ABSTRACT

This chapter develops a socio-technical perspective that seeks to understand the smart city not as a fixed narrative or static artefact that simply diffuses throughout global cities, but as an emerging practice in which a range of public and private actors are trying to "actualise" smart urbanism. It introduces the field of sustainability transitions. Scholars in the field of sustainability transitions investigate societal transformations toward sustainable socio-technical systems of production and consumption. The chapter argues that smart city experiments should be interpreted as simultaneous effort of discursive, institutional and material construction, and shows that cities are the sites in which actors experiment in various ways with each of these "constructions-in-action". It elaborates authors' conceptual argument and provides empirical illustration by using examples from Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Hamburg, Germany. The chapter discusses how the authors take this forward in terms of further conceptualisation and promising avenues for future research.