The governance approach of smart city initiatives. Evidence from Trondheim, Bergen, and Bodø

A pragmatic and polity-focused solution for governing a smart city in the direction of sustainability is still missing in theory and practice. A debate about whether a smart city is a pragmatic solution for modern challenges or just a technology-led urban utopia is entangled with the vexed issue of governance. While ‘smart governance’ has drawn unprecedented interest, the combination of its conceptual vagueness and broad applications couple with a lack of focus on its underlying international and local political paradigms have raised concerns about its utility. This study contributes to restoring attention to the original concept of governance, its differences with governing and government, and the potential challenges resulting from its functionality in its real, multi-layered, and complex contexts. This paper explores the intellectual connection between governance and smart cities, from both an empirical and a conceptual/analytical perspective. From the empirical side, we examine which actors, processes, and relational mechanisms at different levels that have had an impact on the initiation of smart cities in three Norwegian cities: Trondheim, Bergen, and Bodø. We illustrate how the structural sources of the interests, roles, and power in smart city initiatives have caused governance to emerge and change, but have also affected the goals designed by specific actors.publishedVersio

Aesthetic Preference as Starting Point for Citizen Dialogues on Urban Design: Stories from Hammarkullen, Gothenburg

This article sets out to describe the role of aesthetics in citizen dialogues during the upgrading of a local swimming pool in Hammarkullen, Gothenburg. The swimming pool became an important project because of its role in a larger neighbourhood renovation project that allowed the municipality to focus on citizen engagement and inclusion. The engagement process showed the importance of the local swimming pool for a marginalized group of women of Somali origin, and a decision was made to keep the swimming pool instead of demolishing it. This led to collaboration between project coordinators, the Public Art Agency, an artist and an architect. Individual qualitative interviews focusing on storytelling were undertaken with key stakeholders. The findings show that aesthetic quality mediated the communicative processes between project coordinators and citizens. Art in public space is more than just aesthetics or something to look at; art provokes a wide variety of responses and artists use a variety of means to engage with their public and creating dialogue. Yet the project managers failed to consider the creative process of the architect and her perspective on aesthetic quality and building functionality. Stakeholders take different stances to whether aesthetic quality can be a way of grounding, communicating and evolving, or whether it is a matter of beauty where the artist or architect takes the lead. While the project coordinators affirm sameness, different understandings of aesthetic quality actively negotiate social differences. Inability to consider creative practices’ work processes in relation to citizen dialogue can result in conflicts between art, architecture and governance during the transformation of a neighbourhood

The Montana Kaimin, June 4, 1937

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/studentnewspaper/2648/thumbnail.jp

Guidelines. PI-SEC report 2.4. Regulatory and planning implications for municipalities

Introduction. When engineering meets pragmatism, challenges arise in terms of how to solve problems. The process of studying how instruments and tools can be improved and developed to integrate energy aspects into urban planning, has from a methodological perspective centered around a basic challenge. The challenge that we have found to be at the core, is that while municipal urban planning is a pragmatic practice working on district or city scale, energy planning is a more direct problem-solving process, based on engineering principles and working at a different scale. Engineers and municipal planners also work at different ends of the timeline. Typically, municipal planners lay out large structures of land use, functions and possibilities in municipal master plans and zoning plans, before handing these over to other stakeholders responsible for technical detailing, property agreements and a multitude of smaller, individual projects. In between the start of a municipal area plan and the realized neighborhood, a range of procedures, political actors, market and legal regulations make the process from plan to reality rather unpredictable. PI-SEC WP2 is concerned with the needs in municipal planning for realizing smart energy communities, and the results are hence focused on municipal planners as a target group. This means that our recommendations go beyond the ‘building project’ as this is not the core of a municipal planners’ work. Our results emphasize the implications in relation to the pragmatic role of urban planning; a situation where a range of needs and trade-offs must be met in this practice. The PI-SEC planning wheel (Report 2.2) outlined a new overarching process for understanding how to integrate energy into urban planning. The PI-SEC Planning wheel presents no less than 23 challenges and best practices (A-Z) based on our study of Bergen, Oslo and the municipalities from the research center Zero Emission Neighborhoods that we compared our findings with. Many of the best practices are related to the navigation of multiple stakeholder projects, stakeholder commitment, citizen involvement and differing goals. The results are based on interviews and workshops with the mentioned municipalities we describe the implications of our findings on municipal planning and regulation. This PI-SEC report includes 9 implications, that we discuss individually. As the discussions illustrate, the work to improve our cities and communities will never be finished. The interplay between different stakeholders, objectives, people and time, will keep making integrated planning interesting and full of opportunities. The nine implications therefore suggest new possible research directions for improving municipal planning beyond PI-SEC.publishedVersio

A theory of change for cleaner cooking: building a health belief model for service design starting with the slums of Kathmandu

A new theory of change is needed for cleaner cooking. Indoor cooking on three stone fires is a practice that is harmful to both people and planet: causing an increasing number of fatalities and destroyed forests. Yet humanitarian, international, and national efforts to transition to cleaner fuels are so far unsuccessful. This short paper proposes a new and transdisciplinary approach; one that deeply seeks to understand the women end-user and community perspective and opportunity for change. We will start by investigating the link between quality of life indicators, health impact of indoor air pollutants and local strategies in the slums of Kathmandu. This data collection will contribute to the development of a Health Belief Model (HBM): a model that considers people own role in creating change. This combination of data collection and HBM can help us understand how women and communities can be approached to trigger the needed behavioral change. Describing the end user perspective in a more holistic manner will further contribute to create service blueprints showing how existing service systems can integrate stove introduction programs with existing public health programs. The model creation will be followed with stove introduction for clean and affordable fuel use

Aesthetic Preference as Starting Point for Citizen Dialogues: Stories from Hammarkullen

This article sets out to describe the role of aesthetics in citizen dialogues during the upgrading of a local swimming pool in Hammarkullen, Gothenburg. The swimming pool became an important project because of its role in a larger neighbourhood renovation project that allowed the municipality to focus on citizen engagement and inclusion. The engagement process showed the importance of the local swimming pool for a marginalized group of women of Somali origin, and a decision was made to keep the swimming pool instead of demolishing it. This led to collaboration between project coordinators, the Public Art Agency, an artist and an architect. Individual qualitative interviews focusing on storytelling were undertaken with key stakeholders. The findings show that aesthetic quality mediated the communicative processes between project coordinators and citizens. Art in public space is more than just aesthetics or something to look at; art provokes a wide variety of responses and artists use a variety of means to engage with their public and creating dialogue. Yet the project managers failed to consider the creative process of the architect and her perspective on aesthetic quality and building functionality. Stakeholders take different stances to whether aesthetic quality can be a way of grounding, communicating and evolving, or whether it is a matter of beauty where the artist or architect takes the lead. While the project coordinators affirm sameness, different understandings of aesthetic quality actively negotiate social differences. Inability to consider creative practices’ work processes in relation to citizen dialogue can result in conflicts between art, architecture and governance during the transformation of a neighbourhood

Identifying and supporting exploratory and exploitative models of innovation in municipal urban planning; key challenges from seven Norwegian energy ambitious neighborhood pilots

The planning of energy ambitious neighborhood pilots in Norway typically begin with the creation of holistic and socially ambitious visions based on extensive stakeholder collaboration, citizen insight generation and vision setting. However, as projects move from planning to implementation, the exploratory innovation methods are replaced by exploitative approaches. ‘The holistic vision and in particular, citizens’ described needs, fail to transfer into the implementation phase. This paper identifies four main challenges as to why this happens and link these to theory on ambidextrous organizations that need to exploit existing knowledge while reaching into the future with its rapidly changing goals and technological opportunities. Implementing stakeholders are familiar with exploitative tools, which build on earlier experience and capabilities of the selected implementing stakeholders, and the implementation stage leaves little time and resources for innovation on a lower hierarchical level. While extensive research on smart and integrated planning focus on ‘breaking down the silos’ meaning sectors and disciplines, our findings argue that the need to manage ambidextrous organizations and support both exploratoryand exploitative innovation is equally important. An ambidextrous organization is one that has the ability to be efficient in its management of today's business while being adaptable for coping with the changing demand of tomorrow. We propose a model in which the organizational style and management style of innovative neighborhood pilots focus more on how to transfer knowledge and learn from the bottom-up and horizontally through management that foster both innovation modelspublishedVersio

Experiential learning and reflection through video in field-based learning.

The first semester of the master program Urban Ecological Planning consists of extensive fieldwork and deep learning. Studying informal settlements of Indian cities require that students think action and are able to reflect upon own experiences. Sensory impressions represent a significant part of the students’ experience, and the course facilitators need to support reflection in an intense and challenging context. The students’ role as outsiders, their ambition to make a difference, and their professional role as future urban planners are challenged when meeting the realities of citizens in Bhopal, India. In fall 2018, a group of students stayed behind in Trondheim to do their fieldwork in the area Lademoen. As an educational experiment, we encouraged the students to not only reflect upon their experiences through written words on paper, but also to try to communicate and reflect visually, and deliver their reflections as videos. The results were beyond our expectations; the students delivered high quality short videos, showing how they interpreted their experiences, the course and the learnings about the communities in which they spent days, weeks and months together with. The students also explained that as they were filming and editing the videos, the process itself ‘did something’ to the way they saw the complexity of the problems in front of them and how they made sense of the whole. This suggests that video reflections can help students complete the cycle of experiential learning[1], something that can help them move towards a stage where it becomes easier for them to act based on their learning.status: Published onlin