Governing future urban conduct through the sociotechnical imaginary of the low-carbon city : a comparative case study of carbon reduction plans from Auckland, Copenhagen, New Orleans, and Vancouver

As concern over the future impacts of Climate Change has grown, cities have become key proposed sites of interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Numerous cities around the world have set goals to achieve varying levels and forms of eliminating carbon from their milieu. This study critically examines how the “low-carbon city” as a conception of a desirable future is translated into both a strategy and a set of proposed instruments for governing urban contexts in the future. The theoretical framework of this thesis draws on Critical Futures Studies, using Jasanoff and Kim’s sociotechnical imaginaries and Foucault’s governmentality as linked lenses with which to scrutinize particular social and material means of intervening in the greenhouse gas emissions of cities. Two distinct logics of emissions reduction, decarbonization and low-carbon practices of daily life, are also considered for the role they play in these efforts. This thesis took the official carbon reduction plans of Auckland, Copenhagen, New Orleans, and Vancouver as its research material, producing a comparative case study. The overall analytical approach was one of Dispositive Analysis. The data analysis methods were Directed Qualitative Con-tent Analysis employing Dean’s Analytics of Government, Comparative Analysis and Causal Layered Analysis. The results of the study indicate that the low-carbon city is far from a homogenous sociotechnical imaginary, with the approach each case city takes to becoming low-carbon differentiated by their existing capacities and geographic situation in addition to the particular carbon reduction logic they have chosen to adopt. While some of the areas of urban fabrics and activities that the cities view as in need of transformation are similar, others are unique to individual cases. All four city governments envision specific ways of acting on urban dwellers to bring their self-conceptions in line with governmental objectives, and the different forms this takes are presented. The goal of this study was to make the power relations that may be produced by enacting the imaginary of the low-carbon city more evident, thereby opening them up to more effective criticism. By exploring possibilities for using Dispositive Analysis to understand some of the difficult-to-perceive ways in which conceptions of desirable futures are used to govern, this project aims to expand the possibilities for ethical and reflective contributions by Futures researchers to practices of government

The war for the future

The following essay was born out of the authors’ participation in the Hamburg (Insecurity) Sessions 2019: Un-Cancelling the Future, and the discussions that took place in the workshop on Future Weapons and Emerging Technologies. The workshop participants critically addressed such problems as the future of defence technologies and their sociotechnical environments, cybersecurity and surveillance proliferation and the improvised instruments of insurgency. Our task was to weave the ideas and insights of the workshop’s participants into a vision of the world in 2040 and use it to motivate an analysis of the technoscientific imaginaries emerging in the present. From the workshop presentations and discussions, we identified three key areas of that allowed us to imagine the outlines and interactions of global security and technoscientific practice in 2040: ecopolitics: the exploitation of ecological systems for strategic ends; technonationalism: the use of advanced technologies to pursue racialised and nationalistic geopolitical agendas; and the security continuum: the extension of conflict modes to all aspects of social life and the open-source proliferation of security tools and techniques

A qualitative, network-centric method for modeling socio-technical systems, with applications to evaluating interventions on social media platforms to increase social equality

We propose and extend a qualitative, complex systems methodology from cognitive engineering, known as theabstraction hierarchy, to model how potential interventions that could be carried out by social media platforms might impact social equality. Social media platforms have come under considerable ire for their role in perpetuating social inequality. However, there is also significant evidence that platforms can play a role inreducingsocial inequality, e.g. through the promotion of social movements. Platforms’ role in producing or reducing social inequality is, moreover, not static; platforms can and often do take actions targeted at positive change. How can we develop tools to help us determine whether or not a potential platform change might actually work to increase social equality? Here, we present the abstraction hierarchy as a tool to help answer this question. Our primary contributions are two-fold. First, methodologically, we extend existing research on the abstraction hierarchy in cognitive engineering with principles from Network Science. Second, substantively, we illustrate the utility of this approach by using it to assess the potential effectiveness of a set of interventions, proposed in prior work, for how online dating websites can help mitigate social inequality

Rainwater Harvesting and Community Water Security in south-west Uganda

Less than 40% of Uganda’s population has access to safe drinking water. Municipal water systems rarely reach the poorest, most remote communities, and where they do reach populations, quality and quantity are often inadequate due to poor system operation and maintenance. Decentralised water services, such as RWH can provide essential water where centralised supply is inadequate or does not reach. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) encourages the use of rainwater harvesting (RWH) to improve community water access in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Nonetheless, uptake of RWH across SSA is below targets that have been set by the United Nations. If these targets are to be met, further research is needed to understand the drivers and barriers of RWH adoption for water insecure populations in Uganda. Water security has become a widely accepted term that communicates the broader social, political and environmental benefits of water-related services. Rather than focusing solely on the materiality of water access in itself, water security frameworks have been used to assess the less tangible outcomes of decentralised water access. For this thesis, a new water security framework was designed based on the perspectives of water practitioners and stakeholders involved in the delivery of water services in south-west Uganda. The framework provided structure to identify and assess the sociotechnical outcomes of RWH access. The framework includes ten sociotechnical water security goals and is based on a new definition of water security developed for this research: ‘water services that contribute to community water security provide sufficient water of acceptable quality for good health, which is affordable and available year-round. They sustain livelihoods and can be equitably accessed across all user-groups. These water services should minimise the risk of local conflict and boost community cohesion and climate resilience. The management of these services should be supported by local and national institutions so they can be reliably sustained over the long-term’. Building on previous research, the water security goals go above and beyond solely describing the fundamental physical characteristics of water provision, instead, they reference socioeconomic, environmental and technical outcomes. The structure of the framework encourages researchers to collect a range of qualitative and quantitative data. Using a ‘two-case’ case study strategy, the framework was applied to the assessment of ten RWH installations in a rural (Kabale) and an urban (Mbarara) community in south-West Uganda to identify the drivers, barriers and outcomes of RWH use in the region. Comparisons between the urban and rural community uncovered how localised socioeconomic, infrastructural and governance structures influence the delivery and uptake of RWH in Uganda. For the assessment, a mixed-methods approach was adopted which included water balance modelling, sanitary surveys, site inspections, key informant interviews, focus groups and physiochemical and bacteriological water quality tests. The significant drivers of RWH use in the rural community were proximity of water in comparison to alternative water sources, the potential for improved livelihoods, protection against climate unpredictability and support from a local NGO. RWH provided good quality water that met WHO standards at 80% of sites. There was enough water to support household and micro-enterprise activities. High capital cost was found to be a significant barrier to the adoption of the technology. The drivers for adoption among the urban community were poor municipal water quality, service interruptions and high costs associated with existing water services. This was compounded by poor sense of value for money and mistrust of the municipal service. In the urban community RWH provided good water quality for 70% of the sites assessed. A lack of awareness and financing mechanisms were highlighted as significant barriers to RWH use. In neither community could RWH provide year-round availability of water and so is most appropriate as a supplementary water source in this region of Uganda. The identification of the drivers, barriers and outcomes of RWH use in these two communities allows policymakers and water practitioners to better understand which incentives, programmes and mechanisms can support the uptake and sustained use of RWH in Uganda. The water security framework provides structure to assess the sociotechnical outcomes of decentralised water access, emphasising the importance of the human-water relationship to global development.National Geographic, EPSR

Combining Design Thinking and the Socio-Technical-Ecological Systems Perspective to Understand Greenhouse Growers’ Experiences with Energy Management Solutions

Multiple threats to sustainability are driving the need to grow food in controlled environments, such as greenhouses. However, greenhouses consume large quantities of energy for lighting, heating, and ventilation, which places additional strain on the natural environment. For both business and environmental benefits, greenhouses must pursue sustainable energy management solutions. Combining design thinking with the socio-technical-ecological systems (STES) perspective, we analyze the greenhouse grower’s journey from awareness of potential solutions to post-implementation use. Our approach offers a novel way to understand the problem space. We find that sustainable energy management is more than a technical or even socio-technical challenge; it also involves important ecological considerations. However, ecological and social concerns are less evident in the grower’s journey as compared to the physical and information technology dimensions. The research and development of sustainable technology solutions would benefit from giving equal attention to these three systems and the interactions between them

State of Science: ergonomics and global issues

In his 1993 IEA keynote address, Neville Moray urged the ergonomics discipline to face up to the global problems facing humanity and consider how ergonomics might help find some of the solutions. In this State of Science article we critically evaluate what the ergonomics discipline has achieved in the last two and a half decades to help create a secure future for humanity. Moray’s challenges for ergonomics included deriving a value structure that moves us beyond a Westernised view of worker-organisation-technology fit, taking a multidisciplinary approach which engages with other social and biological sciences, considering the gross cross-cultural factors that determine how different societies function, paying more attention to mindful consumption, and embracing the complexity of our interconnected world. This article takes a socio-historical approach by considering the factors that influence what has been achieved since Moray’s keynote address. We conclude with our own set of predictions for the future and priorities for addressing the challenges that we are likely to face. Practitioner Summary: We critically reflect on what has been achieved by the ergonomics profession in addressing the global challenges raised by Moray's 1993 keynote address to the International Ergonomics Association. Apart from healthcare, the response has largely been weak and disorganised. We make suggestions for priority research and practice that is required to facilitate a sustainable future for humanity

Not of women born: Sociotechnical imaginaries of gender and kinship in the regulation of transmasculine reproductive citizenship in Denmark

In 2014, Denmark abolished the castration requirement that had been in place since the 1950s in order to obtain legal gender reassignment. As a self-declaration model was introduced, the law was amended to enable everyone with a uterus to retain access to pregnancy care and assisted reproduction. Combining Science and Technology Studies with critical transgender scholarship, this paper explores how the legal reforms, which sought to separate legal gender status from the healthcare system, have shaped the emergence of reproductive transmasculinities and the institutionalization of reproductive citizenship for trans men. Drawing on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (­Jasanoff, 2015), I discuss how specific understandings of coherence between bodies, gender and parenthood organize and restrict the reproductive practices of trans men. For example, men who give birth are still registered as mothers. Through the framework of biomedicalization (Clarke et al., 2010), I extend my discussion of reproductive autonomy to fertility preservation access. I discuss why, in Denmark, sperm can be frozen in relation to gender- affirmative treatment, but eggs cannot, and in doing so I highlight how this disparity is not only shaped by normative practices of risk prediction, but also by the political opposition to surrogacy in Denmark

Blockchain and gender digital inequalities in Africa: A critical afrofemtric analysis

Advances in the technological sphere are synergistic with society’s progression. Technological innovations result in social realities, and these correspondingly remodel technologies to reconcile their functions and values with society’s needs. The birth of blockchain ushered in euphoric pronouncements about its disruptive potentialities for low-resourced societies. While dominant discourses frame it as a tool for enabling grassroots participation in socioeconomic activities, they ignore the societal embeddedness of innovations. A central premise of this study is that the modalities of blockchain’s adoption reflect, and to an extent cement, the inequitable gender power dynamics of its context. Drawing on principles of gender justice from my original critical theory afrofemtrism, technofeminism, and the social construction of technology, I examined the adoption of blockchain technologies in Ghana and its engagement with gender digital inequalities. My empirical data is from 33 qualitative interviews with participants in the blockchain economy. I found that investing and trading in cryptocurrency are the principal blockchain activities in Ghana. This evinces the perception of low entry barriers without needing specialized education. Additionally, participants are overwhelmingly male, and the women in the space navigate a complex existence of relegation and comity. Their presence in this male-dominated space opens them to ridicule, and yet they benefit from better transactional opportunities as people perceive them to be more trustworthy than the average man. Blockchain could engender financial emancipation for women and other marginalized social groups. However, conditions like the compound effect of inhibiting familial, societal, and cultural socialization on gendered interests and progression undercut these affordances. Blockchain in itself is, therefore, not a panacea. Interventions for social change must include gender justice-conscious policymaking, as well as nationwide conscientization of the underpinnings of gender digital disparities. This study’s findings are integral to advancing studies in gender disparities in a sociotechnical arena. It also contributes to knowledge emanating from the Global South, particularly regarding emerging technology