“Don't cook or iron with it”: Heterogeneities and coping strategies for accessing and using electricity in the informal settlements of Kampala, Uganda

This is the final version. Available on open access from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordData availability: The data that has been used is confidential.Uganda has one of the highest energy access deficits in the world, so low-income households improvise to access electricity, often through heterogeneous infrastructure arrangements. This study investigated energy heterogeneity in Uganda's informal settlements, expressed through the coping strategies that households adopt to access and use electricity. The paper is based on fieldwork conducted in Nakulabye slum, Kampala over a period of two months in 2022. We find ubiquitous multiplicity of electricity infrastructures and access options in the as households ration electricity, practice energy stacking, use illegal connections, or forego grid access. Such coping strategies offer households convenience, cost-savings and flexibility, but over prolonged periods of time, they can become the primary means of accessing electricity. This may cement the disenfranchisement of informal settlements from the grid, obscure the energy challenges they face and spur complacency in service provision and policymaking. The grid remains the idealized electricity source for most households, and future energy landscapes will likely feature the grid supplemented through coping strategies that reveal the energy expectations and practices of the urban poor. Augmented with existing measures, coping strategies portray a more accurate picture of energy access, demand, and consumption in informal settlements and advances our understanding of these issues. This can inform effective service provision that is attuned and responsive to the urban poor's energy needs and promote an equitable urban agenda.UCL Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (UCL STEaPP)UCL Department of Engineering for International Development (UCL EFiD)Commonwealth Scholarship Commissio

A Survey on Retrieval of Mathematical Knowledge

We present a short survey of the literature on indexing and retrieval of mathematical knowledge, with pointers to 72 papers and tentative taxonomies of both retrieval problems and recurring techniques.Comment: CICM 2015, 20 page

Smart Eco-CityDevelopment in Europe and China: Opportunities, Drivers and Challenges

The policy pointers presented in this report are the result of a three-year (2015-18) research project led by Federico Caprotti at the University of Exeter. The project, Smart Eco-Cities for a Green Economy: A Comparative Analysis of Europe and China, was delivered by a research consortium comprising scholars and researchers in the UK, China, the Netherlands, France, and Germany. The aim of the project was to investigate the way in which smart city and eco-city strategies are used to enable a transition towards digital and green economies. While previous work has considered smart cities and eco-cities as separate urban development models, the project considers them together for the first time. We use the term ‘the smart eco-city’ to focus on how green targets are now included in smart city development policies and strategies. This report presents a summary of policy pointers, or ‘lessons’, learned through our work on the cities we studied in the UK, China, the Netherlands, France and Germany. Specifically, we studied, in depth, the cities of Manchester, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Bordeaux, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Ningbo and Wuhan. This work included interviews with policymakers, urban municipal authorities, tech firm executives, and grassroots and community representatives and stakeholders. Our work also included intensive and in-depth qualitative analysis of documentary sources including policy and corporate reports and other materials.The research undertaken to produce this report was supported by funding from: the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) through research grant ES/ L015978/1; the National Natural Science Foundation of China, project number 71461137005; the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) through research grant 467-14-153 and the Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW) through research grant 530-6CD108; the French National Research Agency (ANR) through research grant ANR-14-02; and the German Research Foundation DFG through research grant SP 1545/1-1

The rise of AI urbanism in post-smart cities: A critical commentary on urban artificial intelligence

This is the final version. Available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record. Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as an impactful feature of the life, planning and governance of 21st-century cities. Once confined to the realm of science fiction and small-scale technological experiments, AI is now all around us, in the shape of urban artificial intelligences including autonomous cars, robots, city brains and urban software agents. The aim of this article is to critically examine the nature of urbanism in the emergent age of AI. More specifically, we shed light on how urban AI is impacting the development of cities, and argue that an urbanism influenced by AI, which we term AI urbanism, differs in theory and practice from smart urbanism. In the future, the rise of a post-smart urbanism driven by AI has the potential to form autonomous cities that transcend, theoretically and empirically, traditional smart cities. The article compares common practices and understandings of smart urbanism with emerging forms of urban living, urban governance and urban planning influenced by AI. It critically discusses the limitations and potential pitfalls of AI urbanism and offers conceptual tools and a vocabulary to understand the urbanity of AI and its impact on present and future cities

Smart Cities: Towards a New Citizenship Regime? A Discourse Analysis of the British Smart City Standard

Growing practice interest in smart cities has led to calls for a less technology-oriented and more citizen-centric approach. In response, this articles investigates the citizenship mode promulgated by the smart city standard of the British Standards Institution. The analysis uses the concept of citizenship regime and a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to discern key discursive frames defining the smart city and the particular citizenship dimensions brought into play. The results confirm an explicit citizenship rationale guiding the smart city (standard), although this displays some substantive shortcomings and contradictions. The article concludes with recommendations for both further theory and practice development

'Candles are not bright enough': Inclusive urban energy transformations in spaces of urban inequality

In this chapter, we discuss the key issue of how to envisage a just, fair and equitable energy transformation in the South African context. We argue that the move towards a new energy landscape cannot simply be described as a transition, but more accurately (in light of the need to involve multiple scales and actors, and to manage complex development outcomes) as a societal transformation. We also ask the key question of what a just and equitable transformation might look like in the context of South Africa in 2030. The chapter was co-written by scholars with multiple theoretical perspectives and backgrounds, and by practitioners at Sustainable Energy Africa, a Cape Town-based organisation centrally involved in promoting urban energy transformations that are both low carbon and equitable

Debating the urban dimension of territorial cohesion

The Territorial Cohesion goal was only included in the EU Treaty by 2009, with a view to promote a more balanced and harmonious European territory. One year earlier (2008), the European Commission (EC) published the ‘Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion—Turning territorial diversity into strength’. Neither one, nor the other, clearly defines the meaning of the Territorial Cohesion concept. The later, however, proposes three main policy responses towards more balanced and harmonious development: (i) Concentration: overcoming differences in density; (ii) Connecting territories: overcoming distance; and (iii) Cooperation: overcoming division. Although not explicitly, this document identifies several ‘urban questions’ to be dealt when promoting territorial cohesive policies: avoiding diseconomies of very large agglomerations and urban sprawl processes, combating urban decay and social exclusion, avoiding excessive concentrations of growth, promoting access to integrated transport systems and creating metropolitan bodies. In this light, this chapter proposes to debate the importance of the urban dimension to achieve the goal of territorial cohesion at several territorial levels.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Regional Cooperation Towards Green Asia: Trade and Investment

It is logical to argue that growth led by low-carbon goods and services (LCGS) is an imperative for the countries of Asia and the Pacific, and particularly for emerging Asian economies, which are heavily dependent on imported energy and resources. Acknowledging this fact, individual governments in Asia have recently been taking effective actions in the form of voluntary targets and policy commitments to improve the production and use of LCGS. However, the observed effects of these commitments are often challenged by many constraints, such as technological barriers, financial deficiencies, and lack of human capital, some of which are very specific to developing Asia. Different sector policies - such as in trade and environment - and investment policies that aim to facilitate private enterprises, households, and government agencies to contribute to green growth through the use of LCGS are being implemented at the national level. However, fears of competitive disadvantage mean that these policies need to be driven by global and regional frameworks that encompass all countries and sectors. In this context, the objectives of this study are to (i) measure the potential of major emerging Asian economies for exports in LCGS under the "grand coalition," partial coalition, and stand-alone scenarios; (ii) measure the impact of existing "behind the border" constraints on potential exports in emerging Asian economies; (iii) identify the potential, options, and challenges with respect to a grand coalition scenario; and (iv) find ways to improve the contribution of public-private partnerships to LCGS