The Politics of Urban Sustainability Transitions

Knowledge, Power and Governance

Jens Stissing Jensen, Matthew Cashmore, Philipp Späth, Jens Stissing Jensen, Matthew Cashmore, Philipp Späth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367664879
• eBook ISBN: 9781351065320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Cities, the world over, are increasingly recognised to be both a principal source of the environmental and social sustainability challenges facing contemporary society and a critical site for addressing these challenges. Socio-technical systems are at the heart of these challenges as they configure central aspects of urban life: from mobility and energy infrastructures to leisure activities and patterns of mobility. This observation has led to substantial interest in how societies might initiate and actively steer radical transitions in these systems in the pursuit of sustainable urban futures.

This book contributes to emerging debates on the politics of urban transitions by examining the intimate interlinkages between knowledge, power and governance. Drawing upon real-world examples of urban governance, the authors explore the strategies, struggles and controversies involved in configuring knowledge and how knowledge constructions influence governance by rendering some concerns and issues visible and valuable, while obscuring others. The book draws attention to how novel ways of conceptualising, knowing and observing socio-technical systems may be harnessed productively in redefining the power relationships underpinning unsustainable practices. Understanding these dynamics can ultimately inform and enable new approaches to support much-needed urban transitions.

This book provides a compelling examination of urban knowledge politics for the twenty-first century that will be of great value to academics, policy-makers and practitioners working in the social sciences, urban studies, geography, urban governance or sustainability transitions.

1 Introduction

The knowledge politics of urban sustainability transitions

Matthew Cashmore,¹ Jens Stissing Jensen² and Philipp Späth³

Introduction

Urbanisation during the last several hundred years generates contradictory sentiments amongst different actors. On the one hand, it can be interpreted as a centrepiece of human achievement – a vibrant and profound statement of social, technical and economic progress. For other actors, global urbanisation is a principal cause of the Anthropocene – an ecological crisis precipitated, in no small part, by the resource-intensive and polluting metabolisms of human activities in cities. And yet others associate urbanisation primarily with the gross social inequalities between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, with political failures and injustices, and the hegemony of capitalism.

Attitudes about the successes and failures of urbanisation processes clearly vary, but there is widespread recognition that the cityscapes of the future need to be markedly different from those of today if they are to be sustainable and liveable. A variety of terms have been used to portray potential urban futures, reflecting different views on the role of technology (e.g. in innovative and smart cities), economic growth (e.g. green growth and de-growth) and ecology (e.g. in eco-cities or biophilic cities). Radical, systemic and coordinated urban change – an urban transition – is thus a cornerstone of discussions among policymakers, planning practitioners and academics alike.

In many respects, city administrations have been at the forefront of initiatives to promote more sustainable and liveable futures. The willingness of urban actors to play a leading role in the agenda on climate change is particularly noteworthy. Urban sustainability experiments – purposeful small-scale interventions that test alternative urban futures – have been occurring in considerable numbers across the globe. Nevertheless, there has been an overwhelming failure to convert the political goodwill embedded in experimental interventions into effective governance for, and of, systemic transitions (Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2013). One explanation for these apparent failures that is currently receiving increasing attention is that the political dimensions of transitions have been insufficiently conceptualised (Scoones et al. 2015).

Urban transitions are inherently and deeply political, and for a variety of reasons. They challenge existing relations of power and capital, involve trade-offs amongst competing visions of the future that may fundamentally affect equality, ethics and liberty in society, and portend new forms of democratic organisation and engagement. In this book we are interested in one particular component of the politics of transitions: epistemic (or knowledge) politics.

As Scoones et al. (2015, p. 4) note, ‘[t]here is a politics around knowledge production in debates about green transformations, turning both on what we think we know (consensus and uncertainties) and on who knows it (whose knowledge counts)’. We contend that contemporary urban ‘political rationalities’ (or ways of knowing, thinking and acting) are intrinsically connected to the specific knowledge-configuring activities employed in rendering urban systems as intelligible and governable concerns. We also contend that urban systems are not self-evident entities, with naturally defined boundaries, functions and sustainability challenges. The way in which urban wastewater is acted upon, for example, is linked to the techniques and devices used to construct it as a knowable material system, and the types of expertise that are deemed relevant to managing it (Jensen et al. 2016). Knowledge-configuring practices produce visibilities that foreground particular characteristics of urban systems and obscure others, and in so doing they make some actors and actions more relevant to the system’s operation than others.

The development of transformative political rationalities thus often presupposes the invention of new ways of knowing urban systems. Understanding knowledge politics is not simply a question of bringing to critical attention the previously obscure political dimensions of transition governance, for it can be a force for directing change in positive directions. It opens up new understandings of the stickiness of the status quo, how unequal relations of power are (re-) accomplished, and how winners and losers are determined. This knowledge can be enabling and emancipatory, for it allows society to more fully comprehend the implications of alternate futures and navigate pathways to those futures.

A focus on knowledge politics is particularly germane as the ‘big data’ agenda sweeps through cities. Expanded capacity for collecting and analysing large quantities of data is ushering in a new era in urban knowledge politics. The ‘Urban Operating Systems’ of the future are a case par excellence of how the apparent neutrality of analytical devices black-box the political constitution of urbanisation (Chandler 2015; White 2016).

In this book, we outline the contours of a novel research agenda exploring how knowledge-configuring practices are implicated in, and modulate the politics of, urban transitions. We are interested in exploring and explaining how new ways of knowing may contribute to the governance of transitions through the inclusion of particular concerns, interests and values. The analyses contained in the subsequent chapters explore the political processes through which knowledge-configuring practices and strategies for representing the urban fabric are assembled and institutionalised. The authors also explore how the outcome of these processes shape the political rationalities that underpin discussions over urban futures.

Towards a knowledge-politics perspective on urban transition governance

We have argued that an understanding of knowledge politics is important to governing urban transitions, both as a source of mutability and as a mechanism for steering change along sustainable and just pathways. In this section of the chapter we describe the principal inputs to an analytical perspective on knowledge politics. We draw on insights from three main fields of scholarship in conceptualising knowledge politics: the transitions literature; governmentality studies; and, science and technology studies.

Transitions literature

The transitions literature emerged during the last 20 years from an amalgam of academic traditions, including innovation studies, technology and history (Shove and Walker 2007). Within this literature, transitions scholars have been understandably cautious about engaging with questions of governing change given a widespread view that any attempt to evoke change in complex systems is likely to have highly unpredictable outcomes. Elisabeth Shove (2010), nevertheless, claims that transitions scholarship has conceptually retooled the study of sustainability issues and created important new intellectual space in which to consider governance for sustainability. Recognition of this contribution is reflected in the increasing use of transitions scholarship in other academic fields, such as urban studies, and in policy decisions.

The transitions literature has sought to understand how radical change takes place in urban systems and infrastructures, such as energy, transport and water systems (Kemp et al. 1998; Geels 2002; Markard et al. 2012). Such systems and infrastructures have been conceptualised as socio-technical complexes formed over time as people, technology and institutions co-evolve. A socio-technical system is understood to be dynamically stable due to the reciprocities created through the co-evolution of system components (Geels 2002). These systems thus tend to change gradually, as opposed to undergoing abrupt transformations over a relatively short period of time. The study of historical transitions has enabled scholars to further their understanding of how and why technological innovations and external pressures, in some instances, have destabilised extant systems (Turnheim et al. 2015).

Studies of historical transitions have thus provided tantalising insights into sources of system mutability (e.g. Geels 2005). However, the role of novelty in terms of technical innovation has arguably been overemphasised in a tradition dominated by innovation analyses. Our point of departure for this book is that new ways of knowing and representing socio-technical systems can also play an influential role in transitions. We also reason that the consideration of knowledge politics is important in governing transitions in directions that are sustainable and just.

What then does the transition literature have to say on knowledge politics? An increasing number of transitions scholars have emphasised the political nature of epistemic specifications of urban systems. Shove and Walker (2007), for example, argued that, ‘the process of abstracting the “it” in question – the policy, the goal, the system – from its historical and contemporary environment is not just a technical matter of analysis but a political, constructed, and potentially contested exercise in problem formulation’. Following a similar line of reasoning, Smith and Stirling (2007) suggest that societal systems are rendered visible as governable objects according to particular epistemic frames. Shifting from one epistemic frame to another is not a question of getting closer to or further away from an ‘accurate’ representation of a system; nor is it about eliminating uncertainties. Rather, it is the outcome of power struggles where actors manoeuvre to define the nature of urban reality according to their own priorities and interests.

[u]ncertainties are transformed rather than reduced, since reductions under one framing merely pose more questions under alternative framings. Ambivalences prevail over how governance should best cut into and simplify the sheer complexities of socio-technical systems and dynamic relations with complex natural systems. Power relations are recognized to pervade the negotiation of governance constructs. Ever more accurate appraisal is unlikely to see the progressive evaporation of such power relations.

(Smith and Stirling 2007, p. 367)

Given these assumptions, effective governance of societal systems is seen to involve politically infused frame-making. Recognition that interest-driven frame-making plays a constitutive role in transition governance has led to greater appreciation of the reciprocities between knowledge production and politics. Thus, some scholars have claimed that the vocabularies and concepts for making systems visible should be understood as basic ingredients for mobilising and configuring new arenas in which transitions governance can be organised and performed (Jørgensen 2012).

Governmentality

While the importance of knowledge politics to urban transitions is increasingly recognised by transition scholars, research on this issue remains fragmented and piecemeal. Furthermore, existing work is primarily conceptual; few scholars have empirically addressed the knowledge politics of urban sustainability transitions until very recently. It is to the governmentality literature, and its substantial body of empirically grounded analyses, that we turn for further inspiration.

Governmentality scholarship is inspired by a Foucauldian analysis of the reciprocity between knowledge and power in modern governance. It focuses on the conditions under which particular governance regimes come into being, are maintained and transformed (Dean 2010). Governmentality is based on an encompassing understanding of government and views it as calculated attempts to direct human behaviour (or ‘to conduct conduct’) towards particular ends. Government is viewed, in consequence, as ubiquitous, undertaken by various actors (not only ‘the state’ and its representatives), and involves the application of some form of calculative reasoning in efforts to structure actors’ actions.

A central focus in governmentality studies is the role of knowledge in the fabrication of societal power dynamics. Knowledge is understood to be a product of discourses that are fundamentally neither true nor false. Governmentality studies are thus concerned, in part, with how knowledge-configuring practices are enrolled in purposeful attempts to conduct conduct. This focus reflects a belief that ways of knowing are intimately linked to, ‘how the world is apprehended; the ways in which particular technologies and experts are constructed and deployed; and the formation of particular kinds of bodies and subjects’ (Rutherford 2007, p. 293). Knowledge production, and an ability to affect what knowledge is viewed as legitimate and authoritative, are thus interpreted as being central to modern government.

All government, we suggest, depends on a particular mode of ‘representation’: the elaboration of a language for depicting the domain in question that claims both to grasp the nature of that reality represented, and literally to represent it in a form amenable to political deliberation, argument and scheming.

(Miller and Rose 1990, p. 6)

In presenting his governmentality perspective, Foucault emphasised the importance to modern government of statistical analyses that led to the emergence of ‘the population’ as a governable object. The production of statistical population data gained influence in the early nineteenth century (Scott 1988) and has had a pronounced effect on urban governance (Hacking 1982). A pivotal characteristic of this new category was that urban phenomena were made visible at a highly aggregated level (i.e. the population), rather than at the level of the individual or family. This meant that phenomena that appeared aleatory – and thus un-governable at the levels of the individual or family – were rendered visible as probabilistic patterns at the level of the population (Dillon 2007).

One salient effect of the invention of the population was a new conception of the health problems of the early industrial cities. Prior to this, only a vague understanding of the relation between urban health and living conditions existed. Health constituted a social problem in need of political intervention only once population statistics rendered it visible in the form of, among other things, mortality and morbidity rates (Gandy 2006). During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concern about the welfare of urban populations encouraged new conceptions of urban planning and development to emerge. Perhaps most significantly, the hydrological infrastructures of the city were reframed as public health concerns and an important mechanism for improving the productivity and longevity of the urban population (Gandy 2006). Traditional models of water provision, based on privately operated water-supply systems, were replaced by publicly operated, centralised systems. Infrastructural interventions were complemented by disciplinary measures promoting personal hygiene and regular exercise (Gandy 2006). This example illustrates how transformative political rationalities can be predicated on new ways of making the urban fabric known.

The governmentality literature offers three important contributions to an understanding of knowledge politics. First, it illustrates how knowledge plays a constitutive role in urban governance because it renders the urban fabric visible in particular, and inherently subjective, ways via the boundaries, purifications, differences and commonalities enacted under particular epistemic practices. By defining how urban reality is understood, knowledge production establishes the conditions under which political rationalities are formulated.

Second, the governmentality literature emphasises that discursive narratives, on their own, seldom constitute authoritative kno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: the knowledge politics of urban sustainability transitions
• 2 Governing radical societal change: politics, power and knowledge
• 3 Smart urbanism in Barcelona: a knowledge-politics perspective
• 4 The professional knowledge politics of urban transport transitions in the greater Copenhagen region
• 5 The power-knowledge of best practice: governing climate change in German municipalities
• 6 Competing knowledge assemblages in Danish heat governance
• 7 Urban metabolism as governmentality: governing the city of flows
• 8 Exploring the epistemic politics of urban niche experiments
• 9 It’s the complexity stupid! How transition management politicises and reimagines Rotterdam’s mobility system
• 10 Conclusions and perspectives
• Index