiguration is a process of redefining the pathways and limits of urban sustainability, at once extending outwards to new available resources and concentrating possibilities of ‘autonomy’ within particular areas. This selective transcendence suggests a resurgence of attempts at domination of ‘nature’ (Braun 2014), with infrastructures as ‘artificial environments, walling off modern lives from nature and constructing the latter as commodity, resource,

7  Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures     183

and object of romantic utopianism…’ (Edwards 2002, p. 221). There is a gradual move through the chapters towards greater focus on ‘highly technified economic actions’ and secessionary private ecology, displacing any conception of sustainability as ‘public ecology’ (Luke 2003, p. 28). Eco-city initiatives and smart urbanism become here an apotheosis of an ‘industrial ecology’ and ‘machinic metabolism’, a greenwashed technological ‘modernity’ which connects up homes and consumption practices and circulates material and data flows in a modern advanced ‘web of life’ (Moore 2015) that can be used by only a few, and must be ‘analysed’, ‘criticized’ and ‘overcome’ (Luke 2003, p. 25). These tendencies to selective inclusions and exclusions, under the cover of ‘progress’ or ecological modernization, merit further attention, as they are liable to lead to further uneven infrastructure development and consequences as transformative aims are diverted or usurped by ‘business as usual’.

Continuing Infrastructure Futures An overarching concern of the book has been to broaden our understanding of urban infrastructure by tracking through the urban arena the different rationales and engagements with materialities and flows as they are put to work in the making of, and struggles over, wider urban political projects. Across the chapters, infrastructure is never a neutral, singular, fixed and pre-given grid system rolled out across city jurisdictions according only to official policy. While urban infrastructure policy contexts are important, and constituted a starting point for stories, the aim here has been to move beyond the narrow view of infrastructure and the urban that this implies, and capture encounters with an active urban materiality being made political through tensions and struggles which bubble up to unsettle, disrupt or deviate ‘ordering’ visions, objectives and projects of change (see also Easterling 2014). Redeploying infrastructure materializes or presents an active socio-technical cultivation of possible urban futures, but this is an inherently contested process and a provisional ongoing achievement. The perspective developed in the book has been based on a notion of emergence which recognizes that the socio-technical world is always in

184     J. Rutherford

the making and that the processes which constitute this making inherently forge possibilities of change. This immanent view already sets out a political bearing, for as Amin and Thrift (2017, p. 83) make clear, ‘If the world speaks back not from out or over there but from in here, then we find ourselves in a different situation, one in which all manner of beings are or can be enfranchised even though that enfranchisement may not be equal’. Furthermore, it also offers a methodological utility in unpacking, even debunking, the discursive clarity of sustainable visions and drivers of socio-technical change, but which is not borne out by material processes and practices of actually deploying infrastructure. While many of the proponents of sustainable city-making encountered in the stories in the chapters have been quite clear about the aims and supposed benefits of their plans and actions, the processes studied are far messier, more uncertain, full of struggles and often less inclusive than suggested or prescribed. Digging into the materiality of urban change thus offers a useful method of critically interrogating ambitious, but slippery claims of green urbanism or urban improvement for the collective good. In this way, infrastructure futures are shown to be always emerging processes constituted by, and not just the outcome of, socio-technical struggles. But what does this perspective focused on tracing material political processes mean in practical terms for production of some kind of meaningful or transformative change? It is here that a form of normative or ethical commitment to working for change must be foregrounded as part and parcel of emerging processes. Recognition that different types or scales of response or initiative are required to confront the social and ecological issues of today is a first step. The infrastructure configurations and socio-technical arrangements we have seen in the chapters are unlikely to oversee the transformative change that is required, bound up as they are with existing political/governmental formations still mostly oriented towards futures of unfettered economic growth (see Mitchell 2009). A shift in political commitment towards equality through progressive collective socio-technical configurations is a fundamental element of any transformative change (see Luke 2003). Yet, the potential for such a shift is already present if we place ourselves within the socio-technical world in the making rather than somehow

7  Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures     185

standing outside of it. Amin and Thrift (2017, p. 6) argue that ‘infrastructures have their own pinch points, which themselves constitute political arenas’. I suggest that taking into account, and indeed acting with, the vitality of the material world—the technicities, flows and entities of infrastructure over which we only ever have partial control—can be a crucial part of engaging political action towards socio-technical change that addresses core social and ecological concerns. In seeking collective configurations that work towards equality, we need to rethink our sense of what collective futures may signify. As Urry (2016) suggests, it means first bringing a public concern and representative public bodies back into societal debates where private or individual interests dominate. But it also means opening out what public or collective actually is and acknowledging, including and working actively and holistically with all manner of objects and nonhumans that not only matter in themselves as part of our world, but with which we are always already entangled in everything we do and are. This symmetric ‘public ecology’ (Luke 2003) or material politics can forge care-ful and genuinely sustainable infrastructure futures in which the primary task is quite simply to maintain socio-technical collectives which connect up and work for all constituents. This vital infrastructure is endlessly fascinating, reshaping and redeploying the possibilities of urban life itself not least by forcing a multitude of actors to engage and recombine their efforts with the material world. It is through sustaining such hybrid crosscutting engagements that more desirable, progressive and collective urban futures may be fruitfully cultivated. Research too can continue to push at the boundaries of conceptual thinking about infrastructure and urban life. While the chapters in this book have been concerned with the politics of infrastructure grids and systems deployed to support or allow the staging of urban life, I suggest that there is also a link to be forged in further studies of urban infrastructure to the recent proliferation of work across the social sciences which has extended the concept of infrastructure into new domains and to encompass other things from all kinds of logistics systems to drones, blood banks and air itself. As part of an overlapping conceptual shift from flat to volumetric urban perspectives, there appears to be potential in seeking understanding of infrastructure not just as a base layer

186     J. Rutherford

upon which urban life takes place, but as an ambience or atmosphere through/within which urban life is actually constituted (Sloterdijk 2009). Infrastructural activity may increasingly resemble an envelope of existence and vitality forged through effective human and material interactions, which ‘mixes all manner of beings together in a way that can genuinely be regarded as evolutionary’ (Amin and Thrift 2017, p. 4). As a key site and means of delivering sustainable urban futures, of bringing these futures into being, and of actively and vibrantly constituting how this is done, infrastructure is not just life support system, but the vitality of life itself.

References Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift. 2017. Seeing Like a City. London: Polity Press. Barry, Andrew. 2001. Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society. London: Athlone. Beauregard, Robert. 2015. Planning Matter: Acting with Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Braun, Bruce. 2014. A New Urban Dispositif? Governing Life in an Age of Climate Change. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32: 49–64. Coutard, O. 2010. Services urbains: la fin des grands réseaux? In Ecologies urbaines: état des savoirs et perspectives, ed. O. Coutard and J.P. Lévy. Paris: Economica-Anthropos. Easterling, Keller. 2014. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso. Edwards, Paul. 2002. Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems. In Modernity and Technology, ed. T. Misa, P. Brey, and A. Feenberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gabrys, Jennifer. 2009. Sink: The Dirt of Systems. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 666–681. Gandy, Matthew. 2014. The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Graham, Stephen, and Nigel Thrift. 2007. Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance. Theory, Culture and Society 24 (3): 1–25.

7  Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures     187

Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge. Hughes, T. 1987. The Evolution of Large Technical Systems. In The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. W. Bijker, T. Hughes, and T. Pinch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Joyce, Patrick, and Tony Bennett. 2010. Material Powers: Introduction. In Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, ed. T. Bennett and P. Joyce. London: Routledge. Larkin, Brian. 2013. The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–343. Luke, Timothy. 2003. Global Cities vs. ‘Global Cities’: Rethinking Contemporary Urbanism as Public Ecology. Studies in Political Economy 70: 11–33. Michael, Mike. 2009. The Cell-Phone-in-the-Countryside: On Some ironic Spatialities of Technonature. In Technonatures, ed. D. White and C. Wilbert. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. Carbon Democracy. Economy and Society 38 (3): 399–432. Moore, Jason. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso. Murphy, Douglas. 2016. Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture. London: Verso. Otter, Chris. 2017. The Technosphere: A New Concept for Urban Studies. Urban History 44 (1): 145–154. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2009. Foam City: About Urban Spatial Multitudes. In New Geographies, ed. S. Ramos, S. Allen, S. Boeri, and N. Turan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Urry, John. 2016. What Is the Future? Cambridge: Polity Press. White, Damian, and Chris Wilbert (eds.). 2009. Technonatures: Environments, Technologies, Spaces, and Places in the Twenty-first Century. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Index

A

E

Anthropocene 24, 28, 33, 182

Eco-city, ecological urbanism 25–27, 123, 135, 141, 150, 174, 183 EDF 107–111, 113, 114, 161, 177 Eggers, Dave 1, 2 Electricity 4, 31, 74, 78, 99, 102–104, 107, 109–116, 118, 132, 133, 135, 137, 140, 143, 160–163, 175, 179 Energy infrastructure and systems 45, 100, 102, 116, 118, 124, 150 Energy transition(s) 4, 6, 87, 88, 100, 101, 106, 110, 114, 115, 117, 118, 174, 180

B

Biomass, biofuels 75, 83, 84, 105, 106 C

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions 78, 81, 84, 87, 100, 112, 162, 174 CPCU (Compagnie Parisienne de Chauffage Urbain) 103–106

F D

District heating. See Heating Dufy, Raoul 99, 100, 117, 118

Fortum Värme 82, 83, 133, 135, 137 France 6, 105–107, 111, 160, 161, 177 energy policy 110

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2020 J. Rutherford, Redeploying Urban Infrastructure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1

189

190     Index G

Green Capital of Europe award 77, 123

Material politics/material political 3, 5, 11, 15, 30–33, 73, 85, 91, 100, 116, 117, 150, 173, 176–178, 180, 181, 184, 185

H

Hammarby Sjöstad 127–131, 133, 136–142, 144, 145, 148, 149, 167, 169, 175, 180, 181 design and model 125, 131–133, 135, 141, 143, 178 evaluation process 178 infrastructure systems 124, 135, 137, 144–147, 150, 178 Heating 31, 72, 75, 78, 81–85, 88–90, 102–106, 110–113, 117, 132, 135–137, 140, 143, 145, 148, 149, 174, 177, 179, 180 I

Infrastructure. See Urban infrastructure Issy-les-Moulineaux 161–163, 165

N

Norrtälje 53–56, 58, 59, 64 Nuclear power 74, 100, 110, 112, 114, 117 O

Off-grid systems 57–60 P

Paris 99–102, 104, 107–109, 111–114, 116–118, 159, 160, 174, 177 energy and climate policy 103, 105–107, 110 R

L

Low carbon 4, 25, 73, 90, 91, 100, 101, 106, 117, 174, 175, 179, 182 M

Materiality/materialities 3, 5, 11, 14, 15, 19–22, 24, 26, 31, 32, 57, 60, 67, 71–73, 87, 90, 92, 102, 104, 114, 117, 118, 127, 150, 166, 174, 183, 184

Resource flows 4, 12, 16, 106, 124, 125, 146, 149, 150, 174 S

Smart 4, 6, 157–163, 165–170, 174, 175, 178–180, 182, 183 Smart grid 159–161, 164, 178, 181 Socio-technical change 3, 5, 7, 13–17, 24, 30, 31, 34, 61, 63, 66, 102, 118, 119, 125, 146, 148, 150, 165, 168, 173, 176, 179, 184, 185

Index     191

Socio-technical perspective 23, 47, 173 Socio-technical transitions 16 Stockholm 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 60, 61, 66, 74, 80, 87, 123–125, 127–130, 133, 135–138, 142, 144, 146–148, 150, 174 City Plan 76, 78, 86 energy and climate policy 71, 73–75, 77, 79, 84–86, 88, 90–92 environmental policy 72, 77, 79–81, 86–89, 177 STS (science and technology studies) 9, 12, 14, 16 Suburban 4, 45–47, 49, 50, 52, 55, 58, 59, 61–63, 65–67, 87, 89, 174, 182 Sustainability transition(s) 15–17, 19, 30 Sustainability, urban 6, 8, 16, 18, 25, 123, 126, 127, 144, 149, 182 Sustainable cities. See Sustainability, urban Sustainable urban development. See Sustainability, urban Sweden 51, 71, 72, 74, 106, 136, 138, 140, 144 SymbioCity initiative 124

T

Transition(s). See Energy transition(s); Low Carbon; Socio-technical transitions; Sustainability transition(s) U

Urban futures 2–5, 8, 11, 18, 21, 24, 28, 29, 32, 34, 46, 90, 115, 126, 127, 145, 158, 169, 174–176, 182, 183, 185, 186 Urban infrastructure 2, 3, 9, 11, 32, 47, 150, 173, 174, 179, 183 politics of 5, 12, 13, 15, 29–31, 34, 52, 73, 90, 126, 127, 177, 185 Urban materiality. See Materiality/ materialities Urban planning 25, 72, 78, 125, 127, 128, 130, 157, 166, 167, 173, 174 Urban political ecology 26 W

Waste infrastructure and systems 174 Water infrastructure and systems 46, 50, 178