Redeploying Urban Infrastructure

THE POLITICS OF URBAN SOCIO-TECHNICAL FUTURES
JONATHAN RUTHERFORD
Redeploying Urban Infrastructure
Jonathan Rutherford
Redeploying Urban
Infrastructure
The Politics of Urban
Socio-Technical Futures
Jonathan Rutherford
LATTS
Université Paris Est
Marne-la-Vallée, France
ISBN 978-3-030-17886-4 ISBN 978-3-030-17887-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1
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Preface
Over the past twenty years, urban infrastructure has come to be seen
and studied as one of the key sites and vantage points of global urban
transformations. Cities are facing the ongoing challenge of reconciling
social inclusion, economic prosperity and environmental sustainability
in their socio-technical systems (energy, water, communications, trans-
port…). Scholars have responded by unpacking and critically investi-
gating the shifting capacities of diverse actors to shape these systems,
the various means they use to envision, enact and contest change, and
the wide-ranging implications of systemic urban transitions. There is a
meaningful politics of infrastructure which is and will continue to be a
crucial and productive arena of debate and conflict over the directions,
forms, modalities and outcomes of future urban change. This book
seeks to substantively develop and demonstrate, both conceptually and
empirically, this fertile politics of urban infrastructure.
While infrastructure is increasingly present in urban studies and
there is something of an ‘infrastructure turn’ in the wider social sciences
(see for example Harvey et al. 2017), much of this work remains quite
piecemeal and diffuse across disciplines, sectors or contexts. There is
still work to be done to bridge between technology scholars seeking
v
vi
Preface
efficiency and optimal solutions and social scientists concerned by con-

tingent ‘softer’ relations between actors, and a sense that generalizing or
theorizing across these various boundaries—moving towards “a com-
parative theory of urban infrastructure” (Graham and McFarlane 2015,
p. 13)—remains a difficult task as we seek broader understanding of
why and how infrastructure matters or comes to matter in and between
situated urban contexts. Paying more attention to the materiality of
infrastructure can help in this undertaking.
It is perhaps here that infrastructure demands what Jackson et al.
(2007) call a ‘sensibility’: “a way of thinking and acting in the world
capable of moving between the separate registers of technical and social
action”. Redeploying infrastructure in theory and in practice involves
a recognition that social and technical worlds are not carved off neatly
one from the other, but are always untidily intertwined. This calls
forth particular views and enactments of human–technology relations
which are highly contingent and consequential for shaping futures.
Infrastructure creates and maintains “the conditions of possibility for a
particular higher-order objective” (Carse 2012, p. 540), while its redis-
tributive nature means that particular configurations always work to the
advantage of some groups and entities and to the disadvantage of others
(Jackson et al. 2007). Not only do the material and physical qualities
of infrastructure make a difference to its functioning, to how it works
and is developed and taken up, but they also (increasingly?) have politi-
cal consequences and indeed constitute political (im)possibilities (Barry
2013; Mitchell 2011).
I use urban infrastructure as a window to explore shifting relation-
ships between cities, humans, technologies and ecologies, as imperatives
to sustainable urban futures continue to be promulgated, but for var-
ying, often contradictory, visions, rationales and interests. Continuing
exploration of the relationship between infrastructure change and urban
transitions is required to analyse how and why socio-technical systems
are put to work for wider sociopolitical projects and the implications
and contests this implies and draws out. To do this I develop a rela-
tional socio-technical perspective which sees urban infrastructure as an
emerging material political process or achievement in which technolog-
ical components and social relations are fully entwined and mutually
Preface
vii
constitutive. Here, the urban is at once the context, constituent and

consequence of infrastructural processes: simultaneously shaping of and
shaped by, but also, crucially, fully constitutive or actively formative of
actual and possible pathways. In other words, while cities are a milieu
of socio-technical change (with historical and territorial specificities)
and an outcome of change processes, they are also constantly emerging
material political configurations through which change actually comes
about. Understanding the urban as a socio-technical process through
which materiality becomes political, rather than as a pregiven state or a
set measure of density/centrality, helps to underscore that studying how
infrastructure becomes debated or disputed is to explore how urban
socio-technical change comes about.
There are three main objectives of the book. The first is to use orig-
inal empirical studies of urban infrastructure change processes in
European cities, and to show these to be at the heart of crucial, ongo-
ing debates over urban futures. The second is to straddle and inter-
face engagement between the latest theoretical advances and empirical
investigation of urban planning practice and socio-technical engineer-
ing of systems and flows, forging new reflections and perspectives
across distinctive worlds of infrastructure. The third is to open out our
understanding of urban infrastructure by tracking different rationales,
materials and flows through the urban arena as they are employed to
connect to, disconnect from, and contest wider urban political projects.
In so doing, it contributes to reflections around the role of urban infra-
structure and its multitude of actors in enacting more desirable, pro-
gressive and collective urban futures.
I begin in Chapter 1 by setting out a conceptual framework for
exploring the politics of urban infrastructure which draws on a vari-
ety of resources from across urban studies and science and technology
studies (STS). By engaging with, and bringing together, debates around
sustainability transition processes, urban materialities and ecological
urbanisms, I develop an overarching perspective on the material politics
of urban socio-technical change which situates theoretically the stories
of urban infrastructure of the following chapters.
Chapters 2–6 each start from and focus on a distinct pretext and
process of change (suburban planning, low carbon, energy transition,
viii
Preface
eco-city integration, smart urbanism) as implemented in Stockholm and

Paris, two European cities which have been at the forefront of sustain-
able urban development and where debates over the orientations and
outcomes of this development have been intense. This is not a compar-
ative study of the two cities, and the aim is not to provide a compre-
hensive overview of each city, but to delve into a handful of illustrative
examples of how infrastructure is implicated in realizing more sustain-
able urban futures. They are close to what Braun (2014, p. 52) calls
‘vignettes’ which “resist being read in totalizing terms as examples of an
overarching ‘plan’ of government, but nevertheless reveal in their details
particular ways in which urban life is ‘managed’ or ‘administered’…”.
These vignettes are thus not presented as emblematic of urban sustaina-
bility in practice but in order to explore and expose a material political
process in which particular socio-technical configurations, flows, sites
and visions are negotiated and disputed in specific urban contexts. As
mentioned above, the idea is that foregrounding the politics of infra-
structure can shed light on how urban socio-technical change takes
place. The research on which the chapters are based has been conducted
over a number of years across different projects. In each case, qualitative
methods were privileged involving in-depth semi-structured interviews
with stakeholders, site visits and participant observation, and analysis
of secondary material, reports and documentation. While the research
was done at different times and the focus and results are therefore nec-
essarily distinct and uneven, there was always a particular emphasis on
engaging a socio-technical methodology by trying to understand the
technical functioning and operations of infrastructure configurations,
the activities they support, as well as seeking out different viewpoints
and controversies concerning the wider social significance and political
implications of these configurations.
Chapter 2 focuses on water infrastructure systems which are cru-
cially important in extending and reworking socionatural suburban
spaces. These systems have always either accompanied and supported
or preceded and stimulated urban growth. Yet, paradoxically, the actual
ways and processes of making and remaking suburban infrastructure
configurations are largely ignored. Mixing insights from socio-technical
Preface
ix
studies and infrastructure situations and experiences in the South, the

chapter reflects on infrastructure planning and engagement as an ongo-
ing provisional socio-technical achievement in the Stockholm archipel-
ago area where particular hybrid configurations of water infrastructure
are at the heart of changing forms, modalities, and outcomes of local
development and modes of residence.
Chapter 3 is focused on the material politics of low carbon agendas
in Stockholm, the first Green Capital of Europe. There has been signif-
icant debate over proposed visions for Stockholm’s future ‘green’ devel-
opment. This debate was captured by the question of whether the city
was concretely aiming to be both or either ‘fossil fuel free’ by 2050 and/
or ‘world class’ in 2030, and by the different means and resources which
were attributed to working concretely and materially towards these
objectives. The chapter tracks ongoing struggles over urban energy–cli-
mate issues through a number of material settings of transition around
policy trajectories, resources for environmental work, district heating
infrastructure and mobility politics. This highlights how socio-techni-
cal change is understood, negotiated, experienced and practiced through
the multiple arrangements and mobilisations of urban materiality by
particular interests and groups.
Chapter 4 is an attempt to make sense of the nature, modalities,
outcomes and possibilities of urban energy transition in Paris. This
transition process is examined in the context of a variety of equally
meaningful stakes and strategic objectives around decarbonisation,
municipal control of infrastructure and the continuing role of nuclear
power. Each of these concerns emerges through debates and knowledge
controversies around the make-up, functioning and use of particular
objects or materials including resources, pipes, contracts, reports and
radiators. This captures a processual notion of transition as characterized
by work and activities at different sites and levels, and as constituted by
the effectivity of material circulations, flows and stabilities which reveal
and highlight key issues and contentions, become open to claims and
appropriations, and defy, resist and remain unruly.
Chapter 5 explores the complex and contested processes and prac-
tices involved in rebundling infrastructure systems as part of ecological
x
Preface
urbanism objectives in Stockholm. Focusing on the well-known eco-dis-

trict of Hammarby Sjöstad, I trace some of the important disjunctures
between vision, discourse, practice and material politics in and around
the reconfiguring and integration of energy, waste and water systems,
within the context of wider debates and tensions over future urban
planning in the city. Across model and conception, limits and devia-
tions in practice, and evaluation and transfer, eco-city integration and
circularity is exposed as a struggle to contain and control systems, flows
and engagements which are often intractable.
Chapter 6 examines the nature and implications of urban enhance-
ment propounded by recent smart urban initiatives. Using a short ana-
lytical vignette of the reconfiguration of energy system flows in a district
level smart grid project near Paris, it reflects on the implications of
smart logics and what these may say about the temporalities of urban
planning, the boundaries and scales of urban projects and experiments,
and the prospects of devolving agency and control of urban systems and
flows to technology.
Finally, a short conclusion offers summary reflections on the argu-
ments developed across the chapters, around why infrastructure mat-
ters, how infrastructure comes to matter and what can be gained from
pursuing explorations of urban infrastructure futures. It tenders some
thoughts on future concerns and priorities for research and practice in
this area.
Marne-la-Vallée, France Jonathan Rutherford
References
Barry, Andrew. 2013. Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline. Chichester:
Wiley.
Braun, Bruce. 2014. A New Urban Dispositif? Governing Life in an Age of
Climate Change. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32:
49–64.
Carse, Ashley. 2012. Nature as Infrastructure: Making and Managing the
Panama Canal Watershed. Social Studies of Science 42 (4): 539–563.
Preface
xi
Graham, Stephen, and Colin McFarlane (eds.). 2015. Infrastructural Lives:

Urban Infrastructure in Context. Abingdon: Routledge.
Harvey, Penny, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuro Morita (eds.). 2017.
Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion. Abingdon: Routledge.
Jackson, Steven, Paul Edwards, Geoffrey Bowker, and Cory Knobel. 2007.
Understanding Infrastructure: History, Heuristics, and Cyberinfrastructure
Policy. First Monday 12 (6), June 2007, https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.
php/fm/article/view/1904/1786.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil.
London: Verso.
Acknowledgements
This book is the outcome of work and thinking which has developed
over many years. A number of people have helped me with my research
during that time, through shared projects and collaborations, by offer-
ing constructive feedback or friendly advice, and in various conversa-
tions and exchanges. I am very grateful to all and I acknowledge their
contribution in helping to shape the best parts of what follows. Any
shortcomings are of course strictly my own responsibility.
First, Olivier Coutard has been a permanent source of inspiration,
unwavering support and good advice across many projects, publica-
tions and wide-ranging discussions. Other colleagues at LATTS (Ecole
des Ponts ParisTech and Université Paris Est) have made the cen-
tre a stimulating and collegial environment for urban socio-technical
research. I have benefited enormously in particular from the presence
and encouragement of Sylvy Jaglin, Ludovic Halbert, Eric Verdeil (now
at Sciences Po), Gilles Jeannot, Valérie November, Valérie Bocquillion
and, more recently, Mustafa Dikeç and Martine Drozdz. LATTS has
also been lucky to have an incredible cohort of dynamic young Ph.D.
and postdoctoral researchers over the years working on infrastruc-
ture, energy and urban issues in a variety of contexts around the world
xiii
xiv
Acknowledgements
including Anastasia Touati, Lise Desvallées, Catalina Duque-Gomez,

Daniel Florentin, Pauline Gabillet, Sylvère Angot, Francesca Pilo,
Rémi Curien, Antoine Guironnet, Félix Adisson, Aida Nciri, Morgan
Mouton, Hélène Subrémon, Thomas Blanchet.
Simon Marvin has been a steadfast ally and inspiring company
through a number of adventures in urban technology, most recently in
arranging a visiting post at Sheffield’s Urban Institute. Tim Moss, Steve
Graham, Harriet Bulkeley, Simon Guy, Andy Karvonen and Jochen
Monstadt have been consistently supportive over the years as well as a
source of great work. I have also had stimulating and encouraging con-
versations and discussions with Andrés Luque-Ayala, Jonathan Silver,
Aidan While, Harald Rohracher, Pauline McGuirk, Roger Keil, Pierre
Filion, Janette Webb, Mike Hodson, Sabine Barles, Cyria Emelianoff,
Stefan Bouzarovski and Will Eadson among many others. I worked
with Frédérique Boucher-Hedenström on the study which forms the
basis of Chapter 2.
I thank Rachael Ballard and Joanna O’Neill at Palgrave Macmillan
for their support and great patience through various deadlines.
Finally, and most importantly, Christelle, Eloïse, Anthony and the
rest of my family are just wonderful and I love them all to bits.
Contents
1 Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure 1
2 Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces and

Remaking Socio-Technical Configurations in Outer
Stockholm 45
3 Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon

Transformation in the Green Capital of Europe 71
4 Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy

Transition in Paris 99
5 Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures:

Permeability and Politics of the Closed Loop
of Hammarby Sjöstad 123
6 Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban Systems:

Reflections on Ordering and Disordering the City 157
xv
xvi
Contents
7 Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures 173
Index 189
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Settlements along the coast in Norrtälje 54

Fig. 2.2 Summerhouse residence in Norrtälje 55
Fig. 2.3 Off-grid home in Norrtälje with well and septic tank 58
Fig. 2.4 ‘Community’ connection to municipal networks
(Source Redrawn from Norrtälje kommun, n.d., p. 5) 59
Fig. 3.1 The trajectory to ‘fossil fuel free’ (Source Based on City
of Stockholm [2010c, p. 9]) 79
Fig. 3.2 The rising price of district heating in Stockholm,
2000–2011 (Source Extracted by the author from Nils
Holgersson reports, 2000–2011 [Nils Holgersson gruppen,
n.d.]) 83
Fig. 5.1 Hammarby Sjöstad 128
Fig. 5.2 Infrastructure integration in miniature at Hammarby
Sjöstad, 2007 131
Fig. 5.3 Loop closing and systems integration: the Hammarby
model (final iteration) (Source Lena Wettrén, Bumling AB) 132
Fig. 5.4 Organic waste chute in Hammarby Sjöstad 139
Fig. 5.5 Waste inlets in a Hammarby Sjöstad courtyard
(visible from apartment buildings) 142
Fig. 5.6 Waterfront apartment buildings, Hammarby Sjöstad 148
xvii
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Percentage of population connected to centralized water

and wastewater systems in Stockholm county
municipalities 53
Table 3.1 Changes to the text of Stockholm’s Action Plan
for Climate and Energy 85
Table 5.1 Aims and operational goals set by the city in 1996
for the Hammarby Sjöstad project 130
Table 5.2 ‘Green technologies’ deployed or to be deployed within
Hammarby Sjöstad 134
xix
1
Introduction: Redeploying Urban
Infrastructure
Mirages and Materialisations
Frustration or fascination? Whenever we talk about transformative
change or transition, in its various guises and for distinctive reasons,
it is quite easy to be underwhelmed by what is actually happening on
the ground. While it is widely argued that the urban is a vital nexus for
implementing transitions to sustainability, there only ever appear to be
modest or piecemeal shifts toward sustainable cities (however defined)
and few concrete results. Dave Eggers captures both the persistent allure
of the vision and the constant dissatisfaction at the level of progress in
his novel A Hologram for the King, where an IT consultant waits around
to pitch for a technology contract for a new city under painstakingly
slow construction in the Gulf:
Alan saw no sign of a city-to-be.

‘Whatever it is, it’s there’, Youssef said, pointing in front of them.
The road was new, but it cut through absolutely nothing. They drove
a mile before they arrived at a modest gate, a pair of stone arches over
the road, a great dome atop it all. It was as if someone had built a road
through unrepentant desert, and then erected a gate somewhere in the
© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. Rutherford, Redeploying Urban Infrastructure,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_1
2
J. Rutherford
middle, to imply the end of one thing and the beginning of another. It
was hopeful but unconvincing. (Eggers 2012, p. 40)
I have also long been unconvinced and discouraged at the disconnect

between the major stakes at hand and the apparent lack of material or
tangible progress on the ground, not in building brand new tabula rasa
settlements but in reworking existing cities. There is, of course, no end
of small urban projects and experiments claiming to offer responses to
big fundamental issues, but many of these seem to be only token initi-
atives with limited potential for leading on to something more mean-
ingful. Clearly, this is an inescapable normative question about the
forms, the degrees and the sources of required change and desirable
futures that we all have in mind. We can agree on the one hand about
the scale of response that is needed to confront the social and ecolog-
ical issues of the times, while disagreeing or holding different views of
where, how and by whom such a response might be constituted and
built up. Eggers’ protagonist steadily abandons his preconceived ideas
and expectations of the new city in the desert as he waits for the King
to turn up to make the contract decision. Similarly, I suspect that my
frustration derives, at least in part and for several reasons, from think-
ing overly in terms of immediate and rigid scales, linear trajectories
and grand results, which leads to standing outside of the processes
being studied and endeavouring to understand only inertias, blockages
and obstacles—what and who is preventing a preconceived notion of
change from happening. I have come to recognize that becoming more
open to the multiplicity and incrementality of initiatives in the making,
their emergent processes and outcomes, and continuous reshaping of
relations and associations may help to perceive possibilities in even the
most localized and contingent encounter.
This is a book about urban futures in the making, as seen through the
lens of urban infrastructure. Over the past ten years or so, I have studied
the systems, networks and components of infrastructures as they have
developed, been maintained, modified and put to work in the context of
north European cities. These cities have been facing a set of challenges
(inequalities, austerity, ecological crisis, political legitimacy…) which
broadly call into question the existing capacities of authorities to ensure
1 Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure
3
urban reproduction. Infrastructure offers a pertinent window through

which to view how urban actors respond to these challenges, because it
constitutes the socio-technical1 arrangements through which urban life
and urban functions take place. While often longstanding and gener-
ally quite stable, even to the point of invisibility, these arrangements are
being recast (and thus made visible again) in various strategic ways as
actors seek to address challenges and to govern and shape infrastructures
to guarantee future urbanity. I suggest that exploring shifting socio-
technical arrangements of urban infrastructure necessitates holding
together two stances. The first is that urban change must be seen as
inherently political (there is no simple and singular way to address chal-
lenges and ensure urban futures), and infrastructure constitutes a key
political site through which urban futures are negotiated and forged. In
other words, given the stakes at hand, we need to be concerned with
how struggles over infrastructure come to manifest/materialize diverse,
often discordant, views of sustainable urban transitions. At the same
time, there is likely to be only so much that can be done in organizing
and governing urban futures, until we account for and take into account
the vitality of materials, flows and entities of infrastructures in constitut-
ing emerging socio-technical change. This means uncovering the often
hidden and unnoticed material processes of urban functioning, paying
attention to small scale and situated yet dynamic interactions between
the pipes, paper and people of infrastructure arrangements which may
be constitutive of and effective in urban transitions. I argue that this
dual stance can account for urban vitality in/of socio-technical change
processes and contribute to exploring the material politics of always
emerging, potentially transformative, urban futures.
The focus here is on shifts or reconfigurations in infrastruc-
ture which are at once envisioned, made and contested to bring
1I understand socio-technical as a move beyond an artificial distinction between social and techni-
cal aspects, components and actors of systemic change processes and thus to speak constantly and
symmetrically across the two to underscore their always already intertwined and co-evolutionary
formation. This ‘seamless web’ allows analysis of relations between actors, their interests, ration-
alities and purposes, and to take seriously the make-up and materiality of the technologies and
instruments deployed, in a perspective which stresses that these are mutually (and indissociably)
shaping of potentials and limits.
4
J. Rutherford
about various ‘sustainable’ urban futures. Such a focus reminds us

or brings to bear how infrastructure circulates resources which pro-
vide many of the most basic necessities of life (water, heat, electric-
ity…), and yet the current ways in which this circulation is done
are held to be often profoundly unsustainable on different levels. There
is thus a political ecology to infrastructure as diverse views emerge and
conflict of how ‘best’ to configure resource flows and technical systems
to allow for consuming nature in the city. While urban transitions/
futures are captured by a variety of terms or epithets which announce
relatively undisputed change, the chapters here study infrastructure
struggles emerging respectively in the name of suburban development,
low carbon, energy transition, eco-urbanism and smart which demon-
strate in each case contingent and plural interpretations and enact-
ments. In each chapter, a series of otherwise quite prosaic material
encounters in particular urban environments becomes a strategic arena
for contests over how, why and for whom city-making processes and
practices (are put to) work. These encounters produce effects and con-
sequences well beyond the immediate technical constitution and func-
tioning of infrastructure. It is indeed arguably because infrastructures
are (considered as) usually quite stable, obdurate systems that even small
adjustments and shifts in their constitution both may become immedi-
ately visible and can be an index of potentially substantive wider societal
changes.
Exploring the material struggles and encounters of the city in flux
produces an understanding of the shifting interplay between technol-
ogy, ecology and politics, and a sense that the direction and substance
of urban futures is very much in play, up for grabs and thus tangible and
shapeable. This may be a sizeable ambition for a study that remains in
so many ways a partial take on our evolving socio-technical world, yet
the aspiration also allows us to give the socio-technical world its full
chance, to be open to the prospect of meaningful futures becoming pres-
ent in particular infrastructure arrangements, rather than accepting fore-
closure according to necessarily arbitrary criteria. Indeed, the main task
of infrastructure is to present the future. It exists to connect people and
things over distance and time, to convey useful, even essential, fluids and
resources to points and places where they will be consumed. Its telescopic
5
configuration at once maintains local material relations and extends these

across space, bringing closer together and rendering immediate and live
that which would otherwise be far away, intangible and/or forever forth-
coming. Exploring the material politics of infrastructure allows us to
make sense of relational worlds and collective life always in the making.
Urban—Infrastructure
In this introductory chapter, I make the case for mobilizing urban infra-
structure as a key site to view always emerging reconfiguration processes
of urban socio-technical change. The following chapters then explore
particular instances of such processes in which infrastructure constitutes
a material and discursive arena in which various pathways and guises of
urban futures are laid out, enacted and contested/struggled with or over.
This chapter locates and situates this perspective within existing debates
and literatures to develop a conceptual understanding of infrastruc-
ture and the politics of urban socio-technical futures. I suggest that this
demands critical engagement with notions of and debates around tran-
sitions, materialities and the politics of eco-urbanisms, and this is the
focus in the second half of this chapter. First, however, it makes sense to
deal with two preceding questions which frame the wider concerns of
the study: namely, in exploring the forms, modalities and outcomes of
potentially transformative socio-technical change, why an urban focus,
and, more specifically, why urban infrastructure?
Urban Processes of Transformative Change
Cities are increasingly seen to have a central ‘role’ in contributing to

major systemic societal changes.2 This is all the more so given the lack
2Recent reports and publications on various topics from international organizations such as the
World Bank, the OECD and the European Commission have highlighted this point, while The
Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde and other media outlets either have ‘cities’ pages or run
frequent reports on urban issues.
6
J. Rutherford
of movement and action in some areas on national and international

scales. Global urban population growth, the increasing dependence of
increasingly urbanized societies on energy and other resources (requir-
ing ever more complex and long-distance logistics chains of supply),
and the policy responsibility and mandate which has been allocated to,
or taken up by, local and urban authorities in many countries for devel-
oping local responses to sustainability issues mean that a specific urban
focus is highly relevant (see McCormick et al. 2013, for a number of
case studies and perspectives on urban sustainable transformation).
From this starting point, however, perspectives begin to diverge on how
and why the urban matters.
Cities are still often predominantly viewed as targets for or instru-
ments through which some national or sectoral policy objectives or stra-
tegic goals can be met. Whether it is, for example, the ‘territorialisation’
of environmental policy or ‘energy transition’ in France, the generic
design of smart city ‘solutions’ by global IT corporates, or how urban
energy production and consumption challenges are subsumed by major
international organizations into the wider issues of climate change,
‘green growth’, or both combined (OECD 2010; World Bank 2010a;
UN-HABITAT 2011; Kamal-Chaoui and Robert 2009; Hammer et al.
2011), there is a top-down conception and reification of cities as being
homogeneous and often largely passive receptacles or agents, which can
be simply given an impulse along a prescribed pathway. In this instru-
mentalized view, urban contexts and their wealth of stakeholders are
somehow outside of defining and addressing the processes in question.
Elsewhere, the traditional assets and characteristics of cities—
agglomeration, proximity, density, economies of scale, quality of
life—are seen as qualities to be built on in the production of urban sus-
tainability/futures with regard to, for example, infrastructure and service
provision, promotion and dissemination of innovation, or manage-
ment of waste and pollution (see, for example, Newman et al. 2009).
Urban authorities and actors frequently have a range of responsibilities
and mandates for extending and improving environmental actions and
performances in their own building stock and municipal practices, in
public service provision, in planning and transport policy, and in build-
ing and land use regulation (Bulkeley and Betsill 2003). So local and
7
urban actors (in a wide sense) always have at least some degree of agency
and capacity to shape, orient and effect locally specific interventions and
change within broader situations and processes (Krueger and Agyeman
2005).
In other work, the potential for ‘disruptive socio-technical change’
emerging from urban sites and arenas is quite high (McCormick et al.
2013; Rohracher and Späth 2014). This is the case when cities come
together to form quite powerful collective lobbies, as shown, for exam-
ple, by the thousand or more European cities which are pushing for
more stringent energy efficiency and renewable energy objectives than
those adopted by the European Commission (Energy Cities 2014). But,
crucially, it is also the case in smaller-scale initiatives and actions within
individual cities and communities, where a variety of ‘experiments’, pro-
jects and mobilizations driven by different groups and interests may well
have as much meaning and transformative potential. Recent research
focusing on collaboration and learning through the development of
‘urban laboratories’ is one example of this (see, for example, Nevens
et al. 2013; Karvonen and van Heur 2014).
There is recognition then that the forms and degrees of change
now necessary require more transformative shifts than piecemeal local
actions and policies. At the same time, the range and diversity of sites,
arenas and coalitions of possible urban transformation have multiplied,
marking ‘the realization that what we call “the urban” is a complex,
multiscale and multidimensional process where the general and specific
aspects of the human condition meet’ (Keil 2003, p. 725). This rela-
tional urban perspective, sensitive to a notion of cities as porous ‘meet-
ing places’ with particular intersections of social and technical relations
which are all ‘constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen
to define for that moment as the place itself ’ (Massey 1994, p. 154),
has implications for our ways of conceptualizing, studying and know-
ing possible transformative change. The array of actors and interests
involved, but also, crucially, both the variety of tools and ways of work-
ing that they use, and the active presence of a host of materials, entities,
plants, animals, technologies and other ‘non-humans’ (which comprise
the ‘majority’ of urban worlds), alter the questions we pose and our
frames of analysis. In short, cities can be seen as socio-technical arenas
8
J. Rutherford
of interaction, which are reducible neither to the sum of all flows cir-
culating within/through them, nor to a notion of places ‘containing’
pre-existing components such as buildings or infrastructure. They are
always produced through a series of processes, events, performances and
practices: ‘ongoing stories’ (Massey 2005, p. 131) involving all kinds
of visible and less visible actors performing a multitude of constantly
changing lead roles and bit parts (Latour and Hermant 1998; Amin and
Thrift 2002).
In this context, Whitehead (2003, p. 1186) observes how urban
sustainability becomes ‘as much a political vision or social ideal –
incorporating its own moral geography and forms of ecological praxis –
as it is a tangible object, or location on a map’. Similarly, Braun (2005,
p. 640) has argued for ‘urban sustainability [to] be seen in terms of
urbanization processes, and as fundamentally a political rather than a
technical or design problem’. This involves recognizing that consti-
tuting urban futures is inherently founded on competing ideologies,
imaginaries and practices of the urban; it mobilizes organizations and
arrangements of flows, networks and distributions that are put to work
for particular interests and purposes; and it produces uneven outcomes
through which different social groups and spaces are affected in diverse
ways (see Heynen et al. 2006b). Uncovering and understanding how
sustainability becomes a political process in different urban arenas is
now a key task for analysis of urban transitions. Indeed, when we see,
for example, organizations as diverse as Greenpeace, the International
Energy Agency, the Transitions Towns movement, GDF Suez and the
Covenant of Mayors all propounding a shift to local energy and climate
responses (Greenpeace 2005; International Energy Agency 2009; GDF
Suez 2010; Covenant of Mayors, n.d.), it becomes essential to unpack
these different interests, to understand how they can be apparently
brought together around a particular material goal or site, and whether,
why and for whom they are, in fact, working in distinct ways.
These competing views and actions always frame, and indeed help to
forge, a variety of possible pathways to sustainable/future urban config-
urations (Guy and Marvin 1999; White and Wilbert 2009; Cook and
Swyngedouw 2012). It is this ongoing and contested process of mak-
ing sustainabilities/futures that needs to be analysed. I argue in this
9
book that urban infrastructure is a key site through which this can
be done. In order to gain a firmer grasp of this contested process and
how the urban becomes constitutive of it, the following chapters ana-
lyse a number of illustrative urban interventions where broader socio-
technical futures are being negotiated and played out around or through
infrastructure.
Infrastructure Entanglements
Infrastructure is understood here as a process rather than any fixed

object. This perspective foregrounds the allusiveness, uncertainty and
multidimensional nature of infrastructure, taking in ‘the proliferation
of discourses and material realisations’ (Chatzis 2017, p. 22) through
which it is (provisionally) achieved. As Star and other STS (science and
technology studies) scholars have recognized, it is highly embedded, his-
torically constituted over time and has a stable and regular quality that
means it often fades into the background of everyday life (Star 1999;
Edwards 2002; Thrift 2005; Hommels 2005), thus demanding ‘infra-
structural inversion’ (Bowker 1994) to make its finer processes and
operations visible. Yet at the same time it is dynamic, lively and always
shifting, never still, constantly folding in new alliances and unfurling
new connections. STS flavoured analysis of infrastructures varies, like
other theories of social change, depending on where one places the
cursor between continuity, stability, inertia, path dependency, lock-in,
obduracy, etc., on the one hand or transformation, transition, innova-
tion, etc., on the other hand. There is also a related set of distinctions
across a spectrum moving from technological determinism at one end
to forms of social constructivism at the other, with scholars emphasiz-
ing or privileging the effects of ‘harder’ or ‘softer’ actors and relations
in the constitution of socio-technical configurations and change. Yet, it
is contingent interaction between or across these notions, and indeed
their mutual constitution, both in individual studies and collectively in
transdisciplinary infrastructure studies, that account for the continuing
fertility of STS approaches (e.g. Bijker and Pinch 2012). As Edwards
et al. (2009, p. 365) suggest: ‘Infrastructure today seems both an
10
J. Rutherford
all-encompassing solution and an omnipresent problem, indispensable

yet unsatisfactory, always already there yet always an unfinished work in
progress’. Rather than offering a definition of the ‘object’ under investi-
gation then, given that this is often a key element of controversy, study-
ing infrastructure necessitates instead asking ‘when is an infrastructure?’
(Star and Ruhleder 1996), or in other words being clear about how it
becomes a tool of action when it connects to a particular purpose. As
Larkin (2013, p. 330) observes, ‘Given the ever-proliferating networks
that can be mobilized to understand infrastructures, we are reminded
that discussing an infrastructure is a categorical act. It is a moment of
tearing into those heterogeneous networks to define which aspect of
which network is to be discussed and which parts will be ignored. It
recognizes that infrastructures operate on differing levels simultaneously,
generating multiple forms of address, and that any particular set of
intellectual questions will have to select which of these levels to exam-
ine. Infrastructures are not, in any positivist sense, simply “out there”’.
In other words, it is important to be clear about what is under investi-
gation, what aspects of infrastructures are in focus or foregrounded and
what is backgrounded or outside the scope of a study, and what is being
shown through infrastructure.
There are therefore many ‘ways in’ to studying infrastructure captured
in many distinctive and diverse literatures, and the very ontology of
infrastructure, as notion, object and process, is inherently fluid and het-
erogeneous. Indeed, these definitional questions—what infrastructure
constitutes or allows and what claims are made for it—become part of
any study of infrastructure. Just as infrastructures can be said to oper-
ate a number of functions simultaneously, circulating, connecting up
or enabling a multitude of things to happen,3 so scholars can explore
wide-ranging interests through analysis of infrastructures. It matters
crucially therefore what this analysis is trying to say or to tell us. Not
least because the infrastructures in focus can be substantially different
3This understanding reflects the perspectives and practices of ‘heterogeneous engineering’ on the
ground where those ‘doing’ infrastructure are simultaneously laying and maintaining material sys-
tems and components and deploying and working organizational arrangements, values, imaginar-
ies, etc. (Law 1987).
11
depending on the research interest being explored: in one study, it may

well be a system of water pipes, while in others the (no less) material
focus may be the administrative or bureaucratic techniques used to
govern a water system: ‘pipes turn out to be documents’ (Larkin 2013,
p. 335; see Chapter 2).
A core driving question in developing my conceptual and empiri-
cal approach has been to seek to understand more precisely how urban
infrastructure matters. Infrastructure is a site of intervention which pres-
ently materializes the future socio-technical arrangements through which
possibilities of urban life and functioning are being cultivated. It is stud-
ied here as an ongoing material political process through which urban
futures are conceived, constituted and contested. My approach thus
builds on the particularity of urban infrastructure which lies, I think
and as I show over the following chapters, at the intersection between
its density and complexity of (relationally constituted) material compo-
nents and systems which produce and reproduce many aspects of city
life, and its pivotal political potential through which some of the key
debates and contests about the organization and space of the city can be
played out. The city today is where materiality (as a figure of human–
environment relations) primarily becomes political. As Amin and Thrift
have recently argued, it is in the machinic combination and confronta-
tion of people, buildings, visions and infrastructures that we find a city,
creating essential urban networks and systems that order, circulate and
manipulate life and its possibilities: ‘It is the coming together of over-
lapping sociotechnical systems that gives cities their world-making
power’ (Amin and Thrift 2017, p. 2). No longer just the underpinnings
or medium of other aspects and functions of cities, infrastructure can
now be seen as ‘the urban structure itself – the very parameters of global
urbanism’ (Easterling 2014, p. 12), the sinews of planetary urbanization
(Brenner 2014), actively formative in its replicative formulas, standards
and models of the potentials of urban lives, settlements and futures. But
urban infrastructure also summons a socio-technical arrangement of dif-
ferent participants and entities through which emerging alternative col-
lectives/futures may be constituted, cultivated and contested.
There has long been an exciting undercurrent of research on cit-
ies and infrastructure cutting across various epistemic communities
12
J. Rutherford
(urban history, large technical systems, urban planning) (see, e.g., Tarr
and Dupuy 1988; Hughes 1983; Melosi 2000; for a review see Coutard
and Rutherford 2016a). But work on urban infrastructure has prolif-
erated over the last two decades, sparked to a large extent by Graham
and Marvin’s (2001) Splintering Urbanism. The key shift operated by
Splintering Urbanism was to re-place infrastructure networks at the heart
of the social and political make-up of cities worldwide and to show crit-
ically how they become trenchant carriers and mediators of political and
economic power and interests which reinforce existing social inequal-
ities and produce new forms of disparity. Re-placing infrastructures at
the core of critical urban research agendas inspired more scholars to seek
out the vital processes and politics of the cables, wires, pipes and roads
undergirding urban development. Their contribution to cities, their
urban qualities, have thus been reinterrogated in relation to both very
different infrastructure experiences in the majority urban world in the
South (see Chapter 2), and global environmental turbulence through
which the intensive spatial and temporal connections of urban areas and
lives to multiple elsewheres beyond the urban here and now are being
made ever clearer, and which are revealing ‘new’ lively components and
processes of infrastructure assemblages that were not previously known
or studied (Luke 2003; Amin and Thrift 2017). Sustained and con-
stantly reworked through zestful discussion between STS and urban
studies (Monstadt 2009), urban infrastructure has been productively
analysed as a loose, interdependent arrangement of different systems
and networks of provision, service configurations, rules and norms,
finance, material and resource flows, and individual and social practices
and experiences. This analysis translates what appear to be on the sur-
face quite mundane and passive urban objects into captivating media-
tors of all kinds of relations, flows, symbolisms, powers and politics. It
thus demands engagement with its material forms, technical workings
and reconfigured territorialities through which it becomes a vibrant
urban ingredient in a dynamic, contingent and contested arrangement
of things, processes and relations. This emergent and processual notion
of infrastructure can be relevant across different urbanizing contexts,
and help to unpack the specificities of infrastructural change in each. In
our recent edited collection Beyond the Networked City, Olivier Coutard
13
and I (2016b) discuss in more detail the trajectories and deviations

provoked by these ‘new infrastructure territorialities’ and their conse-
quences for urban research and practice.
This volume ties together and offers a transversal analysis of my own
recent research into urban infrastructure politics in European cities. The
title ‘Redeploying urban infrastructure’ tries to capture both the strate-
gic reworking of infrastructure currently being done in practice in these
cities as a response to various needs and drivers (necessitating perhaps
new tactics in laying, knowing, experiencing infrastructure), and my
own mobilization of infrastructure as a theoretical tool offering a per-
tinent perspective on processes of urban change. Redeploying is also
taken in its etymological sense as an unfolding, a gradual uneven process
through which infrastructure evolves in the interaction between pur-
poseful (tactical) design and by being grown or nurtured (Edwards et al.
2009, p. 369). This sets up an understanding of urban socio-technical
change as ‘reconfiguration’ through which embedded socio-technical
systems come under pressure to change and compose a new formation
(Summerton 1994; Moss 2014). Again, however, it is the processes
through which any reconfiguration emerges which are the focus of study
rather than the more or less stable formations which result.
In keeping with the developing concern for the politics of infra-
structure in and beyond urban studies, a constant in my research is
that socio-technical systems of energy, water and information are
approached through the tensions and contests they inherently generate.
Infrastructures are conceptualized relationally as, and empirically shown
to be, lively meeting points for diverse and divergent interests and views
of how a city’s essential functional systems are, can be, and should be
provided, managed, maintained and used. These ‘bring us below the
surface level of goals and implementation, into the murky depths of
tension, failure, and compromise where conflicting purposes and politi-
cal differences meet technical details’ (Edwards et al. 2009, p. 366). This
is less a method of infrastructural inversion, foregrounding background
components and processes, than a particular stance or posture which
suggests that infrastructure is always remarkable and to the fore through
the politics it both shapes and is shaped by (McFarlane and Rutherford
2008). Tensions are indeed recognized as ‘one of the chief sources of
14
J. Rutherford
infrastructural change, growth, and learning over time’ (Jackson et al.

2007), and thus offer a useful heuristic for exploring socio-technical
change. But this political constitution of infrastructure processes is
encountered in quite differing or distinct ways, forms, intensities or
degrees. ‘What is significant politically’ or constitutes political activity
is distributed through the city and is not restricted to the realm of only
municipal or state policymakers (Magnusson 2011, p. 169). It resides in
the practices and performances of everyday urban infrastructural lives
(e.g. Graham and McFarlane 2015) as well as in highly visible forms
of remonstration, contestation and disorder (e.g. Kallianos 2018). In
the following chapters, there are sometimes openly hostile placards and
protests in the street, just as in other instances it is more about subtler
contests or other ways of doing. We thus move between hot and cool
politics, from organized dissent to individuals refusing or doing differ-
ently (cf. Edwards et al. 2009, p. 372). More generally across the chap-
ters, I suggest that political infrastructures are encountered particularly
as/through active material components and objects which become effec-
tive in various ways, enabling and constraining actions and possibilities.
This points to how struggles with infrastructure always constitute ‘a pol-
itics of small interventions with large effects’ (Amin and Thrift 2017,
p. 6; Furlong 2011). The approach adopted here thus does not so much
seek causal factors in system development as explore how shifting rela-
tions between components reveal and constitute the (shifting) mean-
ing and ‘substance’ of infrastructure configurations (Star and Ruhleder
1996, p. 113).
Urban Infrastructure Matters: Thinking

Through Transitions, Materialities
and Eco-Urban Politics
In focusing on urban infrastructure as a lens to view emerging pro-
cesses of urban socio-technical change, I have sought out wide-ranging
conceptual resources from the increasingly fertile borderlands between
urban studies and STS. In the remainder of the chapter I continue
to work through a conceptual perspective on infrastructure and the
15
politics of urban socio-technical futures by discussing and engaging in

more detail with three stimulating areas of scholarship around (socio-
technical) sustainability transition processes, urban materialities, and
the politics of eco-urbanisms/techno-natures. These are rich debates
around core notions of relevance here: around emergent transforma-
tions to sustainable configurations, about the active contribution of
materials and technologies in transformations which rejig or adjust our
view of human-environment relations, and about the wider politics of
urban ecological change/futures. Taken together, they forge a conceptu-
al-methodological stance or bearing which foregrounds the processual,
relational and material political constitution of urban transformation. I
am neither arguing that these comprise the sole, exhaustive resources to
inform work on urban infrastructure, nor aiming to extensively cover
and advance on the full realm of knowledge that each of these has pro-
duced over the years. But they have stimulated my thinking and have
oriented the studies presented in the chapters. I advance here a particu-
lar and partial view of these notions and areas, and suggest that taken in
combination some of their elements have much to offer my overarching
interest in contributing to our understanding of the material politics of
urban socio-technical change, i.e. of how urban infrastructure comes to
constitute a political arena within which meaningful future socio-tech-
nical configurations are debated and enacted.
The three conceptual discussions thus serve three purposes. First,
they situate theoretically the empirical material presented in the follow-
ing chapters, grounding the ‘cases’ in existing approaches and linking
‘case’ elements to specific arguments in the literature. Second, through
these three conceptual discussions, there is a gradual building up of a
distinct perspective on the material politics of urban socio-technical
change: approaches to transitions, materialities and eco-urbanisms each
offer resources towards this perspective but it is in the incremental com-
bination of these resources that I situate the wider contribution of the
study as a whole. Third, they relate the infrastructure focus elaborated
above to these core debates to locate the wider significance of studying
urban infrastructure which constantly reverberates through and into
concerns for how human-environment futures are envisaged, theorized
and enacted.
16
J. Rutherford
Sustainability Transitions: Understanding Urban

Socio-Technical Change Processes
The inherently normative connotations of any notion such as sustaina-

bility, which attempts to capture a favourable future trajectory or state,
mean that there tends to be more clarity about desired ‘end points’ or
overall objectives than about either the complicated processes through
which these outcomes might be achieved or the alliances and disso-
nances involved in negotiating pathways. This is demonstrated, for
example, by both the regular discussions of what cities may (or should)
look like in (say) 2050 after their socio-technical systems of resource
flows and service provision have been radically transformed, and the
recognition of persistent implementation gaps between general ambi-
tions and concrete work on the ground.
Recent work around (urban) sustainability transitions can help to
overcome this conceptual limit. This notion captures both the under-
lying rationale of perpetual search for societal (urban) improvement
and the concrete processes of implementing meaningful or transform-
ative change to our living spaces and conditions. A diverse and dispa-
rate literature is emerging, across disciplines and traditions, focusing
attention on the processes through which socio-technical change is
defined, implemented and contested in a search for more sustainable
configurations.
Much of this work analyses the nature, modalities and implications
of some form of ‘transition’, a notion that has become increasingly
diffuse across the social sciences in the last 20 years and an important
nexus for transdisciplinary conversations about socio-technical change.
Building on work in the vein of the ‘Dutch school’ of transitions, this
notion identifies a fundamental, systemic, long-term and multilevel
process of societal, or socio-technical, change (Rotmans et al. 2001). It
is argued that in current times such change is required to address a series
of interconnected, deep-set and recurrent problems, and to shift society
onto more sustainable pathways (Elzen et al. 2004).
Socio-technical transitions research is a well-established field branch-
ing across STS, innovation studies, policy studies and other cognate
areas. This research studies transformations in the major systems of
17
societal functioning and reproduction and how these changes emerge

and build up. Historical studies of socio-technical evolution and change
focusing on a variety of technological artefacts and sectors allowed
gradual conceptual refinement of the ‘multilevel perspective’ (MLP),
a heuristic analytical tool which identifies the interacting sets of logics
and forces present across landscape, regime and niche levels which are
productive of change (see, for example, Geels 2002; Geels and Schot
2007). Socio-technical regimes are stable, embedded and intertwined
assemblages of technologies, infrastructures, regulations, norms and user
practices. They are dynamic and can change through a combination of
pressures from the wider social context (landscape) and from emerg-
ing distinct (or competing) configurations developed in niches. Much
research has focused on the innovation processes of emergence, stabi-
lization and diffusion of new configurations (progressive ‘alignment’
or ‘structuration’ of the components in regime assemblages), and thus
on ‘niche–regime interactions’ supported by landscape pressures. These
‘levels’ are interdependent, in constant flux, and represent analytical
topologies rather than fixed, containerized, or indeed geographical, hier-
archies or scales.
Through study of current ‘sustainability transitions’, ongoing inno-
vation and change processes are analysed in their multidimensional,
dynamic aspects in an attempt to produce better understanding of
potentially radical shifts in (otherwise stable) socio-technical systems
‘which exhibit strong advances regarding environmental performance,
economic prosperity and societal equity’ (Truffer and Coenen 2012,
p. 5; see also Markard et al. 2012). A systems approach is adopted to
understand the dynamics of socio-technical change in the structures
underpinning production and consumption. This has shed great light
on the multilevel interactions through which socio-technical system
configurations evolve, notably processes of stabilization, path depend-
ence and lock-in of established forms and the factors and conditions
facilitating destabilization or the emergence of new forms.
Cross-fertilization and debate across fields and disciplines have led
to conceptual refinements and expansions of transitions frameworks. A
number of scholars have sought to make connections between transi-
tions analysis and other distinctive literatures and approaches to systemic
18
J. Rutherford
societal shifts (Meadowcroft 2009; Monstadt 2009; Bulkeley et al. 2011;

Lawhon and Murphy 2011; Truffer and Coenen 2012; Wolfram and
Frantzeskaki 2015). This work has notably been important in calling
for more analysis of the central role of space, place, scale and politics
in systemic change. Communities, cities and regions have usually been
neglected in transitions studies where a pre-eminent national context has
been seen as crucial for innovation, industry and policymaking. Equally,
participants in transition processes have often been restricted to major
players in these domains leading to limited understanding of the deploy-
ment, shaping and outcomes of particular (other) agencies and power
relations in the formation of systems (Shove and Walker 2007). Truffer
and Coenen (2012, p. 2) summarize refinements and advances as having
helped to deepen understanding of ‘how and under which conditions
new and radically more resource efficient socio-technical configurations
emerge or, alternatively, how existing socio-technical configurations sup-
port or hinder major transformations to sustainability’.
An emerging subfield around ‘urban sustainability transitions’ has
begun to apply transitions thinking to the study and practice of place-
based sustainability policy. Emanating partly out of the normative
policy-oriented agenda of transition management, researchers in this
subfield note the fragmented organization and only incremental adjust-
ments promoted by local responses and call for more holistic, joined-up,
long-term thinking for policy learning and ‘better’ reflexive governance
of the ‘locus of change’ (Roorda et al. 2012; Wittmayer et al. 2014).
While there is a more inclusive participatory approach here involving
a wider set of stakeholders than authorities and businesses, this concep-
tion of urban sustainability transitions still attempts to steer change in
the ‘right’ direction: ‘Cities are given an impulse that translates into a
sustainability movement for the city’ (Wittmayer et al. 2014, p. 9). In
this view, cities become ‘transition managers’ by grouping practition-
ers and decision-makers together to make rational choices about urban
futures and the ‘optimal’ pathway to be taken, although the forms of
participation, inclusion and collaborative planning remain open and
require further investigation.
Other urban transition approaches attempt to feed off, rather than
overcome, uncertainty by seeing it as a resource for the creation and
19
extension of productive spaces of debate and negotiation which might

open up alternatives and possibilities not yet considered. This recog-
nizes that cities are neither merely neutral contexts within which tran-
sition happens to take place nor singular and homogeneous actors
governing the transition process on behalf of all citizens (Hodson and
Marvin 2010a; Rohracher and Späth 2014), but are assembled rela-
tionally through exchanges between a multitude of agents working at
and across scales (Affolderbach and Schulz 2016). Through this, there
is a call to open out processes of transition to a wider framing of the
political contests through which change can come about: ‘Sustainability
initiatives should be analysed not only as instrumental policy problems,
but also as discursive acts in an ongoing political struggle for resources
and as an expression of conflicts of interest in the respective regions’
(Truffer and Coenen 2012, p. 15). Configurations for societal futures,
like technology, are inherently malleable, full of interpretive flexibility,
and can be put to use for very different purposes and interests. This is
what Easterling (2014) calls the art of ‘extrastatecraft’.4 There may well
be material consequences from a wider set of ‘technological interven-
tions’ that are not just restricted to those of the most evident policy and
industrial players in socio-technical systems (Maassen 2012). There has
been some productive work around regime destabilization which takes
another perspective on the MLP focusing on contested material change
rather than novelty and diffusion, and this offers a further entry point
into transition politics (Geels 2014; Meadowcroft 2011; Hess 2013;
Turnheim and Geels 2013). The lessons from this work are that we need
to take into account competing understandings of otherwise apparently
‘stable’ components and systems, and foreground the ways in which
these are mobilized or ‘destabilized’ by particular social groups for spe-
cific aims and finalities (Lawhon and Murphy 2011; Geels 2014).
I suggest that there is room for sustainability transitions approaches
to engage further with meanings and materialities of the urban, and
through this engagement to get to the ‘urban’ constitution of the com-
ponents, work and practices that go into change. Coenen and Truffer
4See below, but it is important to note the infiltration of this kind of thinking into ‘transitions’.
20
J. Rutherford
(2012) (and others) have called for dynamics of ‘territorial embedded-

ness’ to be given more ‘theoretical purchase’ in analysis to take into
account local specificities and contingencies in understanding systemic
change processes (see Bulkeley et al. 2011). Through this urban forma-
tion process, capturing the multiform and uneven processes and out-
comes through which cities and urban spaces are actually being made
and remade, urban transitions might move beyond seeking to promote
shared understandings of problems and potentials, and envisage change
as emerging from disagreement and discrepancy, as the art of negoti-
ating possible urban worlds. This may further contribute to an emerg-
ing critical transitions framework, focused squarely on the underlying
ideologies, meanings and materials of urban transition and (thus) on
questions about who initiates change, for what purpose, through which
elements of the urban fabric and with what consequences.
Urban Materialities: Sustaining Human-Environment

Hybrids
Urban materiality is often used as a shorthand for justifying analysis of

material or physical components of the city, in urban disciplines where
the primacy of social relations in explaining processes is still strong. But
materiality is about more than just the ‘stuff’ of the urban fabric and
environment per se and must be seen as an inherently relational notion.
There are a number of ways in which materiality has been productively
conceptualized and understood which are relevant for discussion here.
It stirs, first, a concern for exploring whether and how the proper-
ties and qualities of objects/artefacts have consequences for how they are
used or put to work within a given network or context. To this end,
a number of useful reflections on the materiality of the city have been
made, offering a fruitful way into thinking through reconfigurations of
the urban in current times (Amin and Thrift 2002; Lees 2002; Latham
and McCormack 2004; Hubbard 2006; Amin and Thrift 2017). This
push to ‘rematerialise’ urban studies has been partly about taking issue
with an increasing proliferation of work on immaterial culture and rep-
resentations influenced by the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1990s, which has
21
had a tendency to overly detach subjectivity, identity and experience

from the tangible, evident artefacts, forms and processes of cities. But
it has also been about a more fundamental recognition that urban stud-
ies scholars have generally ‘under-conceptualized’ urban matter (Latham
et al. 2009). This is not merely a question of returning to empirical
studies of concrete objects and things in cities. Rematerialisation argu-
ments have indeed particularly called for, and highlighted in existing
work (Lees 2002), deeper and more varied articulations of material and
immaterial to get beyond a duality which has sometimes been used ‘as
a shorthand for tensions between empirical and theoretical, applied
and academic, concrete and abstract, reality and representation, quan-
titative and qualitative, objective and subjective, political economy
and cultural studies, and so on’ (Lees 2002, p. 102). Rematerializing
urban studies involves a focus on the relations between people and the
objects encountered in everyday urban life, and the multiplicity of ways
in which these are understood, used, mobilized and experienced as we
negotiate the urban worlds in which we live. Materiality here is viewed
as ‘a spatio-temporal process in which the more tangible, physical stuff
of the city is a lively participant’ (Latham et al. 2009, p. 62, original
emphasis). This does not imply that we can no longer study the (a priori
less visible and less tangible) social meanings and power relations bound
up in or cast into urban form and the built environment, but that we
study these questions differently, ‘as an active and engaged process of
understanding, rather than as a product to be read off retrospectively
from its social and historical context’ by a ‘detached analytical observer’
(Lees 2002, p. 107).
By foregrounding urban materialities which articulate the every-
day engagements of people and artefacts within a strategic or pol-
icy context of discourses and visions of urban futures, we privilege an
approach focused on ‘the practical negotiation of the city’ (Hubbard
2006, p. 96). This does not just account for things in the urban envi-
ronment, but is especially concerned about how things come to matter
to the various interest groups of ‘sustainable’ cities in the making. This
approach focuses on the different ways in which objects, points of con-
tention and policy orientations are made visible, tangible and/or dura-
ble by or for these groups through, for example, practices of ‘ordering,
22
J. Rutherford
circulation and manipulation’ (Latham et al. 2009). Such a perspective

is implicit when Betsill and Bulkeley (2007, p. 452) discuss the need
to reframe global climate change as a local stake, often by linking it to
issues already on the local agenda, i.e. what matters to people, or when
research focused on energy production highlights the combination of
local decisions and situated power plants and networks through which
national policies and national systems pass in connecting consumers
(Wessberg 2002; Akerman and Peltola 2006; Gailing and Moss 2016;
Hawkey et al. 2016). Bakker (2012) and Swyngedouw (2015) show,
for example, how water flows are always simultaneously material and
political. In this approach, what is material (or what matters) is not just
or not so much physical objects per se but more the varying relations
bound up in them in the ways they are used, experienced, performed
and understood in different ways (Braun and Whatmore 2010). As
Latham and McCormack argue, urban materiality must be viewed as
present in the connections between things, technologies, people, bod-
ies, signs, texts, etc., with none of these as inherently more material or
immaterial than the others: ‘we only begin to properly grasp the com-
plex realities of apparently stable objects by taking seriously the fact that
these realities are always held together and animated by processes exces-
sive of form and position’ (Latham and McCormack 2004, p. 705).
The production and reproduction of cities becomes a ‘hybrid’ affair, not
just operated by people, but equally by other more ‘fluid’ (‘more-than-
human’) presences (cf. Latour 2005; Whatmore 2002), such that we are
called in fine ‘to explore the way these materials combine in particular
instances with particular forces, and to scrutinise how this play of effects
and affects produces particular urban formations’ (Hubbard 2006,
p. 248).
This effectivity of various materials therefore leads into debate about
the roles of non-humans in ‘social’ action and the extent to which
agency, or indeed power, is distributed well beyond the usual groups of
human actors, becoming invested in a host of technologies and entities
which, as part of networks or assemblages, thus also contribute to urban
functioning and change (Farias and Bender 2010; Blok 2013; Murdoch
1997). Latham (2016) talks about a constant invocation of the material
plenitude of urban environments, summoning understanding of how
23
tangible, physical and/or biological entities, from traffic lights and air
conditioning systems to foxes and microbes, become lively participants
in all kinds of urban processes.
In this view, human ‘control’ is always limited and constrained (and
enabled) by the vitality, dynamism and power of things and materials.
Irrespective of the degree of agency we attribute to objects (with some
object-oriented ontologies allocating inherent agency), things and
materials do behave in ways and have or produce effects which shape,
reshape and regulate contexts in which humans act (as per ‘thing-
power’: Bennett 2010). This is especially the case in relations and sys-
tems around infrastructure (see also Bijker 2007). Bennett’s case study
of the North American blackout is a prime example of socio-technical
analysis which decenters (but does not disregard) human agency and
foregrounds effects of materials, flows and forces usually in the back-
ground to consider the complex interplay of always associated humans
and non-humans. As she argues, ‘There was never a time when human
agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity
and nonhumanity. What is perhaps different today is that the higher
degree of infrastructural and technological complexity has rendered this
harder to deny’ (Bennett 2005, p. 463).
Building on these arguments, Amin (2014) studies lively infra-
structure with infrastructure as a ‘gathering force’ and site of political
potential because of its fundamental shaping of wellbeing and social
interactions. Meehan (2014) conceptualizes tool-power and force-full
objects wherein objects can be sources or ‘wellsprings of power’ through
the alliances and networks they become enrolled into which offers them
an emergent capacity to broker, extend and limit state power.
The combination of seeking understanding of emerging material
sites and arenas of dispute (over meaningful change) and taking fully
into account the active participation of components in hybrid collec-
tives busy effecting or constituting possibilities of change in some ways
pushes a socio-technical perspective about as far as it can go. Forms
and effects of particular artefacts and relations can thus contribute to
constituting wider collective concerns (Latour 2004b). As Mitchell
argues, ‘They are disputes about the kind of technologies we want to
live with, but also about the forms of social life, of socio-technical life,
24
J. Rutherford
we would like to live’ (Mitchell 2011, p. 239; see also Winner 2004). In
this regard, infrastructure comes to matter differently here. The medium
becomes the message as the materiality of infrastructure produces effects
or has an efficacy and effectivity in broader change processes (Easterling
2014; Filion 2013).
Yet, at the same time, the notion of the anthropocene highlights that
human activity is having significant long-term effects on global sys-
temic processes. This means, fundamentally, that while materiality offers
a focus on the constantly shifting nature of relations between humans
and their physical world/environment, the shifting is not just unidirec-
tional with the physical/material becoming (seen as) more active in the
constitution of worlds. As materials are drawn into political life (Barry
2013) and humans become part of biogeochemical processes, this opens
even more the possibility that we cannot meaningfully separate the
two, that neither should be seen as anything other/more than human-
environment or socio-technical hybrids (Latour 2004a; White and
Wilbert 2009).
In this way, introducing some of the recent thinking around urban
materiality into debates around urban futures could therefore com-
plement and extend existing work around strategic infrastructure and
systemic socio-technical change by showing how the process of mak-
ing things matter is a complex operation or encounter of multiple
co-existing engagements with the concrete objects, natures and flows
of the urban living space. What this approach to materiality offers is
a more precise understanding of the disparate settings and arenas in
and through which policy discourse and goals are actively translated
into actual concrete actions and political interventions. These mate-
rial settings and arenas are constituted by shifting hybrid relations and
engagements between multiple urban actors and all kinds of ‘infrastruc-
tural’ objects (but which have active effects). These emerging ecologi-
cal settings are also therefore inherently constitutive of (the potential
for) socio-political struggles as the orientations of ongoing and future
urban ecological transition are materially understood, experienced and
performed in diverging ways (Swyngedouw 1996; Latour 2004a). This
work on materiality suggests in fine that what we are endeavouring to
sustain in ‘transition’ work is the intrinsic and intertwined relationships
25
between humans and their environments, which, as we shall see in the

next section, is also a question of our capacities to disagree about how
the work of sustaining these might be enacted and accomplished.
Ecological Urbanism and a Politics of Techno-Natures
Concern for the links between cities and ecology and how urban plan-
ning has interpreted and enrolled nature and a variety of environ-
mental resources into the production of urban space is, of course, not
new (see Roseland 1997, for analysis of the evolution of the notion of
‘eco-city’). But, as notions of sustainable urban development, urban
resilience, low carbon cities, etc., have moved up urban agendas into the
mainstream (World Bank 2010b; Joss 2011; De Jong et al. 2015), so
researchers have engaged in quite diverse theoretical and empirical anal-
yses of what ecological discourses and imperatives mean for understand-
ing and practice of urban development (Haughton 1997; Rapoport
2014; Coutard and Lévy 2010). This analytical diversity, a clear rec-
ognition of a plurality of natures, is at odds with the parallel attempt
by some to impose narrow criteria, norms and standards by which the
eco-city (and therefore Nature) can be defined in practice (e.g. the work
of the International Eco-city Framework and Standards mentioned in
Rapoport 2014, p. 139).
Some research has an applied focus, offering frameworks of possi-
ble responses and examples of ‘best practice’ in sustainability planning
based on a normative view of what urban practitioners might, or indeed
should, be doing to improve urban environments (Girardet 2000;
Kenworthy 2006; Newman et al. 2009). Other research works from the
limits of official planning practice to promote alternative, bottom-up
urban sustainability collectives focused on meeting local community
needs and creating meaningful social interaction (see, for example,
Seyfang and Smith 2007; Pickerill and Maxey 2009). The aims, prac-
tices and outcomes of current eco-urbanism initiatives have also come
under critical scrutiny. These accounts uncover and unpack the singu-
lar storytelling, dominant social interests, narrow techno-economic
knowledge and rationales, and pernicious consequences of the making
26
J. Rutherford
of supposedly exemplar urban projects around the world (Hodson and

Marvin 2010b; Caprotti 2014b; Rapoport 2014). While they may be
the latest in a long line of ‘utopian’ planning ideals reflecting the domi-
nant social concerns of the day (Cugurullo 2013; Rapoport 2014), their
particular mix of the discursive and the material has made them useful
objects of critical analysis of urban sustainable transformation processes.
It is here that a politics of ‘techno-natures’ supplants modernist rem-
nants of a singular, pure, static Nature or separate ecological dimen-
sion to understanding (urban) life. The term is used here in the sense
of White and Wilbert for whom it seeks to capture ‘a moment during
which the environmental debate seems to be folding into a vastly more
complex social-ecological-technological field of political discussion’
(White and Wilbert 2009, p. 13). In this way, ecological urbanism is
being opened out to a broader understanding of how we inhabit diverse
environments, the forms these take, and the groups and interests that
drive configurations (Latour 2004a).
It follows that urban change is crucially an inherently politicized
process, as different powers and capacities to act confront through and
over matters/materiality (Latham et al. 2009, p. 64). The discursive
and material processes through which urban environments are shaped
(as in Swyngedouw’s ‘city as a hybrid’), processes that (following the
previous section) make things matter, are not merely about top-down
imposition or decision-making, but are constantly inflected and devi-
ated by people’s differing positions, capacities and subjectivities with
regard to the visions/narratives and circulations/objects in question
(what matters, how, and to whom). As Hubbard puts it: ‘After all, cities
may be scripted, but our performances do not always follow the script’
(Hubbard 2006, p. 126). Prescribed policy goals, visions and actions
can therefore be reinterpreted, reiterated and contested by the different
groups and interests present according to what matters to them (‘hack-
ing’ infrastructure space in Easterling’s terms). Urban materiality thus
becomes a key arena for urban politics as a set of ‘everyday struggles
over ecological (re)production and consumption’ (MacLeod and Jones
2011, p. 2450; see also Bouzarovski 2016).
This approach takes us onto the terrain of urban political ecology
where a number of scholars have, over the last twenty years, proceeded
27
to trace and analyse the uneven, conflictual, dynamic and translocal

processes through which the urban is made and remade (Gandy 2004;
Loftus 2012). Rather than seeing the circulation of material and energy
flows through and around the urban as a question of quantification,
of only policy analysis, or indeed of the seeking of optimal, rational,
techno-economic engineered configurations, these researchers have
sought to recover the inherently emergent, hybrid, dynamic and con-
tested (socio)nature of urban metabolism (Swyngedouw 1996; Keil
2003), and thus to shift focus onto ‘the political processes through
which particular socio-environmental urban conditions are made
and remade… ask[ing] questions about who produces what kind of
socio-ecological configurations for whom’ (Heynen et al. 2006a, p. 2).
This necessitates, for example, looking beyond the city as a bounded
static environment and tracing long distance metabolic flows, ‘opera-
tional landscapes’ and relational urbanization processes through which
dense eco-cities are remade, and which have consequences on extrane-
ous places/environments (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2014; Caprotti and
Romanowicz 2013; Luke 2003; Brenner 2014).
Far from constituting sites of progressive sustainable configurations
and demonstrating transformative urban pathways for the future, some
nominally eco-city projects are shown to emblematise merely the latest
round of ‘entrepreneurial’ capitalist accumulation integrating inter alia:
the creation of development opportunities, whether on new build sites,
‘cleaned up’ brownfield land, or through retrofitted environments (Joss
2010; Caprotti 2014a, p. 12); insertion of erstwhile green technology
and infrastructure; gentrification, dispossession, and social control/fil-
tering; intensive marketing and branding to add value to the whole; and
the circulation and transfer of models, expertise and labour between cit-
ies and projects as the sustainable narrative goes global. The organizing
principle for recent eco-cities is thus a combination of specific expert
knowledge, technology deployment and a narrow view of innovation
as top-down techno-social change leading necessarily to greater sus-
tainability (see Luke 2003). The finality of most initiatives is economic:
investment, competitiveness, property and real estate, translocal diffu-
sion… This urban market environmentalism or green capitalism offers
‘a hollowed-out vision of the city–nature nexus, as the urban becomes
28
J. Rutherford
devoid of human and political potential while being elevated to the role
of stage on which the interplay of technology and green capitalism can
be unleashed in a time of constructed crisis’ (Caprotti 2014b, p. 3).
Urban design has been put to work to make ecology a business oppor-
tunity; nature has become a mere subset of the global economy (Smith
2007; Keucheyan 2014).
Other work recognizes and reaffirms the mediating function of infra-
structures in socio-natural transformations of urban environments
(Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000; Karvonen 2011). In an emerging and
evolving urban anthropocene then, it is clear that the operation and
control of circulation and ordering of flows through capacious urban
vessels is becoming a crucial means of guaranteeing and securing urban
futures (Hodson and Marvin 2009). A variety of actors are, indeed,
testing and experimenting reworkings of circuits to create and sustain
potential for addressing socio-ecological issues in and through the city
(Bulkeley et al. 2014; Karvonen and van Heur 2014; Björkman and
Harris 2018).
Learning possibilities come from seeing and studying these develop-
ments, not as standalone entities, but always within their political and
economic contexts (Rapoport 2014, p. 141). As Rohracher and Späth
(2014) have shown in their study of Freiburg and Graz, eco-urban ini-
tiatives can stagnate or decline because of quite banal and everyday dif-
ficulties such as maintaining political interest over time and shifting
priorities, capacities and resources. Elsewhere, local actors and coalitions
often have a lot of work to do to produce ‘green’ cities alongside tradi-
tional economic development or to link sustainability to broader local
agendas (Desfor and Keil 2004; While et al. 2004; Krueger and Gibbs
2007). These kinds of analyses take us beyond a concern for urban
form and design practices to focus on ongoing struggles over urbaniza-
tion processes (Braun 2005; Whitehead 2003), which may be trenchant
opposition or declining interest. As Amin and Thrift (2017, pp. 160–
161) argue: ‘The supposed technicalities of urban provisioning turn out
to be an enormous political hinterland of access to resources, of proxim-
ity to and distance from contamination, of scripts of spatial and social
selection written into objects which have broken out of the frames in
which human thinking had formerly confined them’.
29
Infrastructure processes become an ongoing achievement requir-

ing constant maintenance and readjustment across shifting elements of
permanence and change (Castan Broto and Bulkeley 2013). These pro-
cesses exceed a host of boundaries, becoming transformative in their
dynamic, mobile constitution and the shifting exchanges they order and
reorder. Indeed, taking into account the overflows and ‘spills’ of engage-
ments with socio-technical systems may help to forge new pathways of
change: ‘Impurifications are not aberrations to be scrubbed from the
data, but are the very gist of what constitutes the emergence and trans-
formation of environments, as well as their practices and imaginings’
(Gabrys 2009, p. 671).
This all points towards a politics of eco-urbanism that is less con-
cerned with studying only external conflicts resulting from infrastruc-
ture deployment, than tracing an internal set of struggles around urban
material circulation processes wherein infrastructure, actor positions
and their shifting relational dynamics dialectically constitute each other.
In other words, in tracing the ‘imbalances’ of metabolic flows—energy,
waste and water flows and interconnections which redistribute fluids
around the city—we can capture some of the political contours of the
making and remaking of urban environments which circulate, redistrib-
ute and rebundle a variety of potentials and possibilities, inclusions and
exclusions, costs and benefits.
These concerns for the making and remaking of green cities through
a combination of infrastructural elements including ambitious eco-
projects, technical networks and material and energy flows must be
situated within their changing wider cultural and political contexts.
Understanding of how particular initiatives and configurations are
linked to dominant ecological ideas and imaginaries of the time helps to
identify the potentially immense significance of infrastructure processes
as part of the shaping of urban futures. In Last Futures, for example,
Douglas Murphy (2016) revisits the architectural projects of the late
1960s and early 1970s which offered fantastical yet material attempts to
come to terms with global ecological crisis and emerging recognition of
planetary limits. His analysis grounds avant-garde futures in particular
projects for inhabiting the Earth in conjunction with changing (views
of ) natures, thus demonstrating ‘glimmers of potential’ (p. 5) for today’s
30
J. Rutherford
socio-technical challenges. Albeit perhaps on a more modest scale,

urban infrastructure projects are currently imagined and implemented
with strikingly similar future world-making goals: ‘Infrastructure pro-
vides the trails from the past into the future that, like the Australian
dreaming, do not just locate us but tell us what we are’ (Amin and
Thrift 2017, p. 96). But whereas some of Murphy’s projects were ten-
tative efforts at working within limits, the tendency today, as we see in
this section, under the dominant narrative of ecological modernization,
is a promotion of transcendence, the defining of ways to bypass, avoid or
benefit from crisis and constraint (Hodson and Marvin 2010b). As well
as fitting neatly with the transferability of designs, models and technol-
ogies which can be marketed and deployed the world over, this tran-
scendence notably effaces ideas of working within environmental limits
to growth by overcoming technological and cultural limits for growth,
thus creating urban repositories for state-of-the-art global dwelling that
are not constrained (e.g. in technology or finance…) by their immediate
milieux. It is in this sense that the nature of political infrastructures, as
uncovered in the following chapters, is of concern beyond local strug-
gles and disputed entanglements of humans and non-humans, as these
come to be part of bigger debates already engaged over the uncertain
urban, ecological limits to planetary futures, which are the veritable
substance of material political processes of transitions to sustainability.
Towards Material Politics/Critical Hybridity

Consideration of emerging processes of sustainability transition, the
effectivity of materials and their contribution to shifting human-
environment relations, and the wider politics of urban ecological change
allows us to push forward the conceptualization from earlier in the
chapter of the urban as fully formative of ongoing reconfigurations of
human–environment relations. It moves the focus onto the material
and political components, modalities and outcomes of change which
make and remake the urban. In fine, conceiving the urban in constantly
evolving material and political terms is to focus on how meaningful
socio-technical change comes about.
31
Gandy (2014, p. 24) argues that ‘The story of urban environmen-

tal change, and the politics of infrastructure networks, are marked to
a significant degree by the largely unseen and unrecorded dimensions
to human experience’. In this view, the question becomes how infra-
structure comes to matter in a given situation, moment or locality,
and for whom, and thus how particular infrastructural situations are
made or rendered visible and thus political. This issue and process is
the crux of the following chapters. Two recent works offer particularly
useful contributions to understanding this material politics of urban
socio-technical change.
Andrew Barry traces the conflicts that emerged during the construc-
tion of a long distance oil pipeline, especially those around the qual-
ity, nature and meaning of certain materials and objects, but also in
the production and dissemination of information on the project. From
his perspective, infrastructure is not a ‘passive and stable foundation
on which politics takes place’ (Barry 2013, p. 1). Rather, the politics
of socio-technical change are actively produced and indeed constituted
by artefacts and relations of infrastructure systems which become funda-
mental to the conduct and possibilities of politics. In this view, many of
the tensions and struggles over socio-technical systems emerge around
the flows, infrastructures and materialities which make up the system
and its functioning (see also Mitchell 2011). There is neither a pre-given
shared understanding of the nature of the system, and its ‘basic’ com-
ponents and interactions (for example, what a district heating network
or electricity system is), nor agreement over dispositions and configura-
tions of the system for ‘sustainable’ present and future provision of any
particular city. There is, instead, always a series of competing accounts
(information) of the nature, meaning, significance and future of infra-
structure and technology. This constitutes a ‘political situation’ around
any transition, with indeterminate and contingent bounds and signifi-
cance, which calls for ‘an expansion of the range of elements that should
be considered when analyzing a controversy…’ (Barry 2013, p. 11). So
one aim of the chapter studies is to follow Barry in ‘developing accounts
of the political geography of materials whose ongoing existence is asso-
ciated with the production of information’ (Barry 2013, p. 5). Then we
might see in all this information (about logistics/circulation of materials
32
J. Rutherford
and flows of power) not consensus and shared visions of urban futures
but ‘new concerns, sites and problems about which it matters to disa-
gree’ (Barry 2013, p. 5), and therefore new political possibilities forged
from engagement with materialities.
Keller Easterling’s (2014) excavation of infrastructure space is also a
useful intervention into this material political process. She traces a series
of ‘active forms’, or underlying markers, which always give infrastruc-
ture a ‘disposition’ or a potential, in which we can detect the organiza-
tion and outcomes of socio-technical activity (Easterling 2014, p. 73).
This helps to uncover the wider, often hidden, significance of particular
configurations, but crucially this also may then create possibilities for
intervention or ‘hacking’: ‘finding switches and connectors that can
amplify policy intentions and isolate damaging eventualities…’ (Amin
and Thrift 2017, p. 160). She shows the pertinence of an immanent
approach which tracks always emerging configurations in situ rather
than against pre-given ideas of networks and their components. Local
forms and processes hook into, reproduce and expand, and thus make
visible, the workings of global infrastructure space as a ‘technological
zone’ (Barry 2001) with common standards, regulations and proce-
dures which assist governability. Here, infrastructure is in constant flux,
always doing something, exceeding its immediate constitution (Latour
2005), reflecting how it is put to work through material political pro-
cesses (circulation, ordering, manipulation) of ‘active forms’ such as
multipliers, switches, topologies and stories. Infrastructure becomes
a site or arena of material politics as particular social interests engage
with and appropriate in contested ways a variety of systems, objects and
components that are not necessarily passive in their make-up, function-
ing and activity (e.g. Braun and Whatmore 2010).
Building on Barry, Easterling and other scholars, the follow-
ing chapters zoom in on and dissect particular ongoing urban
infrastructural processes which constitute material enactments of socio-
technical futures. In each case, the focus is at once on the policy context,
the capacities and actions of various actors present, and the various mate-
rials and technologies put to work to meet or divert specific interests.
These always emerging hybrid processes work through lively tensions,
conflicts and overflows producing not just new urban infrastructures
33
but also shifting, uneven relations between technologies, humans and

environments: ‘reorganising socio-technical worlds, in which what we
call social, natural and technical processes are present at every point’
(Mitchell 2011, p. 239; see also Latour 2005; Callon et al. 2001).
Holding together transition/emergence, hybridity and criticality
is a precarious affair itself replete with tension and contradiction. It
requires openness to possibilities and at the same time some form of
normative concern for potentially uneven and unequal configurations,
and even the potential for ‘hacking’ infrastructure space (Easterling
2014). Actors have at best a partial, temporary grasp over bits of very
complex socio-technical systems such that notions of agency, flows and
mechanisms of functioning and change are increasingly indistinguish-
able. At the same time, we are attached to political systems in which
specific individuals have to be held accountable for actions or lack of
actions such as gaps between aspirations and actual measurable or vis-
ible results. Bennett (2005, p. 464) captures neatly the crucial conun-
drum between responsibility/intentionality and a more symmetric
effectivity: ‘It is ultimately a matter of political judgment what is more
needed today: should we acknowledge the distributive quality of agency
in order to address the power of human-nonhuman assemblages and to
resist a politics of blame? Or should we persist with a strategic under-
statement of material agency in the hope of enhancing the accountabil-
ity of specific humans?’ There is no definitive response to this question,
but sensitivity to the unruliness and vitality of matter (see Braun and
Whatmore 2010) may at the very least open up what Damian White
and colleagues (2016) call a critical hybridity perspective on always
emerging socio-ecological processes and human-environment relations.
This recognizes that the material politics of urban transition works
through, and not against, human agency, but a recombinant agency in
which the potentials and performances of materials and technologies
can help to ‘activate’ new political actions and strategies: ‘Objects mat-
ter. Non-humans matter. Entanglements matter. Yet, when all is said
and done, it is our view that a more just, egalitarian, democratic and
hopeful anthropocene will only be brought into being by reclaiming,
celebrating and channeling the productive and reconstructive potential
of us. Yes, us – entangled, diverse, fractured hybrid humans as inventive
34
J. Rutherford
hominids, creative gardeners, critical publics, political agents’ (White

et al. 2016, p. xx).
This perspective is particularly useful for its openness to the possi-
bilities of change, its desire to explore new relations between humans,
technology and their environments, and its concern for critically under-
standing the wider politics of provisional socio-technical configura-
tions. Indeed, while we can say there are only ever ongoing processes of
future-making enacted only ever by human–environment hybrids and
working only ever through struggles and contests (Callon et al. 2001;
Luke 2003), far from being reductive this stance opens up and diversi-
fies possible pathways, participants and politics of urban socio-technical
change. This is crucial if we accept that current ongoing configura-
tions are unlikely to be sufficient to bring about the progressive change
urgently needed. These are elements which underpin the stories of infra-
structure entanglements and emerging urban futures in the following
chapters.
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2
Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living
Spaces and Remaking Socio-Technical
Configurations in Outer Stockholm
Introduction
The intertwined dynamics and tensions between urban and infra-
structure development are often fully on display in suburban areas
at the edge of city and grid. In the peripheral and less dense areas of
some European regions—areas that are not (yet) served by central-
ized infrastructure systems—local planners, technicians and residents
are questioning the relevance of water and energy network extensions.
In contexts of low population density and distinctive modes of resi-
dence, actors and authorities are balancing possible returns on invest-
ment from network deployment and use, and the technical difficulties
and additional costs of laying and maintaining the necessary cables
and pipes. These areas that lie beyond the network may be included
in future extension plans or may remain more dependent on alterna-
tive infrastructure arrangements which are already adapted to suburban
living.
Filion and Keil (2017) argue that there is a clear articulation
between ‘suburbanization’ as a process of making and remaking
the suburbs and ‘suburbanisms’ as ways of inhabiting these areas.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_2
46
J. Rutherford
Infrastructure systems are an important means of sustaining this artic-

ulation in their extending and reworking of suburban living spaces
through resource and service provision. These systems have always
either accompanied and supported, or preceded and stimulated, urban
growth. Yet, paradoxically, the actual forms and processes of mak-
ing and remaking suburban infrastructure configurations are largely
ignored, and indeed ‘massively unknown’ and ‘working as the ulti-
mate black box’ (Filion and Keil 2017, p. 9; but see Keil 2013; Addie
2016). Much work on infrastructure in suburban contexts has usually
restricted itself to the study of the relative financial cost of sprawl or
extended urban development compared to that of densification (for
an overview, see Jaglin and May 2010), reducing both suburbaniza-
tion to a narrow and preset techno-economic issue which can objec-
tively inform more efficient planning practice, and infrastructure to
generic and passive equipment, the features and specificities of which
have little influence on development. Eschewing this limited perspec-
tive, this chapter explores the circumstances, processes and implications
of reconfiguring water infrastructures in outer areas of the Stockholm
region where particular hybrid socio-technical arrangements for water
provision and wastewater removal are at the heart of changing forms,
modalities and outcomes of local development and modes of residence.
There is a wider resonance to this case, as it offers a perspective on, and
wider lessons for, urban futures more broadly. At the fringes of urban
spaces and grid systems, as conventionally thought, are important
transformations of socio-technical infrastructure space which reflect
the status of ‘in-between’ areas as a major zone of recent residential,
functional and infrastructure change (Young et al. 2011). Exploring
infrastructure here provides analytical purchase on constantly shifting
frontiers between collective organization and individual liberty, pub-
lic and private realms, industrial and vernacular technology, untamed
‘nature’ and societal reproduction (see Desfor and Keil 2004; Gandy
2014). The dynamics of infrastructure, where it is actually being
deployed or redeployed, thus reshuffle a host of given interactions
and arrangements in a potentially distinctive politics of infrastructure
beyond networked urbanism.
2 Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces …
47
Thinking (Sub)Urban Infrastructure

Configurations from the South?
An emergent and processual notion of infrastructure, as sketched out
in Chapter 1, can be relevant across different urbanizing contexts, and
help to unpack the specificities of infrastructural change outside of
dense, central cities in areas where economies of scale, modes of resi-
dence and living, and the technical processes of deploying, maintain-
ing, reconfiguring and using infrastructure are quite distinct. Some
recent work on urban infrastructure has dispensed with the traditional
narrative of growth and extension of centralized technical networks as
an epistemological, practical and aspirational norm (see Coutard and
Rutherford 2016), and focused on how infrastructure is actually lived
and experienced in diverse ways (see Graham and McFarlane 2015).
It is a fair assumption that suburban areas constitute, and are consti-
tuted by, a hybrid and persistently evolving set of configurations and
practices of dealing with, planning for and experiencing infrastruc-
ture that do not necessarily relate or respond to a single, settled ideal
or model. Studying, knowing and accounting for suburban infrastruc-
ture thus requires dispensing with any assumption that the suburbs are
marginal areas within larger infrastructure territories, whose residents lie
passively in wait for the usual urban connections, flows and accessibil-
ities. There are likely to be distinctive systems, relations and mixes of
components which fit or work together very differently, and involve the
labour, expertise and strategic efforts of many different actors in discrete
combinations.
It is here that studies of infrastructure in cities of the South may be
helpful in exploring heterogeneous configurations which become part
of urbanizing processes more generally. As Monstadt and Schramm
have suggested, this work may ‘provide insights for better understand-
ing recent changes in the technological fabric of cities in the global
North, where more diversified socio-technical arrangements increasingly
challenge urban and infrastructure planning’ (Monstadt and Schramm
2017, p. 123). This scholarship is particularly useful as it highlights at
least three pertinent points which speak to a socio-technical perspective
48
J. Rutherford
by drawing out the indivisible social significance of particular system

configurations. First, there are often multiple, co-existing forms of
provision, services and/or waters, as is highlighted in a range of cases
from metropolitan Jakarta (Kooy and Bakker 2008, p. 375) across
sub-Saharan African cities (Jaglin 2012) to smaller cities of South
America (Furlong 2015). These arrangements are built on long
entrenched histories of fragmented systems and differentiated access to
these systems (McFarlane 2008, p. 417; Kooy and Bakker 2008, p. 376;
Jaglin 2005; Gandy 2008), which constitute a very different dynamic
to that of the splintering of an ‘infrastructural ideal’ and its associated
socio-technical arrangements (Graham and Marvin 2001; see Coutard
2008). Second, in many contexts in the South, there is adaptation
already to this diversity of arrangements as everyday practices and rou-
tines maintain and reproduce these co-evolving systems as a working
norm involving economic exchange, labour and material engagement
(Silver 2014; Baptista 2015). In some cases, crisis, disrepair or dysfunc-
tion, unreliable or sporadic service and poor quality meet expectations
of any ‘norm’, with many people having long adjusted to such situa-
tions and to the effort required to maintain these arrangements (Furlong
2015). Third, these existing socio-technical systems are acutely form-
ative of particular subjectivities, agencies and urban citizenship more
broadly, as difference and inequality between social groups and spaces
is materially and discursively inscribed in infrastructure configurations
(McFarlane and Rutherford 2008, p. 366; McFarlane 2008; Kooy and
Bakker 2008). This is shown in the relationship between classification
of residents, differentiation of spaces and inequality of access to services
(Kooy and Bakker 2008; Anand 2011), where infrastructure becomes a
governmental means to make self-governing hygienic, moral subjects and
to regulate ‘the conditions of possibility of urban life’ (McFarlane 2008,
p. 418).
Infrastructure in the urbanizing South is thus visible and active—
‘lived materiality’ in Graham et al.’s (2015) terms—and has long been
formative of the nature and repercussions of the urban political here
through an imbrication of ‘discursive strategies, socio-economic agen-
das, identity formation, and infrastructure creation; an iterative pro-
cess with changing patterns of socio-spatial access to water supply as an
49
artefact’ (Kooy and Bakker 2008, pp. 385–386). We can draw on this
knowledge of established infrastructure situations and experiences in
the South in order to think through the meaning of shifting practices
and arrangements in the North. Many infrastructure projects in the
North are being linked to different ecological and economic necessities
and thus may come to promote multiple, co-evolving configurations
within which residents must adapt, negotiate and maintain their own
arrangements. In doing so, they forge residence, belonging or citizen-
ship through infrastructure. I suggest that this is the case with regard
to water and wastewater systems in the Stockholm archipelago, which
are bound up in shifting planning practices, residential patterns and the
wider socio-politics of this low density area. Infrastructure is tremen-
dously active here in shaping living spaces, as material components and
relations constantly constrain and enable suburban possibilities.
Planning for Water and Wastewater Systems

in the Stockholm Archipelago
For a number of years, the Swedish capital region of Stockholm has
seen increasing tensions between demographic and residential change
and infrastructure dynamics, especially in relation to water and waste-
water systems. The population of Stockholm County (Stockholms län)
has been steadily rising every year, modes of residence are transforming,
and in some areas what were previously second homes are becoming
permanent residences. At the same time, demand for water is increas-
ing, policies generally promote connection to centralized networks, and
the costs and financing of infrastructure extension are evolving, while
national and European regulation becomes stricter on environmental
and health grounds (Svenskt Vatten 2013). In a large part of the county,
and especially in the archipelago area, water and wastewater are now
at the centre of local planning preoccupations. These are at once eco-
nomic, environmental and socio-spatial concerns. First, the question of
financing local services takes on new importance in a context of resi-
dential change with extension of permanently inhabited areas within
50
J. Rutherford
municipalities, local budgetary constraints and an absence of available

information about and calculations of costs of supplying services. Water
systems also impact on resources and, more generally, on an increasingly
fragile suburban environment. Finally, local planning and infrastructure
decisions and projects (e.g. whether to extend local networks) influence
residential and social equilibriums in municipalities, notably through
the redistribution among households of new costs associated with water
infrastructure and systems (Stockholms läns landsting 2013).
Stockholm County already has very contrasting forms of urban fab-
ric and urbanization processes. Its increasing population of more than
2 million is heavily concentrated in a central ‘belt’ in and around the
main city (one of 26 municipalities). Almost half the surface area
of the county is forest, while agriculture and water still occupy more
land than built-up urban areas which represents only 14% of land use
(SCB 2008). This translates into strong variations in density between
the 4000 inhabitants/km2 of central Stockholm and archipelago munic-
ipalities, where there are sometimes fewer than 100 inhabitants/km2.
Regional planners have strongly promoted densification (‘building the
city inwards’) and tried to protect countryside and coastal areas from
unwarranted sprawl, but local municipalities are responsible for plan-
ning policy and have interpreted these guidelines in different ways
(RTK 2007; Pemer 2006). However, suburban transformation in
Stockholm takes on a particular form constituted by heterogeneous
and non-contiguous residential dispersion rather than any standard lin-
ear peri-urban diffusion or sprawl. Sparsely populated areas of mostly
summerhouses are transformed from secondary summer residences into
permanent all year residences requiring constant access to water and
wastewater among other services. The drivers of this shift are multiple:
urban regional demographic growth, retirees moving out of the city and
the search for cheaper alternatives to increasingly expensive and scarce
homes in central Stockholm (SLL Office of Regional Planning 2010).
One of the main issues for local and regional planners—perhaps even
‘the primary concern’ (regional planner interview, October 2010)—
is the presence of around 100,000 seconds homes or ‘summerhouses’
owned mainly by Stockholm residents and located primarily in the
51
coastal archipelago area. Swedish anthropologists have captured neatly

the importance of these second homes in Swedish culture:
To many Swedes the summerhouse is of much higher symbolic value

than the permanent home. The summerhouse is the happy place where
you spend the high value time of vacation, while the home is a neces-
sary requirement, tied to work, the daily rat race and sheer survival. Many
urban Swedes dream of moving to the summerhouse, simply because this
means moving to a happier place. The opportunity comes when commut-
ing time is shortened, when you work part time or when you don’t have
to go to work each day. (Arnstberg and Bergström 2002, pp. 6–7)
The issue is the increasing practice of households moving permanently

into these summerhouses. Over the last twenty years, the regional plan-
ning office (SLL, formerly RTK) estimates that up to 1000 residences
have been transformed every year (regional planning official interview,
October 2010). This can lead to problems arising from the fact that the
homes were not built for permanent all year living, while municipalities
must deal with a population increase and new requirements in the man-
agement of local services:
Municipalities say that when more than 30% of the people live there
permanently, then the area begins to change, because they have greater
requirements for services for which the area was not originally intended.
And the people only there part-time want to keep it in its half-organised
state. And for the municipalities to be able, for example, to draw out
municipal water, generally they have to change the whole area and put
in twice as many houses, to sell land areas to be able to pay for the whole
changing growth, building out the sewerage systems. So it’s a whole
change of area that needs to be planned very carefully if everybody’s going
to get organised. (regional planning official interview, October 2010)
Provision and management of water and wastewater systems are man-

dated in Sweden to local municipalities which either take care of these
systems themselves or group together in intermunicipal organizations
(Sveriges Riksdag 2006). Local decisions are therefore made about
which zones to connect to networks and how to regulate or control the
52
J. Rutherford
use of water installations. Costs are financed by tariffs such that what
is paid by households is reinvested into local systems (Svenskt Vatten
2000). On a regional level, this inevitably means that there is a great
variation1 between tariffs paid by a household in an apartment in cen-
tral Stockholm and a household living in an isolated house on an island
in the archipelago:
There is a direct correlation between density or pipe length and the costs.
As long as you have a wider spread network, you not only have to invest
in longer pipes, but also in pump stations and so on. (intermunicipal
water organization official interview, 2010)
Within municipalities, tariffs are standardized with no differentiation

operated between households depending on where they live, for exam-
ple, in relation to the pipe layout. This simplifies billing processes and
allows a reasonable level of solidarity between households in the same
local area, but it also produces a substantial degree of redistribution
across sometimes very large and diverse municipal territories, as illus-
trated below.
Crucially, not all households are connected to local centralized
water infrastructure. It is estimated that around 90,000 households
in Stockholm county use alternative systems to municipal networks
(Kommunförbundet Stockholms Län/VAS-rådet 2006). The most
recent regional plans have indeed promoted ‘small-scale solutions’ in
sparsely populated areas of the region which ‘may be significantly better
than today’s systems’ (SLL Office of Regional Planning 2010, p. 151).
In these areas, what is infrastructure beyond the networked city? How
do local officials plan for infrastructure? How do residents and other
actors contribute to configurations? The central question at hand is to
understand how infrastructure matters here as it becomes a nexus for
different views of and actions around modes of residence, environment,
finance and technology, thus articulating a shifting politics of suburban
1Up to three times more expensive in outer municipalities than in central ones according to fig-
ures from Svenskt Vatten.

53
Table 2.1 Percentage of population connected to centralized water and waste-

water systems in Stockholm county municipalities
Municipality % population connected % population connected
to water network to wastewater network
Norrtälje 56.07 56.07
Värmdö 58.64 58.64
Nykvarn 72.60 72.01
Österåker 76.47 76.71
Nynäshamn 79.15 79.15
Vallentuna 79.61 79.83
Vaxholm 81.53 81.53
Södertälje 84.00 84.00
Upplands-Bro 86.61 86.51
Haninge 87.11 85.71
Source Compiled from Svenskt Vatten (2007) figures
socio-technical arrangement. In order to investigate how changing

modes of residence and population dynamics are accounted for in local
planning decisions and infrastructure provision, I examine the forms,
stakes and wide-ranging implications of water and wastewater systems
in one municipality of the Stockholm archipelago (Table 2.1).
Infrastructures of Permanence?
Norrtälje is the largest municipality in Stockholm County, taking up

fully a third of its surface area in the north. Although it is around 70 km
from central Stockholm, roads and public transport connections make
it an increasingly attractive residential area. Its population of around
60,000 is widely dispersed in a patchwork of small urban centres, ham-
lets and quite isolated settlements inland, along the coast and on numer-
ous small islands (Fig. 2.1). During weekends and over the summer, its
population expands two- or threefold as Stockholmers and others escape
to their summerhouses of which there are 25,000 in Norrtälje.
Recent local planning policy has taken on a liberal slant under the
Moderate (conservative) majority,2 as local politicians have pushed to
2Norrtälje had a Moderate-led majority in the city council from 1998 to 2014.
54
J. Rutherford
Fig. 2.1 Settlements along the coast in Norrtälje
attract incoming residents for increased tax revenue (local planning

official interview, October 2010). They have become permissive of
new constructions and extensions, including the formerly protected
coastal area. Furthermore, they have also supported permanent resi-
dence in summerhouses (local planning official interview, October
2010), with more than 200 having been transformed per year on aver-
age over the last twenty years (Norrtälje kommun 2013, p. 22). For
the Mayor of Norrtälje, it was ‘a question of local democracy, which
does not concern the departments of the state’ (quoted in Dagens
Nyheter, 26 February 2008). As a core part of this urbanizing pol-
icy, the municipality has explicitly and regularly recognized the need
to expand and adjust water infrastructure and service provision for a
growing and increasingly permanent population (Norrtälje kommun
2008, 2013, 2015b).
55
This is an attempt at reconfiguring a multiplicity of systems for a

changing residential and suburban fabric. As we can see from Table 2.1,
44% of the population is not connected to local centralized water and
wastewater grids, meaning that there are almost 40,000 properties with-
out connection to the municipal wastewater system (Norrtälje kommun
2015b, p. 7). There are particularly important water access and wastewa-
ter removal issues on the many islands, some of which are not accessible
by bridge (Länsstyrelsen i Stockholms län 2008). One fundamental issue
is that many seasonal homes (as in Fig. 2.2) do not have all year round
water supply but access only to municipal ‘summer water’ (sommarvat-
ten) which is available six months of the year roughly between May and
October (local planning official interview, October 2010). Homes with
only summer water supply tend to have ad hoc installations and smaller
pipes with valves that must be turned off and protected in advance of
cold winter months notably to avoid water freezing in the systems.
Fig. 2.2 Summerhouse residence in Norrtälje

56
J. Rutherford
This diversity of geographical situations and living spaces means that

there are, in effect, at least four existing and juxtaposed water system
configurations, all with distinctive divisions of ownership, organization,
responsibility and financing:
• Direct connection of a house or apartment to the centralized net-

work: households pay water tariffs to the municipality which owns
and manages the network.
• Community connection to the centralized network: a collective clus-
ter of houses is interconnected by a mini-network installation with a
single connection point to the municipal grid (households pay tariffs
as a community).
• Autonomous community systems: a collective cluster of houses
installs their own mini-network with small treatment plant and
wastewater tank, authorized and regulated by the municipality.
• Individual home systems: wells and septic tanks for one property
financed and maintained by households, and authorized and regu-
lated by the municipality.
The response of Norrtälje municipality was to develop an ambitious,

long-term water and wastewater strategy and investment programme in
2007 (Norrtälje kommun 2008). The foundation of this strategy and
programme was a categorization of local areas into three zone types: (a)
zones of development where homes are being constructed or expanded;
(b) zones ‘in transformation’ with primarily summerhouses which are
being transformed into permanent homes; and (c) zones for treatment
where there are environmental problems or risks including poor water
quality, infiltration, eutrophication, leaching and seepage of wastewater
into either potable water systems or the Baltic Sea.3
These zones are then dealt with through a three-pronged sustainabil-
ity strategy for water and wastewater systems. This involved, first, major
3Pollution of the Baltic Sea from alternative systems of wastewater management has been a major
problem along the Swedish coast for many years, leading to high-level political discussions among
national governments of the Baltic region (Stockholms läns landsting 2013).
57
long-term investment in new and extended infrastructure in order to

support urban growth and extend or upgrade pipes and installations to
developing residential areas. This included deploying a big water pipe
to the port of Kapellskär and doubling the capacity of the main treat-
ment plant. An outlay of 1.6 billion kronor was planned over twenty
years making this the biggest ever-single municipal investment project.
This was to be financed primarily by increasing the tariffs paid by all
households (in accordance with Swedish law). The original programme
plan also mentioned the possibility of resorting to ‘tax-funded liquidity
support’ in case of overall losses over three consecutive years (Norrtälje
kommun 2008, pp. 25–26). The second part of the strategy was for a
series of measures to be introduced for mini-network collectives where
a small number of clustered homes group together and maintain a com-
munity water system with (or sometimes without) a connection point
to the municipal network. The third aspect was to reinforce the regu-
lation of individual systems, those off-grid homes with wells and septic
tanks (see Fig. 2.3), which have been the source of many of the envi-
ronmental problems, but which are expected to increase in number
by 2030. Taking these elements together, and drawing on a processual
understanding of infrastructure, this strategic intervention around infra-
structure planning can be read as an attempt at working through par-
ticular configurations of technology, materiality and responsibility.
Heterogeneous Technology
What is remarkable here, first, is the acknowledgement that all year

round, connection to local municipal networks is neither feasible nor
desirable in many sparsely populated areas. Rather than targeting a
reduction in the number of households with alternative water systems,
the local authority actually envisages this number to increase by 2030
from around 23,000 to 36,000 (Norrtälje kommun 2008). There is
then an explicit hierarchy of local areas in terms of existing and pos-
sible water systems, in which local planners, residents and a variety of
technologies, resources, waters, finance arrangements and regulations
become embroiled in creating and maintaining a working solution for
58
J. Rutherford
Fig. 2.3 Off-grid home in Norrtälje with well and septic tank
water provision and wastewater removal, and through this a sustainable

suburban living space. In between a direct connection to a centralized
network at one end of the scale, and off-grid individual solutions such
as wells and septic tanks at the other, are several options that are uti-
lized for small groups of dwellings, which are often located some dis-
tance from urban centres. Either the dwellings cluster to connect to a
centralized network for ‘summer water’ or more permanently (Fig. 2.4),
or they implement collective autonomous solutions, such as a small
treatment plant for example, which are used only by the local residents.
This stratification of technical solutions according to several local factors
(density, distance from network, geographical conditions, seasonal res-
idence, technical possibilities, costs) therefore allows the adaptation of
services to vary to some extent, depending on specific contexts and liv-
ing conditions. This ‘fluid’ approach to infrastructure (de Laet and Mol
2000), operating on the principle that a number of sparsely populated
areas will never be supplied by centralized network systems, opposes the
59
Municipal
network
Community system
Connec on point
Fig. 2.4 ‘Community’ connection to municipal networks (Source Redrawn from

Norrtälje kommun, n.d., p. 5)
largely dominant view that network expansion tends to follow, accom-

pany or even anticipate the urbanization of new suburban areas.
Engaging Materials
In their work for the Norrtälje programme, the municipality’s techni-

cians and planners came up with a total of 122 zones which required
analysis and some form of intervention based on a variety of criteria:
residential ‘pressure’ envisaged by 2030, distance to existing network
installations, physical conditions for eventual alternative system use,
local environmental concerns and economic conditions for extending
the municipal network. After analysis using a ‘decision tree method’
(Norrtälje kommun 2008, p. 10), 64 of these zones were classed as suit-
able for connection to the municipal network system, and the other
58 zones were classed as requiring alternative solutions (either off-grid
homes or autonomous community systems). In the former case, this
may take the form of a collective group of around twenty homes creat-
ing a mini-network system which can then be connected to the central
network. This form necessitates a land survey first, but is encouraged
by the municipality as it creates a sustainable solution for homes with
wells and/or wastewater systems which cannot be feasibly maintained
in the long run due to pollution problems, and it allows technicians
to connect these homes through a single point of connection with the
60
J. Rutherford
household collective taking on the responsibility for installing and

maintaining the mini-network (Norrtälje kommun, n.d.).
While planners engaged in the conventional deployment of maps,
zones, pipes and money to extend big infrastructure and future-proof
for growth (Norrtälje kommun 2008), local residents were themselves
constantly defining and redefining how their modes of residence could
adapt and be adapted to materialities of a particular system configura-
tion. This could involve the creation of a socio-technical collective with
shared community space, routines and a division of labour to organ-
ize the deployment of a small-scale system installation, maintenance of
equipment (e.g. turning valves on or off at different times of the year),
the associated forms and paperwork for regulatory conformity or the
negotiation and collection of costs and tariffs. Off-grid households are
responsible themselves for doing the work for and paying the costs of
ensuring quality of water drawn from wells, organizing lorries to come
for regular emptying of septic tanks, and maintaining non-permeability
of their installations. Thus, socio-technical arrangements in the
Stockholm archipelago suggest different meanings of and negotiations
with infrastructure. Infrastructure is inhabited in a variety of contingent
ways, and through entanglement and engagement with multiple indef-
inite objects and processes, which cannot be taken for granted but have
to be produced and reproduced on a regular basis (see also Bijker 2007).
Responsibility and Citizenship
For the local authority, the differentiated socio-technical infrastruc-

ture arrangements privilege ‘shared responsibility’ (Norrtälje kommun,
n.d.) with their own planning and investment being supplemented, or
even replaced, by some degree of resident self-organization, such that
residents are required to take on economic and environmental costs
and risks. As an example, in order to encourage the creation of self-
organized community systems as well as conformance to environmen-
tal norms and rules, the municipality has offered extra building rights
to households as a ‘carrot’. Through this integration into the munici-
pal programme, infrastructure becomes a governmental means to make
61
responsible suburban citizens. Enrolment in the duties and tasks which

reproduce sustainable local water systems becomes a core part of a bind-
ing contract of local citizenship. Overseen by the rules and regulations
of the municipal authority, this can be viewed as helping to create a
coherent and manageable infrastructure territory out of a diverse array
of situations.
Yet, the production of suburban infrastructural lives here is always a
provisional, collective achievement. It depends on a series of incremen-
tal interventions by households, technicians and specialists which con-
tribute to reproducing (and improving) a system through practices of
use, components and zones for intervention, and norms and rules. It
implies repetition not only in the sense of a series of regular patterns
and components but also as rehearsal or trial performance, through
which authorities and other actors are constantly seeking ‘configurations
that work’. Whether it is improvements in relation to levels of pollution,
redistribution of costs or performance of pipe or tank materials, sustain-
ability becomes an often fine-grained socio-technical process involv-
ing a contingent and situated layering of repetitions. These emerge on
and across scales of households, communities and the municipality as a
whole, and allow actors to learn and finesse their ‘performances’ in rela-
tion to one another and a host of active materials, drawing on a series
of attachments to enact what Metzger (2014) calls a ‘caring for place’.
At the same time, however, the uncertain and unresolved goals, dispo-
sitions and outcomes of this system of repetitions and responsibilities—
status quo, spirals of growth for some but not others, new social and
ecological organizations of/through infrastructure—demonstrate that
suburban infrastructure is also constituted through a variety of tensions.
Tensions in Suburban Infrastructure

Configurations
Suburban socio-technical change in Stockholm is brought about
through persistent friction between residential dynamics, local growth
strategies and the diversity of actually existing water systems. While a
62
J. Rutherford
hierarchy of socio-technical arrangements adapts diverse local contexts

and modes of residence to particular system configurations to some
extent, there are tensions and points of dispute over various aspects of
these differentiated arrangements, underscoring the contested nature of
suburban infrastructure (Filion and Keil 2017). Drawing on Easterling
(2014), this can be seen, for example, in the combination of three
‘active forms’ within infrastructure interventions which indicate order-
ing modes and outcomes of socio-technical activity: the classification
and zoning of residential areas used to deploy infrastructure and manage
territory; the repetitive components or practice routines and regulatory
procedures required to organize infrastructure arrangements; and the
narratives for envisioning future planning and expectations.
First, classifications, zones and hierarchies of residential areas, techni-
cal systems and modes of access to services are used as a tool of manag-
ing territory through infrastructure, as shown in the documents for the
water programme. The way in which zones are defined and bounded,
tariffs decided and intervention accomplished, is not neutral and has
political basis and consequences. This process of infrastructural emer-
gence reflects spatial and temporal priorities such that certain zones can
expect development, transformation and treatment earlier or later, or at
differing rhythms, in a 20-year programme of intervention. Priority is
given to the big pipe for the port (and therefore the local economy) and
doubling the capacity of the main treatment plant in support of further
overall population growth (and local taxes). A ‘zone of development’
clearly has different economic, ecological and infrastructural prospects
than a ‘zone for treatment’, so being close to new big water pipes offers
potential connection and inclusion in the municipal project. This adds
another layer of hierarchy onto that which distinguishes in practice
between four technical forms of water provision.
This series of classifications allows infrastructure to actively constitute
residential living spaces. Infrastructure is not just deployed passively and
then taken up and used, and it is not just another sector of local pol-
icy. Infrastructure interventions are direct reconfigurations of residential
possibilities. de Laet and Mol (2000, p. 237) argue that a water pump
technology in Zimbabwe has a number of boundaries which help to
constitute, for example, a community or a nation. Here, when a local
63
authority decides to make its biggest public investment ever in extend-

ing and improving local water systems, it knows that this is about much
more than service provision and access. Hierarchy and classification of
infrastructure zones actually orients urban policy more broadly, so qual-
ity of access to water and wastewater services partially determines deci-
sions about construction and urban extension. It enacts ongoing and
future development of suburban areas as a whole. As Filion (2013) pro-
claims: ‘infrastructure is the message’, bringing the suburbs into being.
A second active form of suburban infrastructure intervention is the
circulation of repetitive components such as paperwork, norms, tariffs,
routines and system materials. These are necessary to produce particular
infrastructure configurations, but always work in specific ways. Zones
and classifications of particular infrastructure configuration become
‘multipliers’ that allow the deployment of repetitive components and
forms. These repetitive components make heterogeneous territory man-
ageable and governable for the authority; they facilitate knowing and
intervening in an otherwise vast and diverse set of contexts. Recurring
elements include norms and routines governing both individual and
collective water systems (e.g. ensuring ‘summer water’ valves are turned
off in the autumn to prevent pipe damage), year-on-year water tar-
iff rises permitting the programme of work and intervention, and
the circulation of the workers and companies that intervene in laying
pipes, maintaining systems and emptying tanks. Autonomous or quasi-
autonomous households are not excused from regular regulatory incur-
sions into domestic or community space. They are obliged to work for
their autonomy through routines of ensuring that forms are filled in
correctly, environmental norms and standards are met and checks and
controls are undertaken and paid for. Individual arrangements must
accord with (reproduce), or at least not unduly hamper, the collective
good. As Easterling (2014, pp. 74, 81) argues, these kinds of ‘multi-
pliers of activities’ which ‘spread spatial changes throughout a field’ are
the ‘levers of disposition in infrastructure space’ taking socio-technical
change in a particular direction.
Most notably, there have been repeated increases in water tariffs to
fund the major investment programme. Regular 7% annual increases
in recent years (Norrtälje kommun 2015a, and other annual reports)
64
J. Rutherford
have led to Norrtälje becoming the municipality with the highest tar-
iffs in the region (Fastighetsägarna 2015; Nils Holgersson 2015). The
‘sharply increased’ tariffs were noted and criticized in the local press as
representing a more than 50% rise in the price of a m3 of water in the
last ten years (Sverke 2014). These are associated with shifting distri-
butions of costs and benefits between households depending on where
they live (former Mayor interview, October 2010). Households living
in the ‘dense’ central towns of Norrtälje already connected to networks
are paying rising prices to extend networks to those Stockholmers arriv-
ing to live in newly permanent and more distant homes. In the context
of a municipality with the lowest average income per household in the
county,4 this is amounting to a questionable subsidization of new, usu-
ally well-off residents and their lifestyles by existing residents who have
already paid for the water systems they use.
A third active form of infrastructure intervention is the construction
and interlinking of narratives that serve as productive techniques for
envisioning desirable futures, creating collective trajectories and enroll-
ing people into public concerns. These are common methods through
which planners try to build buy-into projects (see Beauregard 2015).
The water programme is tied into a story of municipal growth and
expansion, whereby more permanent residents bring more tax revenue,
thus feeding into an attractive image of the municipality as a dynamic
place to live. This fits coherently into a wider regional strategy oriented
around ‘making our environments available for even more residents
and businesses’ (Stockholms läns landsting 2013, p. 2). Concerned
publics are constructed through provision of information, attribution
of responsibility and system regulation. Consequently, infrastructure
narratives matter, such as demonstrated here. They might become a
tool local politicians and practitioners can use as a local growth strat-
egy, prioritizing some areas over others, regulating modes of residence,
and making residents responsible for the infrastructure systems they
‘inhabit’. Yet, as Easterling (2014) argues, active forms in infrastructure
4Norrtälje is not a low-income municipality per se, but has average income levels a little below
the other municipalities in Stockholms län.

65
space are also markers of potential political intervention, where dispo-

sitions can be seized on, diverted or subverted by other actors. In this
case, it enables residents to create diverse adapted infrastructure solu-
tions, to sustain their own lifestyles and routines, and to engage with
or contest ‘official’ suburban story-making for the years to come.
Equally, while nature is being transformed by liberal urban growth and
the deployment of bigger infrastructure to meet increasing demand, it
also resists change through infiltration, seepage and a number of phys-
ical transformation processes, forcing further regulation of systems and
potential sanctioning of offenders. Infrastructure ‘acts’ thus in multiple,
contingent ways: ‘For if the pump must act, what is it to do: provide
water or provide health? Build communities or make a nation?’ (de Laet
and Mol 2000, p. 247).
This is a story of how evolving infrastructure arrangements are pro-
duced in the suburbs, becoming, as per configurations in the South,
actively adapted and adjusted to local needs, situations and specificities,
and not subjected to or passively enrolled in the expansion of a generic
network model imported from elsewhere. There is the mobilization of
a circular metabolism centred on suburban spaces and uses rather than
being subsumed into a linear system organized elsewhere. Infrastructure
is inherently part of the remaking of suburbanisms, shifting possibilities
for ways of life and ‘hydraulic citizenship’ (Anand 2011) in low den-
sity areas. This is the political salience of suburban infrastructure here,
as it not only opens up new residential areas but creates and constrains
new modes of residence and collective life. It is a key site of potential
material struggle over the direction, means and outcomes of suburban
change, or what Silver (2014) describes as a ‘prefigurative politics’ where
claims are staked in the present to desired, possible futures. The articu-
lation between collective organization/responsibility and individual free-
dom, between public and private spheres, the redistribution of costs and
benefits, and the degree of agency attributed to materials and environ-
mental processes all emerge as charged issues in unsettling infrastructure
arrangements.
Infrastructure here evolves continually through the shifting entan-
glements and interactions of its components and arrangements, and is
always deployed and used processually (‘to develop’, ‘to transform’, ‘to
66
J. Rutherford
treat’). There are different meanings of and engagements with infra-

structure, which, as in urban contexts of the South is thus ‘inhabited’
and not taken for granted. The particular case focused on here may
appear rather prosaic at first, but it quickly and continuously over-
flows into broader issues and questions of environmental pollution,
local and regional futures in an age of climate change, community and
citizenship, collective addressing of suburban futures through cross-
subsidization between infrastructure users and resource transfers, and
short-term versus long-term planning. In short, there is a meaningful
and substantive politics of socio-technical change through which the
contours of suburban living and planning are negotiated.
Conclusion
Infrastructure and socio-technical systems are a primary means through
which wider decisions about and planning of the future development
of suburbs are taking place. Infrastructure is at the heart of changing
forms, modalities and outcomes of local suburban development and
distinctive modes of residence, e.g. whether seasonal or all year round.
However, in the case explored here, this does not signify the usual sin-
gular network extensions of the city. There is acceptance that munici-
palities are not all on a linear pathway to large centralized infrastructure
systems, and that not all households have to be hooked up to municipal
systems even in the longer term, leading to tolerance and even promo-
tion of heterogeneous socio-technical arrangements. In the Stockholm
archipelago here, but also in a variety of other contexts, exploring
modes and meanings of infrastructure means going beyond networked
urbanism and its narrative, paradigm and model of connection to cen-
tralized, industrial technical systems. Building on an emergent and
processual understanding of infrastructure, and insights from work
on infrastructure in the urban South, this chapter has explored how
intervention in suburban infrastructure necessitates engagement with
multiple co-evolving technological configurations, a variety of mate-
rial components and a reworking of divisions of labour and responsi-
bility between the actors involved, from municipal planners and water
67
technicians to households themselves. Planning here thus means find-

ing ways to allow different configurations to exist and to co-evolve, thus
promoting active socio-technical cultivation of place and place futures.
This requires understanding of technologies, skills and the interests and
‘cares’ of those present (Metzger 2014; Beauregard 2015).
The overall capacities, meanings and concerns of infrastructure only
materialize immanently in the shifting relative positions of its compo-
nents. There is a hybridized, flexible socio-technical disposition which
is constantly being reconfigured for active and multilayered infrastruc-
ture spaces, and which both incorporates and resists encroaching urban
dynamics as seen in a host of constitutive tensions around active forms
such as classifications, circulations and future narratives. Emerging
suburban areas are therefore somewhat fluid frontier spaces mediating
between contested notions, practices and implications of collective and
individual, public and private, large-scale and local vernacular technol-
ogy, and in a context in which ‘vestiges of nature’, modes of residence
and societal change are mutually imbricated (see Gandy 2014, p. 18).
Across local planning and politics, and lived and maintained materi-
alities, flows and sediments of water systems, infrastructure becomes a
marker and an arena of potentially transformative change in making vis-
ible the socio-technical constitution of suburban living spaces.
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3
Engaging Urban Materialities of Low
Carbon Transformation in the Green
Capital of Europe
Introduction
In 2010 the European Commission made Stockholm, the capital city of
Sweden, the very first Green Capital of Europe. The city has long had a
reputation of being one of the greenest cities in Europe, and this reward
recognized its long-established concern and policies for environmental
protection and improvement (it was at the time of implementing its
sixth consecutive Environment Programme). It regularly ranks among
the world’s most livable cities according to surveys by media outlets and
consultant firms including the Siemens/The Economist Green Cities
Index and the Mercer Quality of Life Index. Stockholm is therefore
usually presented as an emblematic example of best practice in sustain-
able urbanism and in resilient city-making (see, for example, Girardet
2000; Newman et al. 2009; Lux Research 2012; Metzger and Olsson
2013). The municipality’s international relations department coordi-
nates more visits from foreign delegates seeking knowledge and ideas
This chapter is a revised version of Rutherford, J. (2014). The Vicissitudes of Energy and Climate
Policy in Stockholm: Politics, Materiality and Transition. Urban Studies 51 (7): 1449–1470.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_3
72
J. Rutherford
about environmental issues and ‘sustainable’ city planning than about

any other policy topic. Practitioners and politicians play major roles in
transnational or inter-urban networks about environmental policy, and
especially energy–climate policy.
The municipality’s climate mitigation policies are not the sole ele-
ment of this ‘green’ image, but they do constitute an important part of
it, thus illustrating the emerging role of climate policy in city brand-
ing strategies (see Gustavsson and Elander 2012). The environmental
department of the municipality has had a climate action plan since the
mid-1990s and there have been significant efforts to measure the car-
bon savings associated with specific projects and activities. These climate
efforts work in turn to a large extent through energy policy where the
municipality has, in theory, the most leverage (district heating, decar-
bonizing public transport, energy efficient construction, retrofitting of
existing buildings…). It is here therefore that the discourse of decarbon-
ization encounters the materiality of the urban fabric. Policy documents
present this encounter as largely unproblematic, with the municipality
and other actors able to adjust and render malleable the urban built
environment for a coming ‘fossil fuel free’ age.
Already in the past, however, the encounter between urban polit-
ical regimes in Stockholm and material city-building has been ‘messy’
and contentious (Gullberg and Kaijser 2004). The shifting relations
between, and varied implications of, urban development and wider
environmental objectives have been studied through a number of lenses
including: the very different long-term sustainable urban development
scenarios for Stockholm analysed from an environmental justice per-
spective (Gunnarsson-Östling and Höjer 2011; see also Höjer et al.
2011); a focus on the practice of sustainable urban planning (Metzger
and Olsson 2013) and both its equity and justice implications (Bradley
2009) and the actor networks translating nature–society relations into
specific projects (Bylund 2006); the role of social movements in urban
change and evolutions in local politics (Stahre 2004); and analysis of
changes in infrastructure and network service provision in the light of
economic and environmental reforms (Rutherford 2008). Within a
context of the widely observed ‘ecological modernization’ of Sweden
(Anshelm 2002; Fudge and Rowe 2001; Lundqvist 2000; Vail 2008;
3 Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon Transformation …
73
Hilding-Rydevik et al. 2011), these studies come to a shared conclu-

sion that the traditional social equality goals of urban and environmen-
tal planning in the Swedish capital have evolved, and that the ongoing
material planning processes, practices and struggles in the city thus
merit great attention.
A number of areas of tension and struggle have indeed emerged
around energy–climate agendas and issues that problematize any actual
idea of shared pathways, visions and goals, and therefore contribute
to repoliticizing the city’s environmental agenda. The material politics
of energy–climate agendas in the Swedish capital is thus the focus of
this chapter. It goes beyond the question of the priorities and impli-
cations of policy discourse in this area to analyse how energy and cli-
mate become a set of issues which come to matter in the local urban
arena in a conjoined political and material sense. In short, the chapter
is less interested in the construction of Stockholm as an ‘exceptional’
green city than in the ordinary, daily politics of the urban environment
as practised by a host of local actors and groups with diverging interests
(see also Rosol et al. 2017). I draw on policy documents and empiri-
cal analysis covering the period around the Green Capital award. By
delving into the concrete actions and infrastructures through which
energy–climate policy has been both implemented and contested in
Stockholm, and utilizing conceptual work around urban materialities
discussed in Chapter 1, the aim is to unpack the ongoing, everyday
struggles over urban low carbon transition, thus highlighting the diver-
sity of ways in which change is understood, negotiated, experienced
and engaged with.
Energy–Climate Policy in Stockholm

The municipal policy of the City of Stockholm in the domain of energy
and climate change dates back at least to the early 1990s, with the
Swedish capital achieving international recognition for being one of
the few municipalities to have initiated a major energy and climate pol-
icy programme which has generated measurable success. This was one
of the main reasons for Stockholm becoming the first Green Capital
74
J. Rutherford
of Europe.1 Before the Action Plan for Climate and Energy adopted in
2010 (City of Stockholm 2010c), the City of Stockholm had imple-
mented three Action Programmes Against Greenhouse Gases, covering
1995–2000 (City of Stockholm 1998), 2000–2005 (City of Stockholm
2003) and 2005–2015 (City of Stockholm 2007b), which met their
objectives in terms of emissions reductions.
Greenhouse gas emissions were estimated to have decreased by over
24% between 1990 and 2009, during which time the population of the
city actually increased by 22%. This meant a reduction in greenhouse
gas emissions of 38% per resident between 1990 and 2009 (City of
Stockholm 2010c, p. 7).
Energy and climate policy in Stockholm took advantage of the com-
bination of the orientations of the national policy context in Sweden2
and local factors and resources, including a dense urban core (with fur-
ther densification as an explicit planning goal) and a star-shaped urban
structure (RTK 2002, p. 85; Gunnarsson-Östling and Höjer 2011,
1The reasons given for Stockholm being designated European Green Capital 2010 included: (a)
the presence within the municipality of an integrated administrative system that guarantees that
environmental aspects are considered in budgets, operational planning, reporting and monitor-
ing; (b) its success in reducing carbon dioxide emissions since 1990; and (c) its adoption of an
ambitious objective of being fossil fuel free by 2050 (City of Stockholm 2010a).
2‘Reduced climate impact’ and ‘a good built environment’ constitute two of the sixteen environ-
mental quality objectives adopted by the Swedish Parliament (Swedish Environmental Protection
Agency 2011). The ‘integrated climate and energy policy’ outlined in two government bills in
March 2009 set out a ‘national roadmap’ for 2050 with an overall aim for Sweden to be ‘an emis-
sions-neutral country by 2050’ (Swedish Government 2008a, b, 2011). This translated into a
number of interim targets for 2020, which as a whole went beyond EU objectives: 40% reduc-
tion in climate emissions (on 1990 levels); 50% of energy use to come from renewable energy
sources; 20% more efficient energy use; and 10% use of renewable energy in the transport sector.
Action plans focused on renewable energy, energy efficiency and a fossil fuel free transport sector
were initiated to work towards these targets (Profu 2012; Swedish Government 2010, 2011). The
government at the time (like a high proportion of the population) was also in favour of con-
tinued use of nuclear power in electricity production, thus reversing the 1980 decision to phase
out Sweden’s existing reactors. The government saw win-win opportunities for the economy and
the environment from working towards its energy and climate objectives: ‘Investment in renewa-
ble energy and more efficient energy use are strengthening Sweden’s competitiveness and putting
Swedish research and Swedish enterprises at the forefront of the global climate transition. We are
laying the foundations for new innovations, new enterprises and new jobs in green industries of
the future’ (Swedish Government 2009).
75
p. 1055; City of Stockholm 2010e, p. 10), which allowed policy orien-

tation to draw on economies of scale relative to the size of the city.
The decentralization of many responsibilities and mandates to local
government means that municipalities hold many powers, including
over land use and planning, and have real possibilities for discretionary
action on energy and climate issues, even if they have no obligations
in this domain3 (Gustavsson et al. 2009). So although the City cited
a number of factors which accounted for its apparent success (City of
Stockholm 2003, p. 11), the simultaneous expansion and decarboniza-
tion of district heating in Stockholm has been primordial, and indeed
‘is the single largest reason for the decrease in emissions in Stockholm’
(City of Stockholm 2010c, p. 11). Expansion of the heating network
has been an explicit policy of the City with local detailed plans encour-
aging both new building and renovations to be connected to the net-
work and to use energy efficient methods to reduce consumption
(Magnusson 2011).4 District heating covers almost 80% of heating
demand in the city. Decarbonization of the heating sector in Stockholm
(as in other Swedish cities) has to be seen as a direct result of the
national carbon tax introduced in 1991 which has been levied on the
emitted quantities of carbon dioxide from all fuels except biofuelsand
peat, which pushed district heating companies into abandoning fossil
fuels in favour notably of biofuels. The Stockholm heating system runs
on almost 80% renewables.
The overarching long-term policy objective for energy and climate
in Stockholm has been for the city to be ‘fossil fuel free’ in 2050 (City
of Stockholm 2013; Tolf 2013) by ‘continu[ing] to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions at the same rate as in the past [1990–2005]’ (City of
3The 2009 energy bill mentioned ‘voluntary agreements’ between central government and local
authorities on energy efficiency objectives, as well as the need for municipalities to identify
‘appropriate sites’ for wind power in their planning documents (Swedish Government 2008, p.
149). The 2009 climate bill mentioned the proposal made by the Climate Advisory Council that
municipal comprehensive plans should have to show how they contribute to emissions reductions
objectives (Swedish Government 2008, p. 131).
4These goals have been also quite coherent with those of regional planning which has promoted
reductions in energy consumption (through energy efficiency measures) and a transition to

renewable energy sources (Regionplanekontoret 2010).
76
J. Rutherford
Stockholm 2010d, p. 8). Yet, at the time of the Green Capital award,
major strategic planning orientations in Stockholm were, in paral-
lel, guided by the ‘Vision 2030: a world-class Stockholm’ document
which had been adopted by the right of centre Moderate/Alliance-led
Stockholm City Council in June 2007 (City of Stockholm 2007c). This
set out a ‘sustainable growth’ vision for ‘a denser and better connected
Stockholm’ as well as around 200,000 new residents over the following
twenty years, but was also, and primarily, about taking Stockholm to
the world. In the introduction, the Mayor of Stockholm talked about
‘sharpening Stockholm’s competitive edge’ and creating ‘an interna-
tionally competitive capital region’. As she argued: ‘we are sufficiently
large to offer the sort of qualities that will enable us to compete with
the world’s great metropolises’ (City of Stockholm 2007c, p. 3). This
vision underpinned all subsequent planning documents and work: ‘All
the administrations and companies within the City of Stockholm are
required to help make this vision a reality, both in their daily activi-
ties and through long-term development work’ (City of Stockholm
2010e, p. 11). Thus, the City Plan adopted by Stockholm City Council
in March 20105 was seen as ‘a clear example of how this vision of the
future can be made more concrete’ (City of Stockholm 2010e, p. 11),
through its outlining of a number of urban development strategies and
focus areas representing ‘public interests’.
This begins to get at some of the underlying tensions to energy–
climate policy in Stockholm. Although the City of Stockholm has
clearly made a far greater contribution to local climate mitigation than
the majority of other European cities, it is still important to highlight
areas, arenas or issues of recent contention which problematize the idea
of a set of municipal actors speaking for the city and engaging it on a
single, already marked out pathway to reach already agreed-upon goals
for the short term and the long term (see Krueger and Gibbs 2007).
Following Hubbard’s (2006) call to study the urban performances which
5This was a comprehensive plan, i.e. a steering document and not legally binding for local
detailed plans which officially regulate new building, renovations and extensions (City of
Stockholm 2010e, p. 3).
77
do not necessarily follow the script prescribed by policy discourse, in the

next section I analyse three areas of conflict which have constituted par-
ticularly important material struggles over urban transition.
Three Matters of Contention Around

Energy–Climate Policy
Trajectories, Resources and Redistribution
The ‘world-class’ vision mobilized a particular idea of how energy and

climate issues could contribute to urban development. Indeed, although
it engaged the City on a pathway to ‘an ecologically sustainable city’
and mentioned the ‘fossil fuel free’ goal, these were discussed within
the theme of ‘innovation and growth’. It is clear therefore that far from
being contradictory or incompatible, the two objectives of becoming
‘world class’ and ‘fossil fuel free’ were presented as achievable in parallel,
with the latter contributing to the former, while ‘technological devel-
opments and economic growth now provide a solid foundation for
an ecologically sustainable society’ (City of Stockholm 2007c, p. 11).
The Green Capital of Europe award in 2010 fits well with this paral-
lel trajectory, acting as a kind of ‘sustainability fix’ (While et al. 2004)
through which environmental actions and the ‘fossil fuel free’ goal
could bring the prestige, extra (eco)tourism and new investments that
are advertised as the main benefits of the award (European Commission
2010, p. 13). Indeed, the City of Stockholm took out a full page adver-
tisement in Dagens Nyheter newspaper in December 2009 to ‘advertise’
‘a world-class environmental city’ (City of Stockholm 2011b, p. 19).
By contrast, other observers were far from certain that the two goals
could be wholly compatible. As well as a number of social movements
who have been active since the late 1990s in contesting the neoliberal
tendencies of ‘competitive city’ discourses (Stahre 2004), the Green
Party in Stockholm was particularly critical of the overarching influence
and implications of the majority’s ‘world-class’ strategic planning doc-
ument: ‘Vision 2030 conflicts with the creation of an environmentally
78
J. Rutherford
sustainable city and with the achievement of the city’s climate goals.
The process should have been formulated in other ways than the vision
of “Stockholm as a world-class city”. We question the extent to which
this captures people’s vision of their Stockholm. It is our assessment
that most Stockholmers simply want a good place to live, for themselves
and their children’ (City of Stockholm 2010b, p. 16). They also crit-
icized how this vision permeated down into the comprehensive City
Plan which ‘is based on a false self-image and a short-term thinking…
Climate change is a major issue in urban planning, but in the draft [of
the City Plan] it is only sparingly taken into consideration’ (City of
Stockholm 2010b, p. 17).
The very ambitious fossil fuel free objective for 2050 did not meet
with universal support either. There was a lack of a precise definition of
what would actually constitute a ‘fossil fuel free’ city and debate about
the methodology for measuring mitigation (Green Party representative
interview, May 2010). In fact, ‘fossil fuel free’ in this case only con-
cerned emissions from traffic, electricity and heating. Emissions asso-
ciated with long distance travel, Arlanda airport and especially from
consumption of goods produced elsewhere (which were estimated to
represent half of Stockholm CO2 emissions) were therefore excluded
from measurements: ‘I think that the politicians probably think that it
includes all emissions but it only includes emissions from heating, cool-
ing, electricity and traffic. So they might reach this target, I’m not sure
if it is possible or not. But the problem is, when they say that they are
fossil fuel free, it won’t be absolutely true’ (KTH researcher interview,
March 2010).
Moreover, but linked to this, is the fact that the ‘fossil fuel free’ goal
was actually officially adopted and taken up as a policy objective by the
municipality after a handful of City politicians saw the existing declin-
ing curve on the CO2 emissions graph for 1990–2005 (see Fig. 3.1) and
decided that if the line was extended, it could be made to reach zero
by 2050 (City of Stockholm environment department official inter-
view, May 2009). Inevitably, given this debatable method and rationale
for deciding on a major policy objective, both technicians within the
municipality and other local environmental actors were dubious about
both its achievability and the extent to which the current majority in
79
5
CO2 emissions/resident/year
0
1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050
Fig. 3.1 The trajectory to ‘fossil fuel free’ (Source Based on City of Stockholm
[2010c, p. 9])
power took the objective seriously (various interviews). The dual pur-
pose of this ‘fossil fuel free’ policy for decarbonizing Stockholm but
also marketing the city throughout the world became another tension
between ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ policymaking (cf. Gustavsson et al.
2009, p. 68) in which the presence of concrete, material local issues and
ways of dealing with them appeared at first glance to be at odds with
the fluffy, discursive need for international recognition, leadership and
‘green’ credentials.
Yet, there has been a material dimension to these attractive long-
term goals which emerges when trajectories are connected to resource
availability and use. One of the main factors highlighted by local prac-
titioners as influencing the degree and form of municipal engagement
in the energy–climate domain has been the availability of resources.
There have been specific central government funding programmes
for local environmental actions (see Granberg and Elander 2007, for
details). Between 2004 and 2008, the City thus received government
subsidies of around 80 million kronor for the financing of its energy
and climate policy actions in the form of the KLIMP (climate invest-
ment) programme of the national Environmental Protection Agency.
This allowed more measures to be taken by supplementing the City’s
80
J. Rutherford
own ‘Environmental Billion’ funds.6 The two pots of finance were

closely intertwined: ‘It was easier to get money from the City if you got
30% or more from the national. But we also needed the City money to
get the national money’ (City of Stockholm environment department
official interview, May 2009). Other resources in terms of availability of
personnel and work time have also been important, as the environmen-
tal department of the municipality has always tended to have a certain
number of people working on climate mitigation, although this work
and the associated actions were made more difficult during the occa-
sional periods when City politicians wanted these people to work on
other environmental issues or when they said there was less money to
do climate policy (City of Stockholm environment department official
interview, May 2009).
After the majority’s decision to end the City environmental funds,
the work required to put the ‘fossil fuel free’ goal into practice, increas-
ingly took place within a context of persistent budget constraint: ‘We
have seen for the past four years that people who are in charge of envi-
ronment in Stockholm, they don’t get new money, they just have ad hoc
projects or schemes on their day to day tasks…’ (Social democrat advis-
ers interview, June 2010). The ‘environmental’ budget of the municipal-
ity was, in effect, cut by almost half between 2006 and 2009 ‘primarily
for efficiency and prioritization of core business’ (City of Stockholm
2007a, p. 114), before being increased slightly to coincide with the
Green Capital award. Nevertheless, municipal environmental work in
2011 had a budget more than 30% lower than in 2006, and constituted
less than 1% of the City’s total budget.7 As a political adviser to the
Moderate majority (interview, April 2010) stated: ‘Our bottom line is
really result oriented… If you’re using tax paid money you should be
6These funds representing around a billion kronor (almost 100 million euros) for environmental
projects in Stockholm between 2004 and 2009 came into being after the sale of the municipal
energy company to Fortum in 2002 (City of Stockholm environment department official inter-
view, May 2009). We should note that this sale generated 14.5 billion kronor (see Rutherford
2008), so actually only around 7% of this money was directed to the environment. Interviewees
suggested that the remainder was used for various building and infrastructure projects, but also as
a means of avoiding increasing municipal taxes.
7These figures were extracted from budget reports on the City of Stockholm website.
81
sure that you get some kind of refund or result with it, you should be
really careful with this money’. This means that the hardest and most
expensive measures for a ‘fossil fuel free’ city were to be put back to
some point in the future in favour of ‘business as usual’ (Green Party
representative interview, May 2010). The figures for budget restric-
tions and the reasoning behind them thus nuance any idea of a durable
‘green’ urban policy paradigm.
Following the availability and evolution of budgets, staffing resources
and flows of money is thus an important way in which energy–climate
actions materialize and become sources of conflict in cities. This helps to
connect up externally oriented discourses and aspirations such as ‘world
class’, ‘green capital’ and ‘fossil fuel free’ with actual commitments to
and practices of urban change. While environmental actions have con-
tributed to international prestige for Stockholm, it is far from clear that
the material benefits of this in terms of new resources and investment
will be funnelled back into reinforcing these actions for the collective
good. Ongoing work towards the ‘fossil fuel free’ objective must con-
stantly prove its cost effectiveness and value for money which affects
the forms and outcomes of work that can be done. In this way, there is
an inherently material dimension to how discursive goals translate into
everyday policy work and how this in turn produces, or not, change.
This can also be seen when we turn to other specific areas of energy–
climate policy.
The Municipality, the Heating Company and ‘Darkness’

on the Edge of Town
Another major area of controversy has concerned the rather ambivalent

position of the City of Stockholm with regard to the Stockholm dis-
trict heating system. This ambivalence can be seen in material struggles
around the physical aspects of the system, constantly rising heating bills
for users and the energy mix and pollution from one particular plant.
The district heating system covers nearly 80% of Stockholm’s
total heating needs, is still being actively expanded, and has been,
as indicated, a major part of urban energy policy for CO2 emissions
82
J. Rutherford
reductions. The system was formerly owned and run by the municipal-
ity, but between 1998 and 2002, a quasi-privatization process merged
the municipal company with the Finnish energy company Fortum with
the City of Stockholm keeping just 9.9% of the shares (but 50% of the
influence through half the seats on the board) in the new entity called
Fortum Värme. The Mayor of Stockholm argued at the time that the
deal was good for Stockholm taxpayers and energy consumers since
it limited the city’s business risks and freed up capital that could be
invested in other projects, notably environmental projects. The problem
has been that district heating is a technical monopoly (i.e. the owner of
the network is the sole service provider), and there have been substantial
costs involved for city centre households wishing to switch to alternative
heat systems such as heat pumps (see Hellmer 2010). Indeed, Fortum
Värme has been free to set its own prices according to competing alter-
natives, leading to price rises in Stockholm of over 60% in the ten-year
period to 2011 (see Fig. 3.2). The price of district heating in Stockholm
far surpassed that in other major Swedish cities, with this difference
emerging especially in the period post-privatization (Nils Holgersson
gruppen 2010). The City of Stockholm did not use its presence in the
board of Fortum to contest the price rises and seemed happy with the
financial benefits it received from its minority shareholding. ‘We only
own half so we can’t tell what to do. All the decisions are though strictly
economic’ (City of Stockholm environment department official inter-
view, May 2009). At the same time, this increase of district heating
prices was heavily contested by another part of the Stockholm munic-
ipality in the form of its housing companies which defended, logically
enough, their tenants’ rights on the energy market. Indeed, one of the
housing companies, Stockholmshem, became so fed up with the high
prices of Fortum Värme that they sought to bypass the Fortum net-
work in the city by reactivating heat production from old boilers of
their own or by using geothermal heat pumps (Stockholmshem head
of energy department interview, June 2010). In this case here, we have
an internal set of conflicts in which some of the subsidiary companies
of the City were actively contesting the services provided by another
co-owned municipal company, while, in this reconfigured govern-
ance of a core local socio-technical system, the question of who was
83
Fig. 3.2 The rising price of district heating in Stockholm, 2000–2011 (Source

Extracted by the author from Nils Holgersson reports, 2000–2011 [Nils
Holgersson gruppen, n.d.])
ultimately accountable (and for what exactly) remained far from clear
(cf. Wihlborg and Palm 2008).
A further source of controversy concerned a single district heating
plant in the city. On 29 May 2010, a group of protesters tried to gain
access to the Värtaverket (värta means black or dark in Swedish) district
heating plant run by Fortum Värme in the north east of Stockholm.
Although nine people were arrested (Bolling and Svahn 2010), this
highly organized and well publicized demonstration by the action group
Shut It Down brought the ecological credentials of the city’s heating
system (and, some would argue, of the city itself ) into question in the
year in which Stockholm was the ‘Green Capital of Europe’.
The issue was that this particular heating plant was still half-fired by
coal, and given that the City was joint owner of Fortum Värme, this
was seen as being contrary to the objectives of decarbonization pro-
moted in the City’s climate policy. Although the company had outlined
plans to partially convert the plant to biofuels with an aim of at least a
50% admix of biofuels by 2015, environmental groups and the city’s
Green and Left parties argued that this was not quick enough, and in
84
J. Rutherford
particular, that Fortum had not stated whether and how it intended
the plant to gradually become fossil fuel free in the longer term. In
2010 Värtaverket topped the Naturskyddsföreningens (Swedish Society
for Nature Conservation) list of the worst environmental polluters in
the Swedish district heating industry (Aberg 2010).
This issue mobilized political opinion across the board. A 2010 report
from the Left party suggested that the plant produced roughly the same
quantity of CO2 equivalent emissions as all the cars in Stockholm,
and that it was responsible for fully a quarter of the city’s total CO2
equivalent emissions (Holmbäck and Warlenius 2010). It also quoted
a Fortum representative as saying that to decommission and replace
the existing plant would cost in the region of 4 billion kronor, which
the report authors calculated as being either the equivalent of the oper-
ating profit that Fortum made in just the first quarter of 2009 or the
estimated cost of building 3 kilometres of the controversial proposed
Stockholm Bypass road (see next section) (Holmbäck and Warlenius
2010).
There was even evidence of tension and disagreement about this
issue within the City. Fortum’s aim for at least a 50% admix of bio-
fuels at Värtan by 2015 was calculated by the City as leading to CO2
emissions reductions of 235,000 tons/year or 0.3 tons/inhabitant/year
(City of Stockholm 2010c). In their Action Plan for Energy and Climate
(p. 36), written by the Environment Department, the City also raised
(as a ‘conceivable measure’) the possibility of Fortum replacing this coal-
fired CHP plant with an alternative, cleaner plant—a move that would
decrease emissions by another 265,000 tons/year or 0.3 tons/inhabitant/
year. It was clear that the City’s Environment Department considered
this measure to be highly beneficial for Stockholm climate policy.
However, several phrases in the main text of the 2010 Action Plan
were revealingly corrected by errata at the end of the document (Table
3.1). While the possibility of replacing the Värtan plant with a cleaner
alternative was considered as ‘unprofitable’ or ‘not economically viable’
in the main body of the report, this was corrected to ‘not technically
feasible’ (p. 36), as the Left Party report cast doubt on the economic
argument. Furthermore, the phrase identifying Värtan CHP Plant 6
as ‘the single largest source of green-house gas emissions in Stockholm’
85
Table 3.1 Changes to the text of Stockholm’s Action Plan for Climate and
Energy
Text in report Correction in annex ‘errata’
An entire transition to renewable fuels An entire transition to renewable fuels
is not considered being economically is not considered technically feasible
viable by Fortum by Fortum
The single largest source of green- (deleted)
house gas emissions in Stockholm is
CHP Plant 6 in Värtan…
Cost efficiency [of using renewable Cost efficiency [of using renewable
fuels instead of coal] High fuels instead of coal] Low
Source Extracted from City of Stockholm (2010c)
was corrected (i.e. deleted) in the Action Plan (p. 37). Other corrections
attempted to nuance the potential of this ‘conceivable measure’ notably
by stating that there would be municipal ‘need for reinvestment in the
range of billions SEK to replace the lost CHP production capacity’ (p.
37) which would change the possible cost efficiency of such a measure
from ‘high’ to ‘low’. This issue highlighted quite significant tension and
even disagreements between the City’s environment division and the
Fortum heating company not just to policy direction and responsibil-
ity for policy coherence, but crucially over different forms of knowledge
and their flexible interpretation.
In short, there has been a very real material politics to district heating
provision in Stockholm through which things like the configuration of
the technical system, heating bill increases, choices of energy mix and
levels of pollution from plants have become sources of everyday strug-
gle over both energy production and consumption, and the extent to
which long-term energy–climate goals can be subject to compromise
and trade-off in the here and now.
The Congestion Charge and the Motorway:

Bypassing Climate Goals?
The other main area of contention has concerned shifts in mobil-

ity and transport policy and their effects on urban energy and climate
objectives.
86
J. Rutherford
The Stockholm congestion charge is a tax that has been imposed on

the majority of vehicles in Stockholm ‘to deal with congestion and traf-
fic disturbances’ (City of Stockholm 2010c, p. 11). It was first intro-
duced as a trial between January and July 2006. A referendum was
held in September 2006 in which a majority of residents of Stockholm
municipality voted to implement it permanently. The charge was there-
fore introduced permanently during the first half of 2007. In 2010 the
City calculated that traffic to and from the city centre had declined
by an average of almost 20% per year, while greenhouse gas emissions
‘have decreased by just over one per cent as a result of congestion tax’
(City of Stockholm 2010c, p. 11). Another report by SLB Analys meas-
ured emissions reductions as 4% between 2006 and 2008 (SLB Analys
2009, p. 4).
Compromise and conflict emerged though in the use of the money
obtained from the congestion charge. The incomes received were orig-
inally supposed to be used to finance public transport improvements
in the Stockholm region. The Moderate/Alliance majority decided,
however, to use the money to partly finance a new six-lane bypass road
(Förbifart Stockholm) aimed at displacing traffic from the city centre
to the western outskirts and facilitating links between the north and
the south of the region. This road was to cost approximately 27 bil-
lion Swedish kronor to be constructed and to be financed to the tune
of 80% by congestion charge income (Swedish Society for Nature
Conservation 2010). This decision became subject to virulent debate
on the local level between the City government, opposition parties and
environmental groups, and in particular between the Moderates who
argued that ‘it is absolutely necessary to build it’ (Moderate Party rep-
resentative interview, April 2010) and the Greens who argued that the
project was a travesty which withdrew a much needed source of invest-
ment in local public transport (Öjemar 2010). Indeed, in interviews
conducted in 2010 about political differences between parties on energy
and climate work in Stockholm, the new bypass road was unanimously
cited as the biggest area of conflict between the different groups.
The bypass project was included in the comprehensive city plan
voted by the City Council in spite of much opposition including from
the Green Party and the Left party who wanted the ‘insane project’
87
(City of Stockholm 2010b, p. 23) removed from the plan (City of

Stockholm 2010b, pp. 13, 22). Some argued that the Bypass project
was ‘the clearest example’ of the City not wanting or being able to meet
its own environmentalobjectives (City of Stockholm 2010b, p. 73).
Here again, therefore, we have an arena of contention created and work-
ing through a politicization of various materialities. Most obviously,
there has been a contested shift in the objects of policy orientation
from public transport routes, suburban trains and collective city region
mobility to road infrastructure, cars and individual level automobili-
ties.8 But this shift has also been enabled by a complex infrastructure of
cameras, databases and financial transfers which has proceeded to trans-
late payment for access to the city centre into tarmac for the motor-
way bypass instead of into the maintenance and extension of the public
transport system. In the longer run, there are clearly also concrete out-
comes of this policy shift in terms of the changing mobility possibili-
ties of different social groups, the upkeep and maintenance of trains and
tracks, and the environmental effects on the declining curve of the CO2
emissions graph of financing car use over public transport.
Energy–Climate Issues and the Politics

of Urban Materiality
These policy controversies and contestations can be seen as the arenas
within and through which energy–climate issues have come to matter
in Stockholm. They come to matter in at least three ways which rework
our understandings of the intersections between politics, urban materi-
ality and energy transitions.
First, focusing on the arenas of debate, i.e. the issues which mat-
ter to people on the ground, and through which energy–climate goals
are being implemented, translated and contested, demonstrates the
8In 2007 the new Moderate majority also took the decision to transfer 165 million kronor from
the Environmental Billion funds which was planned to be used for biogas projects to the City’s
Traffic and Waste Management Committee for road maintenance (City of Stockholm 2011a,
p. 2).
88
J. Rutherford
multiple or alternative analytical ways in which we can follow, trace or

count energy and carbon flows in the urban environment. While the
municipality of Stockholm has evidently been keen on highlighting
its success in local climate policy by measuring and charting the city’s
decreasing greenhouse gas emissions year by year, the contradictions,
compromises and conflicts which lie behind the downward trend line
on the municipality’s graphs serve to nuance this ‘success’ and constitute
alternative ‘measures’ of flows. The areas of contention we have focused
on can thus be seen as performances deviating from the official urban
policy script (cf. Hubbard 2006). Instead of framing energy transition
and climate change as a locally relevant issue (cf. Betsill and Bulkeley
2007), the tensions and conflicts around energy and climate issues in
Stockholm may partly derive from the lack of connection between local
issues (what matters to people) and the proposed policy responses, or
indeed from deviations in the latter. Many people have been sceptic
about both the achievability and pertinence of the ‘fossil fuel free’ dis-
course, but concretely it has been the transfer of public funds from the
congestion charge away from public transport to road construction, the
continuing use of a ‘dirty’ heating plant, the profit maximizing strat-
egy of the heating company, and the decreasing resources for energy
policy work which local actors have talked most about, discussed and
contested. The tensions around budgets and resources, district heating
and the congestion charge suggest indeed that any notion of success
or good practice is blunted by a series of trade-offs (emissions reduc-
tions for heating price rises and profits, financing environmental poli-
cyby privatizing energy provision, regulating car use in the city centre
but facilitating automobility in the outskirts…). Following the evolving,
diverging positions, interests and knowledges of actors (including the
opposing partisan views between the right-wing majority and the green
and left-wing opposition), and the relations and (financial and other)
flows between them is a way of highlighting both the always contested
nature and repercussions of energy and carbon flows in cities and the
potential ways in which change might come about.
Second, this helps to raise the crucial issue of which or whose city
is being prioritized in the formulation, implementation and contesta-
tion of energy–climate policy. The types and implications of city, urban
89
environment and energy/carbon flows underpinning urban life are likely

to be quite opposing according to whether one is interested in promot-
ing a ‘world-class’ Stockholm, a ‘fossil fuel free city’ or ‘a good place to
live’. Following the details and the modalities of operationalizing these
objectives and the changes of direction which have allowed politicians
to shift resources away from one objective towards other, perhaps con-
tradictory ones foreground these questions of who is speaking for what
kind of city, how (based on, for example, what interpretation of which
knowledge), why and with what forms of accountability. At the same
time, it has been highlighted that we need to be aware of the conflicting
and shifting positions of the actors involved, e.g. the multipositionality
of the City of Stockholm in the district heating system, who can rarely
be grouped together or made readily identifiable as a homogeneous coa-
lition driving urban energy–climate policy in one coherent direction.
The lack of a clear division of responsibility in some areas (and indeed
a clear vision of ‘who is governing what?’) problematizes the issue of
the extent to which the municipality can be held accountable for its
decisions and policy orientations (when ‘the municipality’ is always
multiple).
This kind of ‘messy’ urban energy governance also implies that it
remains wholly debatable the extent to which there is an ongoing
shift to some kind of new dominant ‘green’ urban paradigm wherein
shared green values drive environmental issues to structure or cut
across whole urban political agendas. It is striking the relatively limited
resources attributed to environmental issues even in the ‘Green Capital
of Europe’ when education, care and transport still constitute the main
policy priorities (see also Granberg and Elander 2007). Furthermore,
there is a persistent context of compromise and trade-off, also high-
lighted in previous work on the politics of city-building in Stockholm
and cities elsewhere (see, for example, Le Galès 2002), which results
from both the presence of strong diverging interests (majority, opposi-
tion, social groups) and the limits to the strength and diffusion of green
values, and thus to the environmentalization of urban policy (when a
suburban motorway can, for example, be deemed more ‘necessary’ than
ensuring coherence of actions and decisions with regard to the ‘fossil
fuel free’ policy).
90
J. Rutherford
Third, the Stockholm case illustrates the centrality of urban materi-

ality to debates and negotiations over low carbon urban futures. On a
first level, it shows how climate mitigation discourse (‘fossil fuel free’)
becomes confronted with the materialities of energy policy, whether it
be technical infrastructure such as networks, plants and roads or every-
day objects like heating bills, board meetings and the placards of pro-
testers. The politics of urban transition is here a set of struggles over
the evolving, everyday materialities and infrastructures that matter to
Stockholm citizens.
On another level, however, it suggests the need to go beyond materi-
ality solely as static, fixed infrastructures or objects to a discussion of the
dynamics of materiality through which transition is elaborated, oper-
ated and contested. There is indeed a performance, or a set of perfor-
mances, of urban materiality (Latham 2016): work, activity, operation,
and people generally fulfilling tasks to both sustain and evolve energy
and climate matters. This is the case when it is the work of everyday
policy implementation or the activity associated with the organization
of protest and formulation of policy alternatives. Struggles over energy–
climate issues in Stockholm are effectively performed through reor-
dering, distribution and appropriation of material entities. The City’s
emissions graph, the chimney of Värtaverket and the map of the bypass
have organized certain linear flows and relations, but at the same time,
each of these has meant different things to different groups and has
been mobilized to support diverging interests. Indeed, it is through pro-
cesses and practices of disordering and deflection of linearity that these
objects come to matter: debate over the trajectory and implications of
the emissions graph, protest at the heating plant because of what comes
out of the chimney, the use of alternative sources of heating to combat
price rises, contestation over road building and its financing. This sug-
gests that the politics of urban energy and climate issues emerges not
just over infrastructure and concrete objects per se, but more specifically
in the processes of overflowing of these infrastructures and objects, and
therefore the ways in which urban materiality is constantly appropriated
through the practices and performances of varying groups and interests
(see also Barry 2013).
91
This brings us back to the first point, because it proposes that chart-
ing sites and processes of material politics can be an alternative way of
tracing the effectivity of urban low carbon transition, beyond quanti-
tative carbon acccounting and measuring of energy flows in cities.
Taking into account the multiple flows (of waste emissions, heat, peo-
ple, money, best practice ideas…) related to urban energy–climate issues
and the different orderings and disorderings through which they cir-
culate helps to disrupt the linear pathways which normative transition
discourse proclaims and enacts. Unpacking the diverse and undulating
processes through which energy and climate issues come to matter in
the urban arena is thus a useful means of tracing how transition is being
performed, contested and repoliticized.
Conclusion
There has been significant debate over the proposed visions for
Stockholm’s future ‘green’ development. This debate was captured by
the question of whether the city was concretely aiming to be both or
either ‘fossil fuel free’ by 2050 and/or ‘world class’ in 2030, and by the
different means and resources which were attributed to working con-
cretely and materially towards these objectives. In unpacking not just
these discursive visions and ideals, but also the more contingent polit-
ical processes and struggles through which energy–climate policy has
been actually formulated, implemented and contested in Stockholm,
this chapter has contributed to deepening the level of analysis of urban
energy–climate policies. It has gone beyond a simple reaffirmation of
both an ‘implementation gap’ between generic, ambitious policy dis-
course and actual policy action, and an emerging ecological moderni-
zation agenda in which energy–climate policy is seen as creating new
opportunities for urban development and growth which could inevita-
bly and automatically contribute to the creation of ‘a world-class city’
in the near future. The chapter has argued that a core focus on material
politics and everyday struggles around urban energy and climate issues
is a useful means of grasping how long-term orientations are materially
92
J. Rutherford
translated here and now, in diverse ways by diverse urban actors, onto
the local political stage.
I argue that urban energy–climate issues inherently articulate tran-
sition, politics and materiality in shifting configurations. Transition
must be seen as a heterogeneous process replete with potential for con-
troversy and contention because change inherently operates through a
set of urban materialities, not just represented by instruments, objects
and infrastructures per se, but more performed by the multiple arrange-
ments, mobilizations and control of these things by particular interests
and groups.
While this opens up the potential for a repoliticization of urban
energy and climate issues, it also at the same time poses the practical
question of how municipalities can conceive and implement durable
energy and climate policies in a constantly shifting urban policy con-
text. While energy, environmental issues and carbon management
are sometimes portrayed as central now to the whole of urban pol-
icy, this must be nuanced by the still relatively limited resources actu-
ally attributed to green issues in many municipalities. This means that
more often than not they need to be in symphony with other policies,
needs and interests (as with the current ‘green growth’ agenda). When
they conflict too much with more important priorities, they may be
bypassed, reconfigured or even abandoned (as in the case of the financ-
ing of climate-neutral public transport from the congestion charge
in Stockholm). These moments of the ‘unfixing’ of environmental–
energy–climate priorities are important because they reveal the logic
of reversibility which seems to dominate current policy in this field.
Policy oriented towards embedding path dependencies in the form of
large-scale physical infrastructures may be increasingly contested as
it materializes a fixed, singular pathway of transition. More reflexive
and adaptive policy is increasingly demanded, which might take into
account more open notions of materiality and transition as explored in
this chapter. The question that remains unclear though is how to mobi-
lize more diverse ideas of urban materiality and urban change to con-
struct stable, longer term actions for energy and climate issues which
would prove to be durable and resilient in the face of threats of diver-
sion of policy attention and resources to other short-term needs.
93
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Movements in Contemporary Stockholm. International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 28 (1): 68–85.
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manhållen klimat- och energipolitik – Energi. Stockholm: Regeringskansliet.
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manhållen klimat- och energipolitik – Klimat. Stockholm: Regeringskansliet.
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Local Technical Systems—An Issue of Accountability. Local Government
Studies 34 (3): 349–362.
4
Active Infrastructures and the Spirit
of Energy Transition in Paris
Introduction
In the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Paris, Raoul Dufy’s monu-
mental fresque La fée électricité (The spirit of electricity) stands out.1
This spectacular 600 m2 panoramic mural commissioned for the 1937
International Art and Technology Exhibition aimed, according to the
brief given to Dufy by the Paris Electricity Distribution Company, ‘to
promote the role of electricity in the life of the nation and especially the
crucial social role played by electric light’ (MAM 2018). It combines
a view of the social history and the technological development of elec-
tricity with Greek mythology as the thunderbolts of Zeus interconnect
power plants and nature is linked to architecture, as seen in the gods of
Olympus encircling the ultramodern achievement of the Ivry sur Seine
generation station: ‘This dual narrative thread is resolved in an apoth-
eosis as Iris, the messenger of the gods and daughter of Electra flies
through the light above an orchestra and the capital cities of the world
1The title has also been translated more directly as ‘The electricity fairy’, but this does not capture
as well, in my view, the sense of a widespread diffusion of a life-sustaining current or phenomena.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_4
100
J. Rutherford
disseminating all the colours of the spectrum’ (MAM 2015). Looking

from right to left, we are brought gradually to the city as technologi-
cal modernity mobilizes nature and interconnects cities and urban lives
across the world. Dufy’s work projects recognition of the importance of
energy for cities and the global–local interconnection of societies and a
depiction of the heroic Promethean promise of energy futures as tech-
nological power flows magically across the planet.
This chapter explores how visions and notions of ‘energy transition’
come to be grounded in the Paris region. Through a focus on three
ongoing sites and processes of change, I show how this transition actu-
ally involves a parallel set of distinctive concerns around low carbon,
municipal control of infrastructure and its accountability, and the con-
tinuing role of nuclear power. Each of these concerns emerges through
debates and contests (or knowledge controversies) around the make-up,
functioning and use of particular objects or materials (resources, pipes,
contracts, reports, radiators). Current Parisian reveries and promises of
a sustainable, decarbonized, remunicipalized City of Light are produced
by and productive of tensions and struggles over how energy infrastruc-
tures and flows come to matter in the French capital. As the details of
Dufy’s tableau reveal, there is a very real material politics to urban fan-
tasies which enrol energy in particular ways and for particular interests
into current and future socio-technical apotheoses.
I suggest that understanding the nature, modalities, outcomes and
possibilities of urban transition in Paris necessitates a double, inter-
twined move. First, it is very tempting to read what is going on in
Paris on the energy transition front in relation to, or in comparison
with, other cities where progress is more advanced or appears to have
achieved more tangible results. Ignoring issues of comparability of
measures and indicators, this would lead to a focus on the factors or
reasons for the relative lack of success so far or for the belittled place
of Paris on some generic global trajectory or pathway to renewable
energy use or decarbonized energy systems. If we take measures of CO2
emissions as an example, these suggest that transition in Paris is some-
thing of a struggle with stable rather than declining figures (see Mairie
de Paris 2012a), and that, whether it is the 20% reduction by 2020 on
4 Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition …
101
a European level, the Factor 4 reduction by 2050 on a national level

and/or the 25% reduction by 2025 on a municipal level, Paris is there-
fore not decarbonizing fast enough. The chapter eschews this view of
Paris as untransitioning or not transitioning, which is based on a nar-
row, homogeneous definition or understanding of transition processes
in which absolute quantitative endpoints, results or desires can be used
to capture or analyse the significance or spirit of the far wider, more
complex and sometimes hidden set of processes and practices through
and for which transition is actually being done. This is in keeping with
research which has conceived energy/low carbon transitions as emerg-
ing heterogeneous development processes rather than pathways with
fixed singular endpoints or aims (see, for example, Bulkeley et al. 2011;
Bridge et al. 2013). Here, the urban becomes a crucial nexus for energy
transitions in the work of and debate and interplay between many var-
ied actors and interests (Rutherford and Coutard 2014), pointing to
recognition of diverging points of view on future urban energy config-
urations in specific contexts. There is, indeed, a fundamental tension or
controversy between different actors, groups and interests in Paris over
even defining and framing the issue, as well as over the content and pro-
cesses of operation of any ‘transition’.2 In this context, we need to avoid
foreclosing debate around what might constitute a productive site,
arena or practice of future urban change. A more processual perspec-
tive is adopted here to privilege exploration and excavation of where,
how, why and by/for who transition work is (actually or potentially)
being done, thus unsettling and disrupting habitual understandings and
frames of reference focused solely on extracting carbon or increasing
renewable energy percentages in official statistics and documents.
This focus on emerging transition processes and practices, irrespec-
tive of measurable results, then means rethinking the relationship
between the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ in transition—specifically, the role
2As one interviewee put it for example: ‘We would like the term “energy transition” to disappear
and to be replaced by “climate, air, energy”. At least that would be clear, because in my opinion in
two years the energy transition will not be fashionable and everyone will have forgotten what it is’
(City of Paris official interview, May 2013).
102
J. Rutherford
of urban materiality in socio-technical change. The work of transition

always involves ways of acting on and reconfiguring urban materiality
for particular interests, which is an inherently political process, so that
struggles over what matters or making things matter have to be seen
in a conjoined material and political sense. Indeed, many of the ten-
sions and struggles over Paris socio-technical systems emerge around
the flows, infrastructures and materialities which make up the systems
and their functioning. Barry’s work (2013) discussed in Chapter 1 is
particularly relevant here as artefacts and relations of energy systems
become fundamental to the conduct and possibilities of Parisian transi-
tion politics. This means focusing on overlaps, blurring and recombina-
tions of actors, objects and technical configurations in a co-productive
process wherein it is difficult to disentangle or to define any particular
individual components without referring to their relational constitution
and effects.
Live in the City of Light: Contentious

Infrastructures and Heterogeneous Transitions
In this section, I focus on three infrastructural-urban material are-
nas wherein part of the salience of ‘the political situation’ of tran-
sition is negotiated: in decarbonizing district heating systems, in
control over electricity distribution and in linking electric heating to
nuclear futures. These reflect a technical and political focus in Paris
on enactment of transition through debating and making changes to
socio-technical systems where the mandate of local policy actors is
concentrated (Ged 2015), but where infrastructure also demonstrates
its capacity to escape control or management to some degree. Other
arenas are available—energy efficiency and building retrofit, eco-urban
projects, air quality, transport systems and mobility—and, by exploring
these instead, some of the objects and flows under study would change,
but there would still be a political process of materially constituting
transition possibilities, which is the basis of what I’m trying to get at
here.
103
Decarbonizing Heat Systems:

Pipes, Resources and ‘Gruyère Politics’
There is much work going on in and around the city on different lev-
els to address climate and energy issues and to meet various decarbon-
ization goals. One important emerging focus for this work has been
urban heating provision. Paris has one of the oldest and most extensive
district heating systems in Europe. There is an explicit policy objective
both on a city and on a regional level to enlarge and interconnect the
district heating system to increase economies of scale and to diversify
and improve the flexibility of the system, e.g. render it more resilient by
using more than one resource. Paris municipal plans and actors make
reference to using its position as owner of the heat infrastructure and
co-owner of the Compagnie Parisienne de Chauffage Urbain (CPCU) dis-
tribution company to extend the network to other parts of the city cur-
rently heated by less efficient fuel or electricity (Mairie de Paris 2012b).
The regional level climate air and energy master plan (SRCAE) of
December 2012 outlined an ambitious goal for a 40% increase in con-
nections to heat systems by 2020, representing 450,000 extra buildings,
to be achieved by extension of existing systems and interconnection
of networks (Conseil Régional d’Ile-de-France and Prefet de la Région
d’Ile-de-France 2012). But how these objectives are to be met, and how
the current heat system can be reconfigured for transition, are conten-
tious issues.
It is not clear for many actors how the goal of 40% more connec-
tions to heat systems by 2020 is to be achieved. As of 2015, growth in
connections was around 1.5% per year, which is a long way from the
goal, such that a real connection policy needs to be outlined and imple-
mented (heating company official interview, May 2013). It is not evi-
dent either which is the best level for investment and heat load. Many
suggest a collective and mutualised approach, albeit across different
territories (Paris and the inner ring of municipalities, or the new Paris
Métropole inter-municipal cooperation structure…), but this would
require somebody to take a lead and to organize things, and urban gov-
ernance has been in a state of flux in Paris in recent times.
104
J. Rutherford
Furthermore, heating systems are varied and contentious bits of

urban materiality. Objectives of interconnection, mutualisation and
economies of scale require overcoming the technical and contractual dif-
ficulties of linking together different systems. The CPCU Paris-centred
network is a steam system, while systems in surrounding municipalities
use hot water. There are thermodynamic limits to the extent to which
energy can be transferred between a hot water system at 80 °C and a
high-pressure steam/vapour system at 230 °C. These different technol-
ogies were one reason, along with local political tensions, preventing
the Batignolles planning project in the north-west of the city send-
ing heat ‘easily and cheaply’ across the municipal border into neigh-
bouring Clichy Levallois (City of Paris official interview, May 2013).
Interconnection of heat systems is also problematised by the different
types of existing contracts through which municipalities have conceded
their own systems to particular operators, e.g. distribution only as in
the case of Paris or also production as in other municipal contracts. The
lengths of each contract and the dates when they are up for renewal also
vary greatly. French public contract regulations (the Code des Marchés
Publics ) prevent municipalities from modifying or stopping a particular
contract, so combining or mutualising separate systems across munici-
pal boundaries would require, in theory, separate contracts to be up for
renewal at the same time and to have similar conditions of operation.
Interviewees referred to the ‘tangle’ or ‘minefield’ of contracts stopping
what would appear to be common-sense technical connections such as
the use of recuperated heat from EDF’s Ivry electricity plant to the east
of the city which is currently just lost (City of Paris works department
official interview, May 2013).
Heating pipes are also presented as a political nightmare. They are
placed under the road rather than the pavement due to their diameter,
and so necessitate costly major street works for their repair and main-
tenance. These works also require permits from local authorities who
are rarely keen for streets to be regularly dug up due to unpopularity
with local residents. The City of Paris works department cites this local
opposition as an important factor on the extension and maintenance
of the CPCU system, which can lead in some areas where there has
been an accumulation of works to local politicians blocking decisions
105
for any new street works (City of Paris works department official inter-
view, May 2013). Digging up roads, even for urgent maintenance, is
‘almost impossible’ for a 12 month period prior to local elections (heat-
ing company official interview, May 2013). A major biomass plant
project in the north-east of Paris, which was a major part of plans for
further decarbonizing Paris’s heat system, was abandoned when it was
estimated that laying the pipes linking the plant to the existing CPCU
network would have been as costly as building the plant itself due to
them traversing five municipalities. For at least one interviewee using
the analogy of a hard cheese full of holes, this inherent degree of perma-
nent contestation represents the substantial difficulties of working with
the Paris ‘gruyère’ (heating company official interview, May 2013).
Another area of uncertainty and tension in heat systems concerns
ways to drastically increase the proportion of renewable and recuper-
ated heat in the energy mix of systems. It is not clear, for many actors,
how this can be achieved. In spite of the use of just over 40% waste
incineration (recuperated energy) in CPCU’s energy mix, until recently
the company found it difficult to reach the level of 50% renewable and
recuperated heat. This threshold triggers both a decrease in VAT level
from 19.6 to 5.5% thus permitting a reduction in customer tariffs, and
a process of so-called ‘classification’ of networks allowing the City of
Paris to force new buildings and planning projects to connect to exist-
ing heat networks which is an important element in ensuring a return
on infrastructure investments.
Biomass resources have represented around 3% of the mix in the
region (or 0.1 Mtep), yet this is supposed to increase to 30% of the mix
(or 1.2 Mtep) by 2020 according to the SRCAE. This increased use of
biomass is a primary instrument to meet local climate and energy plan
objectives. Plans are to use an existing plant and replace half the coal
with wood pellets that are not humid and burn quite easily, and can
be used in the same boilers. But this demands an increase in logistical
capacity for transport and storage necessitating substantial investment
given current limits to local availability and access to biomass resources.
The wood has therefore been sourced initially at least from Canada and
Ukraine because they have an established supply chain and industry
which France does not yet have. Some observers unsurprisingly question
106
J. Rutherford
the carbon efficiency of long-distance imports of wood to meet cli-

mate and energy goals (various interviews). Furthermore, in the longer
term, the Paris region is not the only French region orienting its cli-
mate and energy plan around biomass, leading to prospective competi-
tion for resources where France is unlikely to be able to produce enough
wood for all (City of Paris works department official interview, May
2013). The very definition of biomass has also come under interroga-
tion. Wood from construction projects and wood pallets are classed as
‘waste’ by French legislation, and so are subject to a restriction on their
treatment. Some actors denounce the contradictions of a system which
is supposed to be trying to create a biomass industry as part of a drive
to energy transition, and yet which is exporting perfectly usable wood
pallets to Sweden (Senior advisor to City of Paris politician interview,
May 2013).
In the SRCAE, geothermal energy is also supposed to increase from
3% to 13% of the regional energy mix by 2020. But geothermal energy
requires a lower temperature heat network than CPCU’s vapour net-
work (City of Paris works department official interview, May 2013).
There can also only be one geothermal well or sink within a certain
perimeter to avoid overextraction problems, which can create inter-
municipal problems if the area crosses boundaries (City of Paris offi-
cial interview, May 2013) or even competition over what is actually a
limited resource even though the Ile-de-France region is located on the
large Dogger aquifer (City of Paris works department official interview,
May 2013). The heavy initial investment required for either large-scale
biomass or geothermal production appears to be a significant barrier
(heating company official interview, May 2013). Networks using these
resources would need to connect to thousands of homes to guarantee
any kind of heat load and a return on investment, and the lack of this
demand base has led to abandoning of possible projects (City of Paris
official interview, May 2013).
In sum, resource flows, infrastructure adjustments, contractual and
regulatory issues and their techno-political interpretation and mobiliza-
tion constitute major arenas of struggle over how to organize provision
of low carbon heat for Paris to meet its climate and energy objectives.
107
Contract and Control: Contested Properties

of Electricity Distribution
After many years of being taken care of behind the scenes, electricity
distribution has become a local matter again in Paris and other French
cities. The City of Paris owns its electricity distribution system but it
has been run by EDF since 1955 under the terms of a 55-year public
service concession contract. Following electricity sector reforms, vertical
separation of activities led to the creation of a wholly owned subsidi-
ary ERDF in 2008 for distribution in most of France (as a local public
service monopoly) with EDF concentrating on production and sale.3
The distribution contract came up for renewal at the end of 2009 in a
context of debate over apparent lack of EDF/ERDF investment in the
city’s electric grid, which was linked by the press to a series of black-
outs and power cuts in the city (Bezat 2010). The contract became the
core element in technical, administrative, financial and legal debate and
wrangling over urban electricity provision. It was notably a key point
of focus for local politicians, tasked with implementing a local climate–
energy plan, to retake an interest in and regain some control over a sys-
tem and a public service that had become shaped largely to meet the
particular interests of EDF. High tension emerged over a low tension
grid, as shown by the detailed investigations and reports produced by
national and regional public accounting courts,4 the complex legal and
administrative procedure, and the mediatization of the stakes, process
and outcome.
The process of negotiation of renewal of the contract became a dis-
pute over the actual system itself both in terms of ownership of some of
its components, and control of the system and the interests which were
to be privileged through this control. In particular, there were diverging
3Local electricity supply is also a separate public service. The City of Paris has, however, attributed
a single public service concession for both services (distribution and supply) to ERDF and EDF
(as separate but closely linked companies). For the Regional Court of Accounts, this is ‘a source
of confusion and opacity’ (Chambre Régionale des Comptes d’Ile-de-France 2010, p. 2).
4These administrative tribunals have the task of overseeing and verifying the accounts of public
authorities and local governments.

108
J. Rutherford
views of whether this was Paris’s network to be shaped according to the

needs of the capital, or a local network within ERDF’s national system
with the maintenance and safeguarding of the latter as the primordial
concern.
The City of Paris remains the owner of all infrastructure and equip-
ment between the distribution substations, where voltage is stepped
down from RTE’s transmission grid, up to and including customer
meters. However, it emerged that there were some divergences over bits
of property and infrastructure as an inventory had not been kept up-
to-date during the EDF concession. This is a crucial question for
accounting, for legal issues and for calculation both of investments
required in the delegated system and the annual return or royalty
(redevance ) that the municipality obtains based on the performance of
ERDF, and which Paris redistributes to help poorer households pay their
energy bills. There was dispute over the financial value and provisions for
investment and renewal of the ageing, amortized infrastructure, and the
complex accounting methods for calculating these. The Regional Court
of Accounts criticized the mode of calculation used by ERDF (Chambre
Régionale des Comptes d’Ile-de-France 2010, p. 3). This was linked
to contestation over ownership of some assets (meters, substations…)
(Baupin and Gassin 2009), and their value or rate of depreciation,
which directly affects investments which are calculated according to the
gross value of assets (FNCCR 2015, p. 39). The investment value of the
assets (and thus the provision made for maintenance and renewal of the
Paris system) in EDF/ERDF’s accounting rapidly declined from around
1 billion euros at the end of 2001 to only 350 million euros at the end
of 2009, i.e. the investment required to return the infrastructure to the
City in its ‘original’ state would be three times less. Local politicians
were heavily critical of the situation, even appearing on DailyMotion
(Energie 2007 2009) to denounce the ‘pillaging’, ‘hemorrhage’ and
‘evaporation’ of money from the Paris system into the accounting books
and results of EDF on a national level (Baupin and Gassin 2009).5
5A 2009 audit identified a level of underinvestment in the Paris network to the tune of between
750 million and 1 billion euros, so it is an ageing infrastructure which has been 60% amortized
(compared to a national average of 39%) (Baupin and Gassin 2009).
109
As well as a dispute around control over electricity distribution and

ownership of parts of the system, this was at the same time a dispute
about knowledge of the system, transparency and circulation of infor-
mation. The City refused to accept and validate EDF’s annual reports
for both public services of distribution and supply because they did
not contain sufficient technical and financial information to allow it
to monitor the evolution of its system. When ERDF carries out invest-
ment and maintenance work in the distribution system, the City is
totally reliant on ERDF for information about the nature and extent
of the work. Yet, the Regional Court of Accounts found that annual
reports ‘contained little information about the means, technical and
human notably, put in place by EDF to reach its objectives’ (Chambre
Régionale des Comptes d’Ile-de-France 2010, p. 13). ERDF is work-
ing on a national level with hundreds of concessions and the techni-
cal functioning and interconnection of distribution networks means it
is difficult to extract and provide information about one local system
(Cour des Comptes 2013, p. 121). There is a knowledge controversy
then about the scale (maille ) of extraction and provision of informa-
tion, or over where the boundary might be between a Paris ‘inside’ and
a national ‘outside’.6 So before taking a decision on the prolongation
of the contract at the end of 2009, and the prospective terms of this,
the City conducted three ‘internal’ audits itself of the state of affairs for
technical, property and financial-legal concerns. As the City of Paris
politicians involved in negotiations observed understatedly at the time:
‘After decades of unilateral management and within a framework which
doesn’t give much room to local authorities, reaffirming the rights of the
City has not been without trouble’ (Baupin and Gassin 2009, p. 2).
Yet, notably given the uncertainty over the continuing regulatory sta-
tus of distribution monopolies, the City of Paris was unprepared to do
anything other than adjust the terms of its contract with ERDF-EDF. A
compromise was eventually negotiated leading to a prolongation of the
6Itis only since the end of 2013 that ERDF has been obliged by State Council (Conseil d’Etat ),
the administrative supreme court, to provide detailed disaggregated technical and financial infor-
mation about each of the contracts that it runs.
110
J. Rutherford
existing contract for 15 years, which was itself contested by a compet-

ing electricity company. This contained a number of clauses clarifying
investments and procedures, regarding provision of information nota-
bly. It also opened the possibility for the City to potentially remunici-
palize the system and service before then if regulations and conditions
were to allow, which is viewed as important in safeguarding local capac-
ity in the context of the need to constantly track and update evolving
Paris climate–energy plans in the coming years (Ville de Paris, ERDF,
and EDF 2009).
This conflict involving contract negotiation, accounting reports, legal
wrangling and technical expertise brought an amortized infrastructure
back to life, and recreated a degree of local capacity and control over a
socio-technical system in transition.
Electric Heating and Nuclear Futures
The nuclear question and its place in the energy mix in France has long
been a highly sensitive and divisive one, bound up in industrial strat-
egy, government energy policy and national identity among other things
(Hecht 1998; Topçu 2013). The terms set for the ‘national debate’
on energy transition in France from 2011, and indeed in the broader
Grenelle environmental discussions from 2007, deliberately excluded
nuclear power, thus refusing to frame it as an issue or a question up
for debate. There is so much capital, expertise and vested interests sunk
into nuclear infrastructure in France that alternatives have long been
very difficult to envisage or politically taboo to put on the agenda.
Widespread availability of electricity and relatively low electricity tar-
iffs since the 1970s have combined with EDF’s past push for increas-
ing electricity consumption to justify and make use of its investments
in nuclear power plants since the 1960s.7 Effective and persistent lob-
bying since then has generally ensured the importance and growth of
7Indeed, at this time electricity began to be produced in quantities which vastly surpassed demand:
‘we didn’t know at all who was going to consume it all’ (EDF engineer, quoted in Weiler 2016).
111
electricity use. Around 75% of French electricity production currently

comes from nuclear plants.
The nuclear issue has, nevertheless, become more discussed in
recent years, following the Fukushima disaster and in relation to the
age of production plants across France. Recent government policy
had envisaged reducing the proportion of nuclear in the electricity
mix to 50% by 2025, but it has now rowed back on this to beyond
2030. Meanwhile, in 2015, for the first time a French government
agency published a report envisaging a 100% renewable, non-nuclear
national future, albeit focused on techno-economic issues and without
any mention of EDF (ADEME 2015; see Sinaï 2015; Gueugneau and
Lindgaard 2015).
While the national level is primordial in the governing and function-
ing of France’s electricity system, there is also an arguably increasing
recognition of the urban dimensions to this system through the sheer
‘weight’ of large cities and especially Paris in terms of energy demand.
The electricity grid has long been oriented towards ensuring Paris’s
energy security in particular, and provision of certain strategic parts
of the capital region such as La Défense, Saclay and new nodes of the
Grand Paris initiative continues to focus attention (EDF regional offi-
cial interview, March 2015). Yet the reemerging national debate around
nuclear also comes to matter in the Paris urban arena through inter-
connections between a series of specific issues including grid mix, fine-
grained energy efficiency measurements and building performance, local
policy objectives, domestic heating radiators and individual practices of
comfort.
The production of knowledge, expertise and opinion around these
issues sustains an idea of a variable and contested ‘performance’ of
the urban fabric in climate and environmental terms. A succession of
analytical reports have been produced by Paris planners, ‘grounding’
ambitious objectives in the existing urban fabric of Paris, and using a
variety of methods (cartography, thermography, modelling, scenario-
building…) to translate technical knowledge about the evolving rela-
tionship between networks and buildings into policy choices (APUR
2013, 2014). But even this fine-grained analysis has not produced
consensus.
112
J. Rutherford
One recurring issue has been what to do (or not) about the high
proportion of historic Haussmannian homes and buildings in cen-
tral Paris with electric heating (around 40%). The SRCAE regional
plan translates national objectives into aims for 5% electricity con-
sumption reduction by 2020 (on 2005 level) and 10% reduction by
2050, explicitly mentioning the need to reduce electric heating in this
regard (Conseil Régional d’Ile-de-France and Prefet de la Région d’Ile-
de-France 2012, p. 15). Analysis by APUR planners suggests that indi-
vidual meters have been shown to reduce consumption by 25% (APUR
2013, p. 9), but this has long been a controversial issue. In the dis-
cussions leading to the creation of the first Paris climate plan of 2007,
APUR analysis showed buildings with individual electric heating to be
quite good from a CO2 emissions perspective as they had easily adjusta-
ble radiators in apartments whose inhabitants were often young profes-
sionals who tended to have an environmentally aware behaviour and to
switch radiators off during the day while they were at work. There were
many buildings with collective gas or fuel systems where consumption
was far less controlled and more polluting (APUR 2007).8 The APUR
reports thus endorsed electric heating over other forms and suggested
installation of individual meters in apartment buildings heated by fos-
sil fuels which was argued as stimulating more virtuous behaviour from
residents compared to when heating was just part of general collective
charges (APUR planner interview, March 2015). However, in one of
the clearest examples of tensions over transition objectives in Paris, the
reports ended up being censored and their publication delayed by green
party politicians who were part of the political majority at the time in
the Paris council. Their absolute priority was to contest nuclear power,
and therefore electric heating, even more than CO2 emissions.
In more recent years, electric radiators have in particular come to
be held directly ‘responsible’ for increasing peak consumption levels
(Juilliard 2013). Indeed, RTE’s annual reports demonstrate this impact
8In the study, individual electric heating consumed less than 100 KWh/m2/year compared to
collective gas or district heating at around 250 KWh/m2/year. The former also produced far less
CO2 at 89 kg/inhabitant compared to 665 kg/inhabitant for fuel heating (APUR 2007, summary
on p. 48).
113
(e.g. RTE 2012; see Fabrégat 2013). The high proportion of electric
heating is a French and Paris specificity, developed or ‘invented’ (Weiler
2016) to help justify French industrial policy of massive investment in
nuclear production of electricity by EDF in the past (Lelievre 2017) to
alleviate the nation’s energy dependence which was keenly felt particu-
larly during the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Around a third of French
homes (more than 9 million homes) have electric heating (Berghmans
and Rüdinger 2017). It has been estimated that France has as many
electric radiators as the rest of Europe put together, as developers were
obliged in the past by EDF and government policy to instal electric
heating systems in their buildings, although many developers and
property owners were happy to do so, as installation costs were low and
then it was/is the tenants who pay the electricity bills (Lelievre 2017;
Weiler 2016).
The consequences of this past choice are still debated, defended by
those close to the incumbent energy company (Le Ngoc 2017) and
attacked by others as ‘catastrophic’ for its costs in terms of rising bills,
increasing energy precarities, blackout risks and ecological inefficien-
cies (NégaWatt 2009a; Weiler 2016). It is estimated for example that
3 KWh of energy are needed for every 1 KWh of electric heating con-
sumed as two-thirds of production is lost in cooling towers and through
grid transport (Weiler 2016).
As for the previous vignettes, tensions are culminating towards ‘break-
ing point’ in widespread recognition of the need to now take a strategic,
systemic and long-term decision about French energy futures. Long-
held infrastructure inertias and lock-ins are being looked at again as
‘peak management’ becomes ever more fragile and for some reveals itself
to be a ‘politically correct’ term for an electricity system working for a
minority against the majority (NégaWatt 2009b). The high propor-
tion of electric heating and of nuclear in the French energy mix means
that there is a constant and delicate real-time balancing act between
production and consumption, and anticipation of consumption levels,
especially in cold winter periods. This is in spite of oversized infrastruc-
ture permitting electric heating in millions of homes. It is calculated
that every temperature drop of 1 °C in France in winter brings online
extra consumption equivalent to the city of Paris (NégaWatt 2009b).
114
J. Rutherford
This tends to lead to now ageing 40-year-old reactors working flat

out in winter months and being backed up by a combination of fos-
sil fuel-driven plants and the cheapest (and therefore rarely the clean-
est) available electricity on the European market bought by RTE, the
grid manager (Weiler 2016). A significant question now is whether to
‘extend the lives’ of these nuclear reactors or to replace them, and if so
how and when to do this, or whether to look at other options involving
mass development of renewables9 and building retrofits (following on
from RT 2012 energy efficiency regulations). For many actors, improv-
ing the energy efficiency of the building stock is the key first step for any
French energy transition, but the power of EDF and other big players
and the continuing hold of a solution through large-scale infrastructure
mean that a productionist logic continues to hold reign.
So even here a highly ideological and charged issue around the pro-
portion of nuclear power in the energy mix becomes grounded and a
site of dispute through material engagement of Parisian residents,
energy companies and urban planners with radiators, peak loads and
building efficiency measures. The 2015 energy transition legislation
attempted to capture the main stakes, but it does not set out a clear
pathway about how to achieve many of its specific objectives and there
remain ‘multiple uncertainties’ about energy system futures with regular
political shifts and the heavy degree of lock-in to existing infrastructure
configurations (Berghmans and Rüdinger 2017).
Effective Materiality
These three vignettes highlight something of the use of debates over and
practices of infrastructure reconfiguration in ‘energy transition’ work in
Paris. They also illustrate the inherently contested nature of the ongoing
making of energy future-proof urban fabrics. More technology, more pro-
duction and circulation of information, and more knowledge and reflexive
9A Greenpeace study showed that an electricity future based on renewables would provide more
value for money than renewing nuclear plants (Greenpeace 2014).

115
feedback in socio-technical systems does not reduce the possibility or the

intensity of dispute and disagreement (it does not produce consensus), but
instead leads to new sites and matters of politics with indeterminate (and
contingent) bounds and significance (Barry 2013, p. 10).
The three arenas constitute particular knowledge controversies about
or around infrastructure, through which a wider ‘political situation’
around the nature, modalities, outcomes and possibilities of energy
transition is debated, negotiated and effected. Disputes emerge and
circulate around pipes, resources and energy mixes, contracts, finance,
meters and urban projects, recombining bits of infrastructure and the
urban fabric with the production of information and circulation of
knowledge about these, as well as with stories, narratives and discourses
about urban futures which together become highly politicized. They
emerge in or through different spaces which reflect at once the techni-
cal functioning of infrastructures, the presence of distinctive forms and
sources of knowledge and expertise about these, and often diverging
techniques of communication or circulation of opinion and informa-
tion (in private negotiations between stakeholders, in legislative arenas,
on social media and in the press, in public presentations, etc.).
The political constitution and operation of urban transition thus
cannot be dissociated from, and indeed works through, a host of oth-
erwise rather prosaic material encounters and connections, such as the
interlinking of steam and hot water heat systems with different ther-
modynamic properties, the accounting techniques for valuing an elec-
tricity distribution network and how this impacts future reinvestment
ratios, and measures and calculations regarding building performance
on energy efficiency criteria. Each material encounter filters, mediates
between and translates varying interests, visions and actions, thus con-
tributing effectively to shaping the realm of what is possible in doing
transitions (see Braun and Whatmore 2010; Bulkeley et al. 2016). The
contours of local knowledge controversies—about the technical func-
tioning, economic calculations, modes of transparency, circulation of
information, etc.—make up the meaning of the political situation.
The energy arenas examined also suggest differing ways in which,
or processes through which, infrastructure comes to matter or to be
opened to controversy, i.e. when their significance, value, operation or
116
J. Rutherford
behaviour becomes of interest to particular groups. Three examples of

the distinctive effectivity of infrastructure can be sketched here.
First, there is something here about demonstration and transparency,
about highlighting certain things (and not others), and about where
the boundary lies between visible and invisible, public and private, or
something that matters and something to be ignored. Information has
come to light in all three arenas and helps to open debate on certain
points, but other information is withheld such that the realm of the
politics of infrastructure is inherently bounded by accessibility of data.
Public demonstration in the case of expert reports or the information
circulated by Paris politicians about the electricity distribution contract
places matters in the public record with a view to producing agreement
and accord, but these become subject to debate. Following Barry and
examining the material politics of infrastructures demonstrates that
the more information circulates and the more issues are discussed and
debated, the more disagreement and dissensus is produced, new sites
and arenas of politics result, and indeed ‘could virally multiply’ (Barry
2013, p. 182).
Second, in a process of revendication, materials become open to air-
ings of claims or possibilities as to what, or indeed whose, they are or
what they stand for. Objects are seized or appropriated as part of a terri-
torial strategy or an aim to make things work for specific purposes, and
in some cases they come to exceed their immediate constitution. In the
three arenas, this is especially the case at particular times (when contracts
are up for renewal, in accordance with changing legislation and regula-
tions) or through particular calculations (for lowering VAT, market prices
of coal and gas, or intermittence of renewable energy production v. grid
load charge). These may be seen to represent shifting and contested ade-
quations (spatial, technological, institutional-territorial) as actors seek
new commensurations between production and consumption, control
and concession, density and sprawl, and the present and the future.
Third, actors must take seriously the active role and recalcitrance of
matter and materials in rendering infrastructure configurations open
to debate. Components or elements of energy systems have certain
qualities or behave in certain, unruly ways such that there is some dif-
ficulty to master or to cohere different matters, objects or understand-
ings or views of objects and their performances and operations. Paying
117
more attention for example to the intrinsic thermodynamic properties

of energy, and their political consequences, becomes essential (Barry
2015). Accepting this recalcitrance of matter implies that some degree
of agency is devolved to obstreperous objects, and that actors must
adjust their strategies as a consequence.
Conclusion
In discussing the terms, forms and outcomes of a sustainable, energy
efficient Paris, we are perhaps visualizing as vividly as Dufy the future
techno-political possibilities of urban energy. Infrastructures are a vital,
animating force or essence of energy transition processes in Paris. They
capture and materialize the spirit of a transition which is actually a
parallel set of concerns involving, among other things, low carbon,
municipal control and accountability, and the continuing intertwining
of nuclear power and electric heating. In their circulations, flows and
stabilities they reveal and highlight key issues and contentions, they
become open to claims and appropriations, and they defy, resist and
remain unruly. Stakeholders in the city have become differently organ-
ized around, and indeed by, particular material sites, objects, resources
and infrastructures in attempts at creating and sustaining visions and
implementing actions towards urban transition. This chapter has
explored some of the diverse array of material arenas around which
energy transition actions and developments in Paris have become effec-
tively contested and thus come to matter, as a way of charting possibili-
ties and constraints of change present in the urban fabric. Different bits
or components of socio-technical systems become politicized in distinct
ways and at particular times, whether it is contracts, production plants,
pipes, steam or radiators. I attempted to distinguish between some of
the processes and knowledge controversies at work in making/doing
material politics, and their underlying notions of materiality as a form
of relationship between ourselves and our physical world. Public tran-
scripts of transition aims and efforts in official plans and strategies differ
vastly from the everyday processes and practices of transition in people’s
work and lives. There is not just an implementation gap between what
cities and organizations say they are doing or going to do and what
118
J. Rutherford
they actually do, but also between what they publish and measure as
objectives and areas of activity to achieve these and the less public, less
recorded work, activities and ‘events’ which actually go on.
The nature, modalities and outcomes of transition can thus be con-
ceived as a delicate collective navigation of the workings of the material
world and how it is mobilized according to political contexts and con-
straints. Collective here refers to an always loose and provisional set of
arrangements and relations rather than any clear organization of shared
interests, which underscores the difficulty in envisioning and enacting
the degree of transformative socio-technical change connoted by the
term ‘energy transition’.
Nevertheless, as we continue to explore emerging transition pro-
cesses, two issues which merit further reflection concern our approach
to agencies of change and our need for stories depicting possible path-
ways. It may be productive to further explore a more distributed, rela-
tional and heterogeneous notion of agency—as situated in, around
and between particular matters and materialities—in analysing activity,
capacity and capability to effect transition. Many of the artefacts and
components tracked through the various developments in Paris perform
or do things in a way which often escapes or resists full control. This
seems to require some sensitivity to the unruly liveliness and potentials
of matter in formulating political actions and strategies.
Furthermore, and coming back to Dufy’s depiction of the cultural
politics of electricity, it may be useful to engage in more exploration
of the role of narratives, fictions and fantasies in (re)materializing the
multiple processes of transition and imagining and envisioning very real
shifting relations between people and objects and new ways in which
things are understood, used, circulated and experienced. In this regard,
French theorist Armand Mattelart (1999, p. 178) identifies the ‘thau-
maturgic’ virtues of infrastructure networks through history, and ‘the
gap between prophecies based on the democratic potential of networks
and the trajectory of realpolitik in their establishment’. What this chap-
ter has begun to reflect on, by exploring the process of urban transition
through the effective materialities of energy infrastructure reconfigu-
ration, is a bridging of this kind of gap. By focusing on always ongo-
ing enrolments, deployments and disputes around infrastructure—the
119
operational processes and politics through which transition comes

to matter in the city—we develop a more open understanding of
socio-technical change. Through this, we might begin to have faith in
and forge new ‘reticular utopias’ (Mattelart 1999) grounded in what
matters to people and to their everyday struggles for social and ecologi-
cal reproduction of meaningful urban living spaces.
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5
Infrastructure Integration
and Eco-City Futures: Permeability
and Politics of the Closed Loop
of Hammarby Sjöstad
Introduction
From Hamburg and Portland to Tianjin and Masdar, new visions and
material enactments of the eco-city of the twenty-first century are
being deployed on scales ranging from the district to entire new tab-
ula rasa cities (see, e.g., Joss et al. 2013, for a range of case studies).
The templates, models and productions of these urban interventions
are coming to represent one dominant view of what urban sustainabil-
ity is. They circulate and reproduce internationally through global net-
works of practitioners, architects and design experts, and through their
array of technological ‘solutions’, taking on a performative quality by
being eminently adaptable to almost any urban context. The Arup-led
project at Dongtan near Shanghai encapsulates this neatly having been
widely disseminated and discussed for a number of years as an exemplar
eco-city in spite of the fact that it had not been built and ended up
never leaving the drawing board (Chang and Sheppard 2013).
Stockholm is a key node in this global vanguard of green urbanism, as
demonstrated by it winning the European Commission’s inaugural Green
Capital of Europe award in 2010 (see Chapter 3), by the constant stream

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_5
124
J. Rutherford
of global visitors the city attracts to its sites of ‘sustainable urbanism’,

and by a number of recent reports studying the city’s exemplary ‘green
growth’ (OECD 2013; LSE Economics of Green Cities Programme
2013; World Bank 2010). Infrastructure systems are central to this image
and process, as underlined by the recent promotion of the ‘SymbioCity’
model, a trademarked joint government and business initiative branding
‘sustainability by Sweden’ (SymbioCity 2015), which draws inspiration
in part from the role of Stockholm’s socio-technical networks in ‘holistic
and sustainable urban development’ (see Hult 2013).
The particular focus for these ever greener and more sustainable
socio-technical systems in much of the literature is on specific eco-
districts within Gothenburg, Malmo and Stockholm. By concentrat-
ing various technologies and rebundling and interlinking material and
resource flows at an ostensibly circumscribed local level, there is held to
be greater possibilities for a demonstrable and tangible urbanism which
grounds sustainability efforts on a scale which is both manageable for
planners and practitioners and replicable or transferable in or to other
contexts either immediate or afar. As the SymbioCity initiative states,
this ‘unlocks synergies between urban systems to save resources while
driving growth’ (SymbioCity 2015).
How infrastructure has come to be a core component and process in
such green city building has not, however, been greatly explored in a
critical and situated manner. Much of the grey literature, and some aca-
demic analysis, too readily accepts at face value both the sustainability
credentials of urban projects and strategies as a whole, and the inno-
vative functioning and technical neutrality of the infrastructures and
technologies underpinning them. While there has been useful work in
an industrial or territorial ecology vein looking at the detailed workings
of socio-technical systems in eco-districts or in cities more broadly (for
an exhaustive review, see Barles [2010]), this needs to be complemented
and extended by a perspective which locates far-reaching urban political
debates and shifts as taking place around and through particular infra-
structure nodes and material flows.
This chapter explores the complex and contested processes and prac-
tices involved in rebundling infrastructure systems in Stockholm, which
are not always the focus of the story of ‘sustainable urbanism’ in the
5 Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures …
125
Swedish capital, but which are, as argued throughout this book, intrin-
sically constitutive of urban socio-technical change. Focusing on the
well-known eco-district of Hammarby Sjöstad, I trace here some of the
important disjunctures between visions, discourses, deployments and
practices in and around the circular reconfiguration of energy, waste and
water systems, within the context of wider debates and tensions over
future urban planning in the city.
The aim is thus to pierce Stockholm’s ‘green city’ front and, as in
Chapter 3, get to the far more pertinent questions about the tensions,
conflicts and struggles over infrastructure configurations and resource
flows through which cities like Stockholm are constantly being made
and remade, and indeed how, by who and for who this is being done
(see also Freytag et al. 2014, on Freiburg). I analyse the ongoing devel-
opment of Hammarby Sjöstad, starting from the ‘official transcript’
or model of project development and aims in terms of environment
and infrastructure including its ‘closed loop’ and more efficient urban
metabolism objectives, and the plants, infrastructures and circulating
energy and material flows through which these objectives are materi-
alized. I move on to consider some of the ways in which the project
has been unsettled, deviated and challenged, including the disconnect
between the expected role of residents and observed practices, and the
technical and practical limits to integration and recycling of flows.
Emerging outcomes in terms of policy learning and transfer are also
discussed.
From Consensus to Controversies

By reading all the planning and promotional material on Hammarby
Sjöstad and talking to City officials, one would think that the project
was the very epitome of consensual sustainable urban development.
Yet, as Dick Urban Vestbro, a KTH planning professor and former City
politician (Left party), revealingly notes in a paper on the project’s con-
flicts: ‘Almost all the available documents on Hammarby Sjöstad fail to
provide information about the political controversies in planning the
area. The main explanation for this deficiency is probably the fact that
126
J. Rutherford
these documents have been written by municipal civil servants who are
afraid to write something that may offend either of the political blocs
in the City. By ignoring the differences in perspectives the reasons for
changes in policy become obscure’ (Vestbro 2005, p. 1). Vestbro’s point,
in short, is that foregrounding the politics of urban development is the
only way to focus on how and why urban change comes about.
This observation starkly portrays something of the currently
dominant evacuative politics of urbanism and helps to explain the

seduction of sustainability for local officials and technicians positioned
uneasily between ‘political blocs’. Common discourses and actions
of urban sustainability can be seen to be not about transformative
change at all, but the exact opposite—the reproduction of (the ability
to sustain) existing ways of doing, and in this sense, innovation and
technology are often not about changing or about doing differently, but
provide a new socio-spatial ‘sustainability fix’ for the extant status quo
(While et al. 2004; Keil and Boudreau 2006; Laidley 2007).
While sustainability is always enabled and constrained, forged and
enacted in particular ways under conditions of capitalist social rela-
tions (Krueger and Agyeman 2005; Krueger and Gibbs 2007; Luke
2003), Vestbro’s observation hints at its more troubling and depolit-
icizing arrangements through which the voicing, let alone staging, of
alternative urban futures is silenced (Swyngedouw 2007). The relevant
documents ‘fail to provide information’, and so views are oriented and
decisions taken based on particular framings and partial knowledge
which emphasize the myth of straightforward application of shared
visions and understandings—‘a series of technologies of governing that
fuse around consensus, agreement, accountancy metrics and techno-
cratic environmental management’ (Swyngedouw 2009)—as opposed
to issues and controversies. It is therefore only by explicitly politiciz-
ing the technical (cf. Barry 2001), and focusing on competing visions,
uncovering hidden struggles and outcomes in terms of winners and los-
ers, and thereby highlighting that there are possible alternatives, that
we can hope to understand the urban as an inherently contested ter-
rain of debate over societal futures. As Braun observes, this demands
127
‘that urban sustainability be seen in terms of urbanization processes, and

as fundamentally a political rather than a technical or design problem’
(Braun 2005, p. 640).
Over the next sections, I explore the politics of urban materiality
and circulation through a focus on the Hammarby Sjöstad eco-dis-
trict project in Stockholm, its multiple narratives, its mobilization of
urban infrastructure flows and systems, and its scalar, technical and
functional limits. A number of stories and histories have been written
about the ongoing development of Hammarby Sjöstad from various
viewpoints, and it is not the intention here to provide a complete out-
line or overview of this project which can be found on the project web-
site and elsewhere (see, e.g., City of Stockholm 2014a; Pandis Iveroth
and Brandt 2011; Svane et al. 2011; Bylund 2006; Vestbro 2005). The
focus here is on the ‘environmental profiling’ of the project and its
enrolment of technologies, infrastructures and network-based services,
not so much in some kind of identifiable and measurable ‘sustainable’
urban planning, but more as an arena in which conflict and struggle
over metabolic flows inherently shape the socio-ecological landscape
and outcomes of urban development (Theys and Emelianoff 2001).
While Hammarby could be read as part of a general push towards post-
Fordist waterfront regeneration and the reconciling of urban growth
and competitiveness with environmentalism (see Laidley 2007), there
is a distinctive way into ecological urban change here which locates
transformative change in material circulation processes. Equally, while
the evident, now well-known limits of such emblematic eco-districts
would seem at first to preclude the Hammarby project as a focus for
critical study, I suggest that its visibility and the still dominant consen-
sual, uncritical view of the project as a green icon both in Stockholm
and more widely requires unsettling. I focus therefore successively on
three material circulation processes—around modelling and envision-
ing, reordering of material flows, and evaluation and transfer—which,
I argue, are part of an emerging urban metabolic politics around
Hammarby which reworks its particular configuration of planning,
ecology, infrastructure and urban futures.
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J. Rutherford
Fig. 5.1 Hammarby Sjöstad
Modelling Urban Infrastructural Ecologies

The Hammarby Sjöstad 30-year planning project in Stockholm is the
result of a disappointment. An urban regeneration initiative conceived
in the early-mid 1990s as part of Stockholm’s failed bid for the 2004
Olympics, it has transformed an old port and industrial area of around
180 hectares just to the south of the city centre1 into a contemporary
residential and work area (Fig. 5.1) which, when completed, should
host some 11,500 apartments, 26,000 residents, 200,000 m2 of office
and commercial space and 36,000 people daily (Hammarby Sjöstad
1It was framed as “a natural extension of the city” (City of Stockholm 2014a) in a period when
urban planning policy in Stockholm was oriented by ideas of densification and ‘building the city
inwards’.
129
official interview, August 2013).2 Had Stockholm won the Olympics,

the site would have been the Olympic village and would have looked
very different. Instead, over the last twenty years, it has become a cor-
nerstone both in the municipality’s plan during the 2000s to build
20,000 much-needed new apartments across the city and in the vision
of creating an emblematic ‘sustainable’ urban district which would
boost the visibility of ‘world class’ Stockholm on the global stage
(City of Stockholm 2007).
The project undoubtedly benefited from the Swedish planning sys-
tem which attributes a local planning and land use monopoly to munic-
ipalities, and from the Swedish tax system whereby local taxes are paid
to municipalities. Both these points give great political and economic
power to municipalities with regard to local planning and land use, and
these have been cited by local actors as crucial elements in explaining
the Hammarby process (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August
2013; Hammarby Sjöstad architect interview, August 2013). Around
90% of the land in Hammarby Sjöstad was owned by the City and
for the remaining privately owned land (Lugnet and Sickla Udde) the
City made agreements that owners would get land elsewhere in the
city (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013), or ‘expro-
priated’ and paid compensation well above market rates to save time
(Vestbro 2005, p. 3). The project also benefited from Local Investment
Programme (LIP) money from the State (see Bylund 2006).
After development and construction a ‘mixed system’ operates
whereby some buildings are rented apartments (hyresrätter, run by mostly
municipal housing companies), but other buildings are cooperative-
owned with apartments sold to private owners who each hold a stake
in the cooperative (bostadsrätter ). The balance between the two is held
by many to be a function of the majority in power in the City at the
time, with the Social Democrats favouring the former and the Moderates
preferring market-driven development. In any case, the hyresrätter sys-
tem is checked by a rent control system in which publicly owned
2There were around 20,000 residents as of 2015. The original project was due for completion in
2018, but there remains ongoing work and a new focus on ‘renewing the new city’.
130
J. Rutherford
Table 5.1 Aims and operational goals set by the city in 1996 for the Hammarby
Sjöstad project
Sector Objective
Energy Total supplied energy was not to exceed 60 kWh/m2; within this
electricity was not to exceed 20 kWh/m2
Water Water consumption per person reduced by 50% compared to
new housing in the inner city
Waste Reduction of 20% in weight of recyclable and waste material
Mobility 80% of travel by public transport, cycling, foot
Stormwater All stormwater runoff from the area to be treated
Source City of Stockholm (1996)
housing companies set rent levels which private companies must follow
(Hammarby Sjöstad architect interview, August 2013). While the
Moderate-led majority of 2006–2014—and its predecessor in 1998–
2002—did not sell off land which was previously leased, it did sell some
of the municipal rented blocks of flats to the coops of the people living
there. In the mid-1990s the aim (of the left-green coalition) was to have
in the project around half rented and half cooperative-owned buildings,
but in practice now it’s about a third rented and the rest are flats that can
be bought (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013).
An Environmental Programme (EP) was created for the project in
1996–1997 because of the Olympics bid.3 The EP was constructed
around the idea that the Hammarby project should be ‘twice as good’ in
terms of environmental impact as would be an equivalent urban plan-
ning project (or newly built house) in another part of the city at that
time (the mid-1990s). ‘Twice as good’ goals were set across the board
for all sectors of the project, although only some quantitative indicators
were mentioned (see Table 5.1).
When work started in the mid-1990s, planners were able to build
on the fact that the City of Stockholm owned the water, energy and
waste companies which had been instructed by municipal politicians
3As one interviewee explained, ‘The only reason they made the Environmental Programme was
because Sydney, one of the reasons they got it in 2000 was their Environmental Programme, so
Stockholm said they should make the Environmental Programme a bigger part of the bid to win.
But then they didn’t’ (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013).
131
Fig. 5.2 Infrastructure integration in miniature at Hammarby Sjöstad, 2007
to work together with the planners on a district-level recycling model

for the whole project.4 This was crucial for the articulation of planning
and technical systems, and for fostering cooperation between the dif-
ferent entities and actors. One of the cornerstones of the project came
to be therefore the creation of a recycling model based upon ‘systems
integration’ (Pandis Iveroth et al. 2013) and tailored localized infra-
structural configuration for all housing developments (Fig. 5.2). The
resulting Hammarby model (Fig. 5.3) was therefore an important part
of the Environmental Programme from the start ‘to show the cycles
and how everything is connected’, but ‘a model building on what was
4This ownership and control of utility companies was seen by some practitioners as crucial to the
idea of constructing a recycling model: ‘I don’t think it would have been possible today, when we
only still have one of them, and the other two are more or less private’ (Hammarby Sjöstad plan-
ner interview, May 2005).
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J. Rutherford
Fig. 5.3 Loop closing and systems integration: the Hammarby model (final
iteration) (Source Lena Wettrén, Bumling AB)
already there’ (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013) com-

bined with new technologies and innovative system solutions. Most of
what is produced by the district in the form of waste (domestic waste or
wastewater) was to be reinjected into the district in the form of energy
(electricity, district heating and cooling, and transport fuel). As the City
of Stockholm’s Environmental Programme for the area outlined: ‘The
natural cycles should be closed at as local a level as possible’ (GlashusEtt
and City of Stockholm Development Office 2011).
The incremental construction of this Hammarby model is a story
in itself as the planners and utility engineers devised and constantly
adjusted their diagram through discussion and negotiation of technical
possibilities. Earlier iterations (see Pandis Iveroth et al. 2013) show the
133
model moving from an early wastewater focus due to the lead taken by
the Stockholm Water Company to an ever more complex interconnec-
tion of systems, plants and sinks, translating the increasing coordina-
tion between engineers of the water, energy and waste companies. The
omnipresence and performative power of this diagram—resting upon a
constant effort to clarify for mass consumption an increasingly complex
process of infrastructure integration—over the last 15 years in ‘selling’
Stockholm as a sustainable city cannot be underestimated.
The model materialized on the ground into a number of pro-
posed ‘green technologies’ shown on a Hammarby Sjöstad environ-
mental map (see Table 5.2). This alternative technological system
vision thus appeared to echo modernist rationales of more and more
infrastructure as a harbinger of progress and emancipatory futures,
but it instilled three major differences. First, its circular economy
and objectives of re-use and sobriety contrast with the traditional
infrastructure model of linear flows (from resource to use to waste)
and ever-increasing consumption and growth. Second, it is developed
on, or at least gives an impression of being developed on, a much
smaller, decentralized, geographical scale than modernist large cen-
tralized technical systems. Third, it rests on a much more systemic,
inter-sectoral approach with the aim of promoting joined-up solutions
for water, wastewater, solid waste and energy, involving the Stockholm
Water Company, waste companies, and energy providers Fortum and
Fortum Värme together.
Monitoring of the gradual deployment of the Hammarby
model throughout the district was to be required, and in par-
ticular, ‘Follow-up and evaluation can be done by measuring and
recording of resource consumption for water, heat and electricity’
(City of Stockholm 2005). Mention was even made of an ‘individ-
ual measuring system for each apartment’ (Alliance to Save Energy
2002, p. 66). The technologies and service systems put in place in
Hammarby Sjöstad were clearly meant to deliver reduced resource
consumption and thus contribute to the promotion of ‘sustainable’
lifestyles and a visibly ecological urban district.
134
J. Rutherford
Table 5.2 ‘Green technologies’ deployed or to be deployed within Hammarby

Sjöstad
Water Waste Energy
Prepared soil for Envac automatic Solar cells on GlashusEtt
filtration of storm collection system and other buildings
water from streets by pneumatic tube
infrastructure
Storm water basin with Collection centre for the Solar panels on
wetland for storm stationary pneumatic buildings to heat tap
water from streets waste disposal system water
Storm water basin with Docking points where Fuel cell in GlashusEtt
filtration the refuse collection
lorry connects to the
pneumatic waste
disposal unit
Channel for storm water Collection point for Biogas cookers
from buildings and hazardous waste in approx. 1000
gardens only apartments
Green roofs and yards Passive houses
collect storm water
locally
Sjöstadsverket Geothermal heat
experimental for one housing
wastewater treatment block
plant
Henriksdal Fortum’s thermal power
wastewater plant supplying district
treatment plant heating and district
cooling from treated
wastewater and
biofuels
Pumpstation for
wastewater
Nutrient recovery
through urine separa-
tion techniques
Source Compiled from Hammarby Sjöstad environmental map (and other sources)
Out the Loop: Permeability and Politics

For all the state-of-the-art modelling of material and energy circulations
and proposed technology innovations, Hammarby Sjöstad is neither
new nor particularly exceptional in itself. There is not, never was, and
135
never was planned to be, a closed loop at the Hammarby Sjöstad scale.
Contrary to popular belief, and many press articles, the politicians never
had a vision at the time of creating Hammarby as an autonomous bit of
the city (Hammarby Sjöstad architect interview, August 2013). The tech-
nical and functional boundaries of the district are extremely porous. Each
iteration of the Hammarby model shows the central role of important
external sites and components of the proposed metabolism of the dis-
trict. In the final iteration (Fig. 5.3), the agricultural land on the left, the
Högdalen combined heat and power plant, the drinking water plants near
Lake Mälaren,5 environmentally friendly electricity production6 and the
sea are essential translocal components without which Hammarby’s cir-
cular metabolic system would not function: ‘Hammarby was never meant
to be an independent eco-city. When we were working with the planning,
we didn’t discuss a thing like this. This sort of definition is given to us
from outside’ (Hammarby Sjöstad architect interview, August 2013).
Furthermore, the project was based to a very large extent on existing
infrastructures, and to some extent on infrastructure systems or sec-
tors which were already integrated, or at least ‘talking’ to one another,
for example ‘because of widespread environmental awareness and the
energy crisis of the early 1970s’ (Pandis Iveroth et al. 2013, p. 224).
This included: the Högdalen combined heat and power plant which
has been incinerating waste for heat production since around 1970;
the Hammarbyverket thermal power plant which opened in 1986 and
has been connected to Högdalen since 1991 and to the central network
of Fortum’s district heating system for several years7; and Henriksdal
5Water production takes place at Norsberg (60% of production for Stockholm) and Lovö (40%
of production for Stockholm) drinking water plants close to Lake Malaren where the water is
taken from (Myllymaa 2002).
6Electricity is produced, transported, distributed and sold based on the Nord Pool system, so it
is difficult to trace the origin of electricity consumed in Stockholm in the Nordic countries (or
further afield as Vattenfall have activities in Germany and Poland).
7The Fortum district heating system is calculated to run on a hierarchy of base load, mid load and
peak load plants in which Hammarbyverket operates only as a mid load facility. Base load plants
for the central-south network are Värtaverket, which is still part run on coal, and Högdalenverket
CHP plants. This means that it is nigh on impossible to distinguish which plant serves which
part of Stockholm and when, i.e. to follow exactly where the ‘water molecules’ go (Fortum Värme
official interview, August 2013).
136
J. Rutherford
wastewater treatment plant which has been operating since the 1940s8
and which was sending treated wastewater to the Hammarby thermal
power plant for heat production before the redevelopment project as
well.9
The new ‘green technologies’ which were integrated into this exist-
ing infrastructure system have also produced mixed results. Some work
such as the stormwater channelling and treatment and the automatic
waste collection system. However, some, like the solar installations10
and the fuel cell demonstrator, do not, while others were never made
fully operational, notably the Sjöstadsverket experimental wastewa-
ter treatment plant next to Henriksdal which was downsized, while the
planned techniques for urine separation were abandoned.11 In summary,
as a local official readily admitted: ‘All the big infrastructure and plants
were already built. And the techniques for heating, water and sewage,
that has been traditional, they aren’t new. The only new thing here for
water is to take care of the stormwater locally’ (Hammarby Sjöstad offi-
cial interview, August 2013). Little wonder then that one of the archi-
tects of the project suggests that ‘The recipe is actually quite simple…’
(Hammarby Sjöstad architect interview, August 2013).
Competition between existing and proposed new technologies has
been highlighted as one factor behind limited uptake of some tech-
nologies. Green (2006) and Mahzouni suggest that Stockholm Energi
and then Fortum have been very reluctant to use or promote systems
8Around two thirds of Stockholm households were connected to Henriksdal plant and a third to
the Bromma treatment plant (Myllymaa 2002).

9The whole of the treated wastewater flow from Henriksdal is now sent to Hammarbyverket,
where heat pumps recover heat for the district heating network (Email communication following
Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013).
10The total installed solar capacity is, in any case, extremely small at 55 kW, which pales in com-
parison with the far larger production facilities for heat or cogeneration. Part of the problem is
the lack of a feed-in regulation in Sweden which currently stops small-scale decentralized energy
systems from selling their production to the grid (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August
2013; HS2020 official interview, August 2013).
11Vestbro argues that this was a direct decision of the conservative right-wing majority because of
its impact on urban form: ‘Abandoning experiments with urine separation in multi-family hous-
ing meant that local access roads could be made more modest since they did not have to accom-
modate trucks emptying the urine tanks’ (Vestbro 2005, p. 8).
137
which would have competed with the existing district heating net-
work: ‘Stockholm Energy Company was not interested in investing in
solar thermal collectors which would compete with the existing dis-
trict heating network as an eco-friendly solution. The Company has
already invested in district heating and it would require a change in the
Company’s selection of heating sources’ (Mahzouni 2014, p. 13). This
fits with Fortum’s more recent antipathy towards the prospect of some
housing cooperatives in Hammarby Sjöstad installing heat pumps as
a greener, cheaper alternative to district heating (Fortum Värme offi-
cial interview, August 2013).12 Furthermore, the deregulation of the
Swedish electricity market during the process of building Hammarby
Sjöstad clearly problematizes any guarantee of the use of green and/or
locally produced electricity (e.g. through solar photovoltaic), as residents
can, individually or as cooperatives, basically choose their own electricity
provider on the Nordic market according to their own criteria.
Tensions are also present in the material flows and connections
between infrastructure systems. The main component of the City of
Stockholm’s Waste Plan adopted in February 2013 was to dramatically
increase the production of biogas from organic waste from a level of
around 12% to reach the 50% national goal by 2018. Demand for bio-
gas has however outstripped supply: ‘The demand for biogas for waste
trucks, buses and cars is way beyond this so Stockholm imports biogas
from a lot of other cities as well…’ (City of Stockholm waste depart-
ment official interview, August 2013). Yet, the vagaries of the munici-
pal procurement process where everything has to be sent out for tender
does not preclude some curious, even contradictory, decisions such as
that which outsourced biogas production for the City to plants outside
the Stockholm region even though the City has its own water company
capable of doing this: ‘The service of making biogas from Stockholm
12Some housing associations in Hammarby Sjöstad are fed up with the price of energy (HS2020
official interview, August 2013) and with the fact that they argue that the construction companies
who built housing in the eco-district failed to deliver on their promises and obligations to provide
energy efficient apartment blocks and instead, by cutting their own costs at the time of construc-
tion, effectively ‘passed on to residents’ the cost of energy efficiency (Lundberg 2013).
138
J. Rutherford
waste has gone to Uppsala 80 km north and Södertalje 50 km south

and not to Henriksdal which is owned by the City and which is in
the middle of everything… But they didn’t make a good enough offer,
Stockholm Vatten. It’s a bit stupid but that’s the way it works’ (City of
Stockholm waste department official interview, August 2013).
On a local level, there have been constant problems with ensuring the
quality of organic waste collected as biogas production requires a very
particular, ‘pure’ organic waste. Locks have even been placed on organic
waste inlets in Hammarby Sjöstad (Fig. 5.4) at the demand of the City
to stop residents putting non-organic waste in by mistake (Envac official
interview, August 2013). In fact, officials within the City’s waste man-
agement department mentioned that they had problems for a few years
selling it as organic waste ‘so it ended up being burnt in Högdalen in
spite of all the efforts made by all the households and the different tubes
for sorting…’ (City of Stockholm waste department official interview,
August 2013).
At the same time, a circular economy has been instigated throughout
the waste sector to such an extent that there is now ‘a lack of waste’
for energy production as ‘our plants are designed to handle more than
they have access to’ (Envac official interview, August 2013). This has
led to a recent experiment by Fortum and the City of Stockholm with
imports of waste from outside Sweden, including in one infamous case
welcoming in Spring 2012 a ship carrying 3500 tons of household gar-
bage from Naples in Italy (Fortum 2012, p. 10), the publicity around
which forced Fortum to issue a statement denying it was in business
with the Neapolitan Mafia (Nordstjernan 2012). Furthermore, the
City of Stockholm actually pays Fortum for the waste they take care
of at Högdalenverket (“it’s probably a good business for them”: City of
Stockholm waste department official interview, August 2013), leading
to observations that Fortum is effectively receiving a double income: for
taking care of the City’s waste, and then from selling the heat produced
from the waste back to the City (Researchers interview, August 2013).
Infrastructure practices and behaviours have not been signifi-
cantly altered or made more ‘sober’. ‘Sustainability’ in Hammarby
Sjöstad has been viewed as ‘75%’ the outcome of innovative techni-
cal system deployment and ‘25%’ from the contribution of residents
139
Fig. 5.4 Organic waste chute in Hammarby Sjöstad
(Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013) in a very particu-

lar form of socio-technical configuration. The idea was to provide high
performing technologies which would reduce the need for residents to
make efforts of their own, but this technological formatting of behav-
iours does not work. Both local officials and City planners mention a
figure of 30–40% for achieved reductions in environmental impact since
the beginning of the project, i.e. not ‘twice as good’ but not that far off
either (Skillbäck 2010; Freudenthal 2010), but this is greatly contested.
140
J. Rutherford
The 100 litres per resident per day objective for water use has not been
achieved, while the 60 kWh/m2/year objective for energy consumption
in apartments—‘the key operational objective of the Hammarby Sjöstad
environmental program’ (Mahzouni 2014, p. 1)—was finally abandoned
in 2007 and increased to 100 kWh. It was realized that 60 kWh was
much too ambitious to be ‘imposed’ by the city planners on already
designed (and in some cases already built) buildings: ‘At that time (the
mid-1990s) that was very tricky… it’s like you set the bar for the high
jump at 5 metres. So that has changed, and it’s now 100 kWh/m2, since
2007…’ (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013). This deci-
sion has led to a slightly perverse situation where, instead of leading
the way, the energy goal for the Hammarby Sjöstad project is actually
now 10 kWh more than the Swedish national goal for new build (90
kWh/m2): ‘The reason is that this program is static while the goal for
Sweden is evaluated from time to time’ (Email communication follow-
ing Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013).13
As part of housing associations or cooperatives within Hammarby
Sjöstad, each household pays for most of its services in its rent. Water,
heating and waste (and collective electricity) are paid for in this way,
with only electricity (network charge and consumption) and gas paid
for individually. As a result, actual consumption levels are not very
visible to residents unless they pay close attention to how infrastruc-
ture services are bundled up with apartment rents. In any case, sur-
veys of some of the first residents to move into Hammarby Sjöstad
illustrated that people appreciated the nice surroundings but were not
prepared to make sacrifices to live there: ‘People moved to Hammarby
Sjöstad not because of its environmental qualities, but because they
wanted a house in an attractive area, close to the city centre and still
with access to green spaces and pleasant views of an interesting water
landscape’ (Vestbro 2005, p. 9). There was resistance from residents
13The HS2020 group produced a report of a study of around 100 residential buildings in the dis-
trict which showed energy performance varying between 55 and 185 kWh/m2 with an average of
117 kWh/m2, highlighting the very diverse quality of buildings (HS2020 2013). This study has,
however, been contested by KTH researchers for its reliance on performance data from a variety
of different consultant firms which used different methods at different times.
141
on key sustainability objectives. For example, people came en masse to

evening meetings in the environmental information centre building to
argue against moves to reduce the number of parking spaces in the dis-
trict (Hammarby Sjöstad official interview, August 2013). Vestbro also
questions the ‘high environmental standards’ that could possibly have
been expected given the district’s large apartments with ‘oversized win-
dows’ and multiple balconies, and the architects’ overall neo-modernist
fascination with glass, steel and other metals which are energy intensive
in production (Vestbro 2005, p. 9).
The information centre (GlashusEtt) has been located directly in the
district from the outset of the project expressly to help residents appro-
priate green behaviours with regard to energy, waste, water and mobil-
ity. People learn here to use and dispose of particular objects ‘correctly’
and to develop specific techno-ecological skills which minimize the
externalities of their consumption habits. Like the waste disposal bins,
located in front of residential buildings where people can witness each
other performing their green duty (Fig. 5.5), the visible presence of
this centre illustrates the broader social significance of individual tech-
nological practices for the district as a whole (see Brand 2007). It is
quite emblematic, however, that the head of the information centre
now spends more time informing international delegations about the
district than the local residents.14
Learning the Eco-City: Measurement,

Evaluation, Transfer
These observations about environmental impact and consumption prac-
tices are further nuanced by the lack of follow-up and measuring of
the EP and the deployment of the Hammarby model that has actually
been carried out over the last twenty years. This was one of the prin-
cipal critiques made by KTH researchers in the evaluation exercise of
14There is an average of 12 international study visits per week (Hammarby Sjöstad official inter-
view, August 2013).

142
J. Rutherford
Fig. 5.5 Waste inlets in a Hammarby Sjöstad courtyard (visible from apartment

buildings)
Hammarby Sjöstad they were asked to perform in 2008 by the City of

Stockholm’s executive office.
The Environmental Load Profile (ELP) life cycle analysis, on which
practitioners had placed a lot of faith because of its supposed capacity
to monitor accurately the performance of the district, proved to be less
than adequate. The 30–40% reductions mentioned above and used by
the City to show reasonable performance (if not quite ‘twice as good’)
derive from a report by Danish consultants Grontmij AB (2008). The
graphs in this report appear to show effective reduced environmental
impact, albeit for only four areas of the district. However, a number of
limitations can be mentioned: data were obtained from the developers
themselves so there is little means of independent verification; the ref-
erence level against which performance is compared is from ‘the tech-
nology level current in the early 1990s’ whereas the district’s buildings
143
studied were developed much later; finally, and most importantly, the
report refers to ‘the source data for calculating heating, electricity and
water usage, and certain information regarding technical solutions
employed in the buildings’ which is unclear about whether the figures
for energy and water usage are actual figures of consumption from res-
idents after the buildings were completed and occupied, or merely ‘cal-
culations’ anticipating what this usage could or should be. On this last
point, interviewees suggested that the data used in the report was a mix
from different times and from different stages of construction and con-
tains a heavy component of ‘theoretical’ projection rather than actual
consumption measures (Researchers interview, August 2013). In any
case, the purported individual metering in apartments never material-
ized (various interviews, August 2013).
The evaluation report carried out by KTH researchers (Pandis and
Brandt 2009; see also Pandis Iveroth and Brandt 2011) observes the
general success of the EP and its holistic, integrated approach in gener-
ating broad capacity and interest and in raising the profile of the project
on a local, national and international scale. But it also makes a number
of critiques of the planning process including its unrealistic and fuzzy
operational goals (e.g. energy use) based mostly on technology deploy-
ment, the absence of data gathering and following of the EP, and the
lack of capacity and power for the City to bind construction companies
and developers to the goals, partly because the EP was introduced when
building had already started, but also because of the contradiction in
the City’s need to both attract developers to the project and to incite
them to buy municipal land, and to promote ecological construction.
So it has proved difficult to evaluate how close to ‘twice as good’ the
project has actually come. What it has achieved is based though on
moderate metabolic flow reductions rather than technology innova-
tion (Pandis Iveroth et al. 2013a, b). The Hammarby model outlines a
‘vision’ for the district’s metabolic flows that cannot be accurately quan-
tified in practice. The model and the ‘twice as good’ objective were in
practice merely the vision initiated at the demand of or for the attention
of politicians to make it ‘quick and easy to understand’. Meanwhile the
actual targets ‘were based on what the technicians within the Stockholm
144
J. Rutherford
Vatten treatment plant, Fortum or Stockholm Energi as it was then,

thought was possible. Sometimes it was close to twice as good, but… But
what was twice as good… because often you didn’t even know where the
standard was at the moment, so… how to compare twice as good, twice
as good compared to what?’ (Researchers interview, August 2013).
At the end of the day, even some of the people long involved in the
Hammarby project offer a quite modest appraisal of what has been
achieved in strictly local terms: ‘Hammarby is a little bit better. That
Hammarby is doing fine, but it is a showcase, an example, a good exam-
ple, and then we can explain about the rest. What is more impressive
that we have such a big use of those infrastructure systems all over
Sweden. It’s much more impressive that 80% of the energy use in
Sweden is renewable than Hammarby’s doing fine’ (Hammarby Sjöstad
architect interview, August 2013). Planning and political attention
and resources have also moved on elsewhere. Its main role now is, in
many respects, in policy learning and transfer of experience both locally
to Stockholm’s latest urban sustainability demonstration project at the
Royal Seaport—‘a much newer “eco-profiled” city district in Stockholm’
(Carlsson-Mård 2013, p. 259)—and beyond to eco-cities in other parts
of the world (see Hult 2015).
The new focus for the City’s sustainability attention is the Norra
Djurgårdsstaden (Royal Seaport) project to the north-east of the city
centre. This ‘Hammarby 2.0’ development for 10,000 new homes is in
the process of construction with an overall aim for climate neutrality
(‘fossil fuel free’) in 2030 (two decades in advance of the City’s same
goal for the whole of Stockholm). The links between the two projects
are explicitly stated by the municipality: ‘Stockholm Royal Seaport ben-
efits from the environmental experiences drawn from the Hammarby
Sjöstad city district. This area of Stockholm includes well-developed
public transport links and advanced waste management and recycling
options, implying a lifestyle change focusing on sustainability’ (City of
Stockholm 2014b). The new project also has its own EP which has, this
time, been from the outset a part of the negotiation over contracts with
developers (Mahzouni 2014, pp. 8–9). But interviewees questioned the
extent to which the lessons from the Hammarby process had been effec-
tively learned by those now planning the Royal Seaport, and whether
145
some of the mistakes were not in danger of being reproduced. For

example, there are still no plans to install individual meters in apart-
ments in the Royal Seaport project for measuring household consump-
tion in spite of this being a point which was highlighted as crucial by
assessments of Hammarby Sjöstad (Hammarby Sjöstad official inter-
view, August 2013). Furthermore, sponsoring of the Royal Seaport pro-
ject and its ‘climate neutral’ objectives by the Clinton Foundation was
achieved through inadvertent use of the Hammarby ELP ‘theoretical’
energy consumption data (Researchers interview, August 2013). The
links between the two projects are therefore much more complex than a
simple process or transfer of policy learning between one and the other.
Situating Material Circulation Processes

Behind the green façade of Hammarby Sjöstad lie a number of tensions
and conflicts which betray the complex process through which this
eco-district has come to be. These issues and struggles are fully inter-
twined in its making and meaning with infrastructure systems and tech-
nological flows proving to be a crucial juncture where these take place
and come to matter. The aim has been to show how socio-technical
system organization and metabolic flows and interconnections produce
and circulate not just fluids and materials for local access and use, but
also particular visions, models, ecological modes of residence, measures
and learning possibilities. In short, I maintain that urban futures and
possibilities are circulated through and between the heating pipes, waste
removal inlets, water systems and recycling plants, which explains why
they are always already political matter.
This urban metabolic politics or politics of material circulation
works through at least three parallel and overlapping processes in the
case here. First, in modelling, envisioning and storytelling, Hammarby
practitioners and city politicians negotiate boundaries for the project
and the degree of porosity and autonomy, thus setting up the locale
for intervention. The corollary of this process is that this orders and
enrolls groups and publics, and locates the project within a bigger
story/future. While this was a key task at the outset, there has also
146
J. Rutherford
been a recurrent need to adjust the vision and objectives to actual

functioning (or dysfunctioning) and to relocate Hammarby within
changing and contested urban narratives (from Olympics bid to
Green Capital, as sustainability node or contribution to ‘world-class
Stockholm’). Second, in organizing material flows, technicians and
practitioners arrange connections, access and functioning, and rebun-
dle infrastructure configurations in particular ways. Modes of organ-
izing infrastructure and resource flows implicitly draw on claims made
about the technical domain and how this contributes to the making
of an eco-district. The use of interconnection between usually dispa-
rate systems and of informational techniques for reordering flows and
functioning are ways of rendering visible (and public and governable)
infrastructural operations and control logics (Luque-Ayala and Marvin
2016). Third, through measurement, evaluation and transfer, there is
will to demonstrate learning and success, and to inform both within
project boundaries and elsewhere in the city and in other cities. A
variety of expertise is drawn upon to extract meaningful data which
abstracts succinct and salient elements while veiling experience and
information which is viewed as less pertinent. This is all exported and
might offer a pathway to replication elsewhere, such that the process
of transfer becomes a primary mechanism for sustaining the original
story.
But how Hammarby and its various material and discursive compo-
nents and processes are framed as, or stand in for, urban socio-technical
change is a multiple and contested issue. The project takes on various
guises and its limits and wider significance can be interpreted in differ-
ent ways according to the ‘political situation’ it is linked to or of which
it comes to form a part (cf. Barry 2013).
First, Hammarby Sjöstad is not and never was an exceptional space
in itself. It is a space concentrating what are, in the Swedish context,
quite ordinary metabolic flows which constantly perforate the bound-
aries in and out of the district, pre-existing infrastructure systems (and
underperforming infrastructure innovations), and (as far as we can see)
practices of water and energy use and waste production which are barely
distinctive from those of average Stockholm residents elsewhere in the
city. An extraordinary aspect of the project is how a small group of local
147
actors have been able to ‘market’ and perform the district around the
world based almost solely on its image as a kind of ‘excessive’ simula-
tion (Leach 1999), environmental discourse and very little in the way
of measurable results.15 As such, the project has to be read as revealing
more about environmental governance struggles and the technical and
political inertias and impasses of reconfiguring urban metabolisms and
green innovation than it does about the technical, optimal circulation of
material and energy flows around a supposedly ‘sustainable’ city.
It is also clear that Hammarby Sjöstad’s metabolic flows and
exchanges have to be related to the logics and processes of the wider
political economy of urban development in the city, including issues
around the control, ownership and governance of land and infrastruc-
ture (see Metzger and Olsson 2013). The connections between the
EP, the rebundling of infrastructure systems and decisions about land
use and property merit further clarification. From some perspectives,
including within the municipality,16 the Hammarby project constitutes
a clear case of at least partial eco-gentrification with the selling off of
public land to developers and then to relatively wealthy households:
‘At the beginning it was modest, but now the prices have gone up. So
the people living there have made a good business out of it’ (HS2020
official interview, August 2013). The amount of publicly owned,
leasehold housing has persistently been reduced in the face of a push
towards privately owned properties. These kinds of logics must have
inevitable, but uncertain, consequences on material and energy flows.
The fact that the City imposed environmental measures on developers
who pushed their prices up so that only wealthier households can now
afford to buy an apartment in the district resembles a form of ‘bour-
geois environmentalism’ (Fig. 5.6). The ongoing processes, practices
15Some critical researchers in Stockholm argue indeed that the international marketing of
Swedish environmental technology has been one of the main aims of the City of Stockholm’s
recent urban policy and projects (Wangel 2013). This fits with the idea that the projects are a
showcase for other things.
16The ‘social integration’ department of the municipality was extremely critical of the progressive
reorientation of the project away from the 50% provision of rental housing by municipal hous-
ing companies that had been outlined at the beginning of the project (City of Stockholm social
integration department official interview, May 2005).
148
J. Rutherford
Fig. 5.6 Waterfront apartment buildings, Hammarby Sjöstad
and struggles over the meanings, modalities and outcomes of urban

socio-technical change in Stockholm demand close attention for what
they reveal about evolving social equality, inclusion and welfare con-
cerns more widely.
Furthermore, there are all the questions about privatization and com-
mercialization of infrastructure and network services (see Rutherford
2008) and how this impacts on urban metabolisms. The evolving busi-
ness model of Fortum, based in recent years on extracting value from
Stockholm households for Finnish shareholders through rising prices,
cannot be dissociated from the technicalities of district heating provi-
sion in the city (its use of particular plants as base, medium and peak
loads, its links with neighbouring heat companies…). The HS2020 cit-
izens association has mentioned the possibility of disconnection from
the heat network and the installation of heat pumps for some properties
in Hammarby Sjöstad if certain conditions about price and ecological
quality of Fortum’s heat are not met (HS2020 official interview, August
149
2013). But any widespread shift from collective district heating pro-
vision to a succession of separate decentralized heating systems would
have serious repercussions on energy flows and costs in the city.
There are then questions here about the nature and meaning of plan-
ning, best practice, scales of sustainability, project evaluation and policy
learning. For all the planning work and documents produced at the start
of the project to set a clear pathway and define objectives, Hammarby
has been an emergent, constantly undulating process in which anything
‘static’ such as a fixed energy efficiency goal has had to be re-evaluated
even to the point where its exemplarity is erased in the face of a need for
workable options. Shifting positions, priorities and resources reinforce the
importance of temporality in planning—planning is always concerned
with the future so as soon as an eco-district is built in the present, it
becomes the past (see Beauregard 2015). As attention, resources and work
has shifted from Hammarby Sjöstad to elsewhere, sustaining sustainability
(“renewing the new city”) becomes the mandate of other actors, who have
to pick up the baton left by the planners, including doing the work that
was envisaged, but not completed, during the project such as measuring
and ‘improving’ energy consumption (HS2020 2013).
Analysis of material circulation processes in Hammarby Sjöstad high-
lights an urban metabolic politics in which infrastructures and resource
flows become contested arenas for wider debates about urban possibili-
ties and futures. These are ongoing processes and debates, and just as it
is crucially important to uncover them and situate urban sustainability
as a grounded political matter rather than an exercise in enhancing local
technical functioning, it is essential to continue to track these processes
and the political contours they enact in order to remain attentive to
modalities and outcomes of maintaining sustainability over time.
Conclusion
Timothy Luke’s (1995) analysis of the Biosphere 2 experiment captured
how the eternal contradiction of ‘closed loop’ projects for space explora-
tion is that they always fail to sustain the boundary between inside and
outside, as ‘the endosphere turned out to be an exosphere, where the only
150
J. Rutherford
environment in which it was possible to survive was outside ’ (Höhler

2008, p. 78; see also Marvin 2016). The permeability of Hammarby
Sjöstad operates in a similar frame. While the project was never con-
ceived as autarkic in its day-to-day functioning, the coherence of its
internal green objectives and agenda are constantly exposed to ‘external’
processes, deviations and conflicts. Any transcendence of crucial contex-
tual and constitutive processes and relations proves to be mythical.
This chapter has analysed some of the contested processes and prac-
tices around the rebundling of infrastructure systems in Stockholm,
through which one variant of urban socio-technical change is operated.
The disjunctures and overflows between vision, discourse, practice and
material politics have reconfigured energy, waste and water systems in
profound ways. Infrastructure and resource flows of materials, waste,
energy and money are constantly reshaped, often along channels which
were not planned or foreseen; models, diagrams and objectives become
performative and circulate particular visions and ideas widely; technol-
ogy does not always work or works in unexpected ways or is used for
alternative interests; policy learning is subject to inertias and trade-offs
between ‘local’ situated urban development and wider political econo-
mies; urban materiality becomes an active participant in the city…
These deviations speak to an urban metabolic politics uncovered
by identifying the ways in which storylines, resource flows and infra-
structure, and the constant search for urban improvement relate and
intertwine. Thus, even in a highly programmatic, ‘anaesthetic’ urban
project (Leach 1999), pulling back the sustainability shroud reveals ten-
sions and struggles which may constitute the beginnings of alternative
approaches to technocratic environmental governance and top-down
management of technology provision and use. Indeed, continued mon-
itoring and analysis of political struggles over urban development are
required especially in cities like Stockholm where an often depoliticizing
mantra of sustainability and its associated urban technological govern-
ing practices makes it difficult to see any sustainable city other than the
immediately visible official exemplar. A focus on urban infrastructures
and resource flow configurations is very useful for exposing the diverse
material political processes through which eco-city integration and cir-
cularity is both operated and limited. While these goals and processes
151
need in particular to be made more inclusive rather than supporting

increasingly exclusive enclaves, following infrastructures both reminds
us of the occasional intractability of a material world which, more often
than not, cannot be contained within boundaries and helps to envision
productive thinking and action around interconnections, interdepend-
encies and collective organization.
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6
Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban
Systems: Reflections on Ordering
and Disordering the City
Introduction: Grappling with Smart

Urban planning has long been about technologically mediated efforts
at urban improvement. Belief in progress through technology was one
of the main drivers in the making and remaking of many cities through
the twentieth century, and this may well have attained its zenith in the
emergence and proliferation of initiatives broadly grouped under the
moniker of smart urbanism. For many, the pace of urban change is
speeding up through smart technology, and things are becoming more
interconnected, but it is not clear whether this constitutes just a degree
of difference or something substantively different. What does smart add,
enhance or allow to be done differently in the urban arena?
Governments, public agencies and private companies have embedded
a vast array of systems, software, devices and sensors in cities for varying
reasons, constituting a pervasive digital infrastructure capable of provid-
ing massive amounts of geolocational data about all kinds of activities
and interactions. Many smart city projects aim to draw on these new
streams of information to forge detailed, transversal and often real-time
perspectives on urban life ostensibly to aid and improve city planning,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_6
158
J. Rutherford
management and functioning. Using everything from public transport

smart card databases to air and noise pollution sensors, often brought
together through tech company platforms or analytical tools, smart urban-
ism offers an appealing vision of efficient and sustainable urban futures
through maximizing the value of urban information and creating new
knowledge about everyday flows and happenings in the city. Critiqued as
top-down and technocratic in their aims and operations, these initiatives
also seek to draw on the more distributed production of information and
content by citizens as they move about, or inhabit, the city.
For all the recent ubiquity of smart urban projects, practitioner and
policy discourse, and a furore of work in and around urban studies con-
cerned with interpreting meanings, modalities and outcomes of this,
there is a sense in which we are still struggling to grasp what might be
distinctive about smart urbanism. In terms of content, many versions of
smart urbanism appear to revolve around or emerge out of a conflation
or synthesis of three elements: interconnection of networks and rebun-
dling of infrastructure systems; mass deployment of sensors, screens and
surfaces and associated processes for monitoring, recording, circulation
and feedback from these in real-time; and promotion of an adaptive,
flexible, on-demand, individualized urban experience. By combining
more and deeper technology deployment throughout the urban fab-
ric, the interconnection of heterogeneous systems, and an ‘enhanced
self-sufficiency’ or ‘individualized, autonomized spatiality’ (Michael
2009, pp. 95–96), ‘smart’ becomes a prime field of experimentation and
testing of new socio-technical configurations in the city (Karvonen and
van Heur 2014; McLean et al. 2016), and the inevitable solution to a
host of big problems ranging from climate change to the provision of
public services under austerity. Halpern et al. (2013, p. 278) call this
marriage of sustainability and bandwidth ‘a fantasized transformation
in the management of life — human and machine — in terms of
increased access to information and [thus] decreased consumption of
resources’. Cugurullo (2018) argues that these discourses of integration
and cohesion of smart-eco elements hide a fundamental incompatibility
and lead to fragmented, grotesque cities in practice.
Critical analysis of how, why and for whom these developments are
being put to work in the city is essential (Hollands 2008; Kitchin 2014;
6 Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban Systems …
159
Luque and Marvin 2015). The generic corporate-led version of the

smart city, driven by market logics and technology fixes that are deploy-
able anywhere, claims to improve urban functioning in myriad smooth
and unproblematic ways. Yet this clearly runs the risk of erasing the
very distinctiveness of the urban—its heterogeneous, place-based, mate-
rial and political vitality—in favour of standardized, controlled spaces
for the clear-cut application of given solutions (Viitanen and Kingston
2014; Söderström et al. 2014; McNeill 2015). Smart urbanism can
be placed in a long lineage of the reshaping of social relations by the
‘contingency with bias’ (Graham and Marvin 1996) of information and
communications technologies. As Mattelart (1999, p. 169) has argued,
communications technologies ‘have been, are and will remain the object
of contradictory claims: they lie at the heart of confrontations for global
control’. In this way, it is essential to study how integrated infrastruc-
tures, data gathering and on-demand individual services are configured
in highly political ways in terms of access, use, experience and analysis
of results.
While tracking and analysing the material implementation of smart
urban projects is seen as one way to go beyond broad-brush critique of
corporate discourse and exceptional cases which always promise more
than they deliver (Shelton et al. 2015; Kitchin 2015), studying smart in
practice is still plagued by the issue of whether practitioners are doing
anything substantively different in the name or through the frame of
smart. Initiatives may be linked to a variety of local stakes and require-
ments and implemented in situ in quite distinctive ways.
In the rest of this short chapter, I use a brief analytical vignette of
the reconfiguration of energy system flows in a district level smart grid
project near Paris to explore the question of the difference that smart
makes in situ or in context to try and understand the still fuzzy ques-
tion of what smart actually is, and what its added analytic and/or prac-
tical value might be. While there is a distinction between urban smart
grids focused usually on conciliation of production and consumption
of energy and more transversal smart city projects (see Bulkeley et al.
2016), I suggest that the following story speaks to broader implications
of smart and its temporalities, boundaries and scales, and technological
agency and control, which are discussed subsequently.
160
J. Rutherford
Reconfiguring ‘Energy, Digital and the City’

As we saw in Chapter 4, the Paris region requires ever more ‘intelli-
gent’ work to link up production and consumption of electricity. Ile-
de-France imports more than 90% of its electricity while demand for
energy is projected to increase. Meanwhile, the peak load charge is
already increasing much more rapidly than actual consumption. This
means that during particular short periods in winter there is a sudden,
temporary boost in demand which places stress on the electricity system
to deliver the required amount of energy. Renewable energy generation
is often small-scale and intermittent in its supply. Furthermore, at peak
times, the French electricity system relies on carbon-intensive produc-
tion which goes against climate goals and does little to reduce regional
energy dependency. The system must therefore have the capacity to pro-
duce, transport and distribute sufficient supply to meet these occasional
peaks, as well as the knowledge and expertise to be able to monitor and
anticipate as closely as possible when and where these are likely to take
place. This has become a crucial issue for energy in the Paris region,
illustrating a wider shift in infrastructure from a traditional concern for
flow management to a form of event- and scenario-based technological
management (Picon 2015).
A number of overlapping measures and actions have been initiated to
respond to this issue, with the overarching aim to flatten the load charge
and to realize ‘better consumption of electricity’ (ERDF official, quoted
in ERDF 2011, p. 52). Smart meters are being rolled out to provide
more data and information to electricity providers about consumption
patterns and quantities. Smart grid projects are being introduced to
experiment with mutualization of demand—‘agglomerating several con-
sumption models’ (ERDF official, quoted in ERDF 2011, p. 52)—and
with local production. Here, the aim is to interconnect buildings and
neighbourhoods to share local renewable energy supplies or to bundle
loads together to create more coherent, and less differentiated, temporal
electricity demand.
The IssyGrid project in southwest Paris is the first operational smart
grid project in France. It markets itself as a ‘laboratory’ or ‘window
161
of know-how in the domain of energy, digital and the city’ (IssyGrid

2016). It is located in a municipality with a long-term interest and
expertise in deploying ICT in its projects (City of Issy-les-Moulineaux
official interview, August 2015). It was one of the leading French ‘cyber-
cities’ in the 1990s with an innovative ICT strategy. As a R&D pub-
lic–private partnership between large companies,1 local start-ups and
the Issy municipality, initiated in 2012 for a period of five years, the
project represents a ‘mixed economy’ mode of contracting and doing
urban projects in France where local authorities involve private partners
in the financing and operation of projects rather than doing everything
themselves and only ‘using public money’ (city official in Lelong 2016).
Through ‘collegial governance’ (IssyGrid 2016), various distinct log-
ics coalesce around Issygrid, creating a coalition of political economic
interests brought together by ‘smart’. It is at once a playground to test
new technologies, devices, techniques and business models (corporate
interests) as well as electricity load management (EDF, ERDF), and to
reduce energy bills (Issy municipality) and improve city branding and
publicity with internal (political) and external (growth) objectives (Issy).
As of April 2016, the project vaunted that ‘all the elements of an
urban smart grid’ were in place (IssyGrid 2016). In terms of mate-
rial infrastructure, this meant that more than 1000 homes (with 2200
inhabitants), as well as five office buildings and part of the local street
lighting system, had been connected in two city districts. Two energy
storage systems, three PV production facilities and a state-of-the-art
smart electricity distribution substation were deployed. Control is
achieved through 14 interconnected information systems, a data plat-
form for ‘energy supervision’ which provides real-time readings, and a
system which forecasts anticipated local PV production. In the longer
term, the project is supposed to cover 2000 homes, 5000 inhabitants,
10,000 workers and 160,000 square metres of offices in the city
(IssyGrid 2016; Petrucci 2017).
1Theseare Alstom, Bouygues Immobilier (lead partner), Bouygues Energies and Services,
Bouygues Telecom, EDF, ERDF, Microsoft, Schneider Electric, Steria and Total.
162
J. Rutherford
The project is a prime example of an ‘experimental’ approach to

‘optimising energy consumption’ to ‘consume better, less and at the
right time’ (Ville d’Issy-les-Moulineaux, n.d.) through making ‘real-
time’ adjustments between energy production and increasingly variable
energy demand. But it is not without difficulties and tensions with three
sets of challenges present from the outset (project coordinator in Lelong
2016, City of Issy-les-Moulineaux official interview, August 2015).
First, it requires intervening in the existing urban fabric with buildings
which were not designed to exchange data and energy flows. Second,
there are complex regulatory issues concerning both what a local munic-
ipality can do autonomously within a national electricity system, and
the extent to which it is possible to produce and analyse data collected
from the domestic sphere. Third, there are ongoing difficulties in get-
ting buy-in from residents to participate in the project. These issues
reflect the problematic top-down nature of the exercise with a substan-
tive disconnect between the coalition initiating and coordinating the
project and the households whose energy consumption is the focus of
the objectives and is supposed to be made visible, and thus manageable
and more ‘efficient’.
Real-time energy consumption monitoring and tracking aims to
‘optimise’ the district systems by creating a local and temporally dif-
ferentiated ‘energy profile’ to flatten peak load electricity demand, thus
reducing CO2 emissions by creating less need for supplementary fos-
sil fuel energy at certain times, and improve both the balance of the
network now and in its future dimensioning (IssyGrid 2016).
Homes are equipped with both smart meters and domotic systems
allowing inhabitants to view their energy consumption hour by hour.
Visualization of energy flows thus signals to users how changes can be
made to improve their consumption (project coordinator in Lelong 2016).
A software management platform developed by a local start-up enables
this data to be transmitted to IssyGrid, but to comply with data protection
regulations, it is collected hourly as a package of 10 comparable homes to
safeguard anonymity. Issy officials spent 12 months working with CNIL,
the French data privacy agency, to develop procedures for anonymity while
collecting and circulating data. The project has thus been the forerunner in
establishing new rules on a national level for regulating the use of energy
163
consumption data (City of Issy-les-Moulineaux official interview, August

2015). The aggregation process is done by servers and the data is then sent
to the IssyGrid platform with an electronic signature. Any breach would
modify the signature and automatically shut down the collection of data
(IssyGrid 2016). As well as their own data, inhabitants can see the aggre-
gated figures for their building and neighbouring buildings, the idea being
that they can compare their consumption against these ‘averages’ which is
held to stimulate virtuous behaviour. Visibility here aims to promote a new
civic engagement or even a new form of citizenship with individuals con-
tributing to the collective good. As Halpern et al. (2013, p. 287) argue,
‘Through this promise of omniscience and omnipresence viewers/users/
consumers can exceed their human limitations thanks to the automated
collection and analysis of data that are suddenly easy to access’.
IssyGrid has also started producing data which links electricity con-
sumption throughout the day in particular buildings with available
and forecasted local PV production. This is meant to allow residents to
anticipate whether some of their electricity consumption can be delayed
to when local production is at its highest level, although it is unclear
what proportion of residents would actually do this. The project also
provides a dashboard display for real-time data to visualize performance
and to engage residents. Many residential and office buildings in the
district have already been built to green standards with low energy con-
sumption levels, so the data flows add an extra layer on top of absolute
building performance to allow temporal shifts to further improve net-
work functioning. A new electricity distribution substation in the area
allows monitoring of local PV production and storage of electricity in
recycled electric vehicle batteries. Excess PV production during the day
can thus be stored until peak local demand in the evening.
Reflecting a motto where ‘to govern is to foresee’, the Issy munici-
pality and its collaborators are attempting to increase the controllability
and predictability of local energy flows by deploying integrated sys-
tems for the production of information. Issy thus deploys an anticipa-
tory governance agenda to seek assurance within a wider vision of smart
urbanism promoted at the national level ‘where the exchange between
governor and governed will be accelerated’ (CGDD 2012, p. 3).
This is a configuration ‘that allies ecology and digital’ (IssyGrid 2016;
164
J. Rutherford
Ville d’Issy-les-Moulineaux 2015), and speaks to an ‘autonomous city’

discourse (Ville d’Issy-les-Moulineaux, n.d.) which relocates production,
distribution, storage and consumption of energy to the local scale to
reduce dependence on long-distance energy flows. In sum, this appears
to be a new socio-technical complex to rework technology, temporality
and space in energy systems, ostensibly for user-oriented goals. But there
remain important questions about the extent to which the municipal-
ity’s search for increased local autonomy and capacity for control can
be implemented through partnership with large global companies with
their own logics and vested interests. IssyGrid may be seen as a config-
uration to sustain the growth and expansion of an existing top-down
system ‘based on existing assets’ (IssyGrid 2016). As an IssyGrid project
document states, ‘This realistic approach allows us to deploy a territorial
energy optimization policy at least cost without questioning previous or
future infrastructure choices’ (IssyGrid Project, n.d.).
Decrypting Smart Grids and Flows

The discussion of the IssyGrid project reveals a number of pertinent
issues. We find an activation of intrinsic urban intelligence through
some form of transversal articulation or rebundling of previously dis-
tinct systems, a form of real-time monitoring, loops of information
and recursive feedback, and a certain degree, or at least the promise,
of individualization of system use. More broadly, the project in Issy
reveals an emerging mandate and capacity for local authorities to facil-
itate experimentation on their territories, to test local responses to ‘big’
issues such as energy and climate. This is framed as a kind of antici-
patory governance (‘to govern is to foresee’). It demonstrates a lot of
technology (new and old) and interconnection/integration with objec-
tives of local autonomy (e.g. buildings and neighbourhoods in Issy) or
efficient transversal urban functioning. Even if the IT and digital flows
and layers are usually implicit or behind the scenes, they are never-
theless an increasingly important component of the systemic process.
Sensors and measures contribute to the functioning, maintenance and
improvement of systems, constituting a digital platform above or across
165
traditional infrastructures which allows near real-time knowledge and

feedback for constant adjustment, evaluation and learning through pro-
cesses of reflexive governance (Plantin et al. 2018). This technology con-
nects and constitutes authorities, providers and residents in new ways,
although residents are not actively present in projects and are mobilized
as rather homogeneous and rational ‘contributors’ that are enrolled in
configurations in self-evident ways. In organizational terms, the p roject
works through a coalition of political and private utility actors and
investments with apparently different interests and competences. They
manage to loosely coalesce and fuse around these sites and push forward
a collective agenda and objectives, perhaps around a need to reflexively
manage and react to residential demand patterns. As one technol-
ogy provider stated: ‘in these kinds of projects, the home is the holy
grail’.2 However, as we briefly saw, this new collective configuration is
not without tensions, contradictions and conflicts which constrain how
things are done.
Smart promotes infrastructure transformation and socio-technical
change by enabling the emergence of a local grid supported by local
energy production and demand-side management to test or ‘demon-
strate’ a degree of autonomy from ‘distant’ national infrastructure.
Production and consumption are contiguously organized and the
possibilities of energy storage, home domotics and forecasting tech-
niques allow for the partial recomposition of energy temporalities by
anticipating when and how generation and demand can be best aligned.
The production of visibility of flows is intended to engage residents in
the creation of a more efficient system. Smart civic engagement here
means reacting to signals to reduce or displace energy use temporally to
benefit the whole community.
Smart arrives or emerges in Issy for particular reasons including
previous experience and the presence of ICT actors. Near real-time
technologically mediated flows and circulations are adjusted by local
specificities in infrastructure and urban governance, and notably come
2Atos official, in Rencontre autour du compteur intelligent et de la plateforme Smart Home

d’Atos seminar, Issy-les-Moulineaux, September 2015.
166
J. Rutherford
up against the slower rhythms and different temporalities of urban

planning and regulatory changes. Smart then clearly transforms, and is
transformed by, urban materiality both as new artefacts and technolo-
gies (sensors, meters, grids) are inserted into the urban fabric, and as
buildings, networks and relations are made commensurate through the
work of data production and circulation. Data interconnects and allows
correspondence across time and space of things which are otherwise dis-
tinct and separated.
There are at least three ongoing and overlapping issues or areas of reflec-
tion to which the Issy vignette speaks as part of an overarching concern
with the question of how smart is being done and with what implications.
A first issue is about the concurrent times and rhythms of urban
change, or the potentially anachronistic relation between policymak-
ing and planning temporalities on the one hand and exponential tech-
nology (and code and data power) development and deployment on
the other (cf. Sodah 2014). There is a sense of planning being about
future worldmaking, but projects depreciate almost instantly or become
outdated before being finished, and attention and resources move on.
In this way, smart urbanism’s constant production and circulation, or
streaming, of information resembles what Barry (2013, p. 14) calls a
‘projective device’: ‘they enable companies, governments, managers,
engineers and investors to extend their understanding into the future,
by envisaging certain actions, without necessarily ever knowing precisely
what exists in the present’. How can we learn in/from projects that
never seem to be in the present, or are always on the move, in/from
urban environments that are constantly being upgraded or rebooted?
Governance seems to need to be ever more reflexive and develop contin-
uous feedback loops. Policy does not move in anything like real-time so
who governs/decides/monitors if and when we consider very advanced
smart cities…? Or, even before we get to those big questions, whose
knowledge do we use and under whose control are we going to incre-
mentally, but instantly, roll out new urban configurations?
A second issue is about the boundaries and scales of experiments.
What kind of template is provided by these smart/eco improvement
projects? They are usually located in small districts of bigger cities,
feeding off implicit or explicit aims for some sort of autonomy or local
167
organization of systems and flows. Furthermore, problems crop up

when projects begin to be extended, suggesting that their logics and
dynamics function only or ‘better’ at a small scale or in a confined con-
text. If this is the case, then this raises the issue of how such templates
become more than experiments or trials. Do they have to be upscaled
or rolled out more widely as is usually thought in policy discourse? The
OECD argues that eco-districts are particularly good sites for develop-
ing templates of innovations which can then be upscaled to wider areas:
‘The eco-district therefore appears to afford a rough template for mixing
an array of eco-innovations into a modular system that can, in turn, be
flexibly scaled up to the smart city-region’ (OECD 2013, p. 94). In this
era of ‘fast’ policy exchange, transfer and mobility, the ideas, configura-
tions and lessons of Hammarby Sjöstad (Chapter 5) and Issy are more
likely to be transferred to a succession of other ‘bounded’ sites across the
globe than to trickle up to effect change in their immediate geographi-
cal regions. This translocal transfer is certainly one way in which local
actors measure their ‘success’. But projects can already, and especially,
serve their purpose in terms of the opportunities for local learning,
feedback and improvement that they proffer, and it is here that smart
urbanism is particularly effective because it is inherently about optimiz-
ing and capturing urban intelligence, monitoring and analysing infor-
mation flows for improvement possibilities. This suggests the potential
of perpetual experiment, sustaining a ‘perpetual beta city’ (Leo Hollis,
quoted in Poole 2014), through which experiment is the outcome or
goal rather than a means or modality to something else. Is there a dis-
tinction between testing urban configurations and mainstream urban
planning, or is the city now just a permanent laboratory (cf. Karvonen
2018)? This recognizes both the iterative process of urban improve-
ment and the inherent performativity of projects and initiatives as the
functions and outcomes of even small-scale smart stretch well beyond
immediate territories or boundaries. The public focus on a project like
Issygrid and the production of exemplarity done by circulating knowl-
edge about the project has, for example, undoubtedly transformed and
reproduced the project itself and its associated processes. As the urban
reaches out further and further beyond its traditional or administrative
boundaries, on what scale do we conceive of smart urbanism?
168
J. Rutherford
A third issue is whether and how these projects reflect forms and
degrees of technology and infrastructure deployment that now exceed
human limitations and capacities for control. Throughout this book,
an underlying question has been about what networked cities look like
when agency or intervention is devolved or distributed beyond policy
actors, utility companies and residents? What distinctive material urban
politics does this create? And in smart urbanism this can be pushed fur-
ther as we envisage an urban fabric layered with so much ‘autonomous
technology’ (Winner 1977) that virtual loops and/or the circulation of
information governs/decides/does at least as much as local practitioners
and residents, as we can begin to see in the Issy ‘dashboard’. With the
sensing, monitoring and manipulation of material flows at the heart of
smart urbanism, to what extent has the resultant potential for real-time
feedback loops become as important as the material flows themselves? Is
this ‘the art of augmenting cities’ and ‘the development of a new materi-
ality’ (Danielou and Ménard 2013)? This may evolve into consideration
of distributed forms of intelligence, and sentience and consciousness
of technology, where flows and networks and systems have some level
of self-organization and control that is potentially greater than human
capacity for managing these complex systems. Are we not already
deploying an urban intelligence which will soon bypass human intelli-
gence reaching Kurzweil’s (2005) ‘singularity’, or at least interconnected
technologies and infrastructures which have greater capacity to organize,
manage and control the city than we do? Picon (2015) poses this stimu-
lating and worrying question, and it is clearly worth doing so given the
complexity of our cities and their apparent ungovernability: who really
is piloting the urban these days, and for whom?
Conclusion: Feeling for Disorder

The Issy case shows local work at the interface of energy systems, dig-
ital networks and the urban environment which produces socio-
technical change. Energy flows are made visible and thus actionable,
both to local authorities and energy companies who can coordinate and
integrate between production and consumption, and to citizens who
169
are supposed to adjust their demand and behaviour accordingly. The

mutual constitution of digital and urban, and the intrinsic embedding
of information within cities that this connotes, raises important qualita-
tive questions about the diversity of types of information, the different
ways in which these are used, and the varying possibilities of access, all
of which both reflect and shape the cities we currently live in.
If analysis of even small-scale projects ends up asking more and new
questions, then such is the unstable, uncertain nature and implications of
the smart city. These are implementations of urban experiment, demon-
stration and improvement through particular rebundled technology con-
figurations, whether these are called ‘smart’, ‘sustainable’ or whatever.
They reconfigure urban systems by enhancing learning processes and pos-
sibilities, and by facilitating information flows and circulation of data or
knowledge that can be fed back into the system. But at the same time
as thinking through and conceptualizing what smart urban systems do,
their aims and purposes, and how they go about achieving this, the issues
of temporality, space/scale and agency of urban improvement discussed
in the previous section suggest that it is equally essential to reflect on
deviations of projects, or on what might be called the off-screen space
of smart urbanism, i.e. what is happening that does not always appear in
the neat narrative or main story (cf. Easterling 2014).
In Issy, as in Hammarby Sjöstad in Chapter 5, official attempts to
impose or promote order and predictability on the urban almost inev-
itably produce messiness and imperfection. The smooth, rational and
uncomplicated urban future of many smart city visions always ends up
colliding with the disorder, clutter and muddling through of the actu-
ally existing urban. We come back in some ways to the concerns of
Kevin Robins who saw in the cybercity discourses of the 1990s an anae-
mic ‘virtual urbanism’ at odds with the lively disorder and uncomfort-
able and antagonistic nature of urban life: ‘Among those who are now
considering the possibility spaces of contemporary urbanism, the key
distinction is not that between optimists and pessimists, but between
those who look to order and those who feel for disorder’ (Robins 1999,
p. 57). As smart technology adds or envisages the addition of multi-
ple layers of virtual flows to manage and orient urban functioning, it is
worth foregrounding the messy configurations and overflows of material
170
J. Rutherford
and energy flows, the politics of urban metabolism through which the
disordered city persists and changes.
One tendency has been to try obstinately to simplify the context of
intervention, to erase any distinctiveness in the urban environment, and
to create a flat, generic plane to optimize project roll-out. This is fun-
damentally at odds with the nature of smart and what it allows, and
antithetical to any basic view of what the city is and how it functions
and is experienced. Smart offers new and multiple perspectives or view-
points on city operations and events which were usually not possible or
visible previously (Greenfield 2017). What is needed therefore is urban
policy for, or aggregating the potentials of, these multiple happenings.
Smart urbanism demands to be incarnated and enacted through fleshy
embodiment, incorporation and interaction between the jumbled mix
of peoples, communities, ideas and things which are the very social and
political basis of urban life and which form the material conditions of
possibility of urban change. Far from ‘clearing up’ the mess of the urban
through technology, smart interventions could amplify the inherent
disorder, difference and discordance of the city through reconfigura-
tions that are visible and traceable, but also allow debate and contes-
tation over the many modalities and implications of ‘improving’ urban
functioning and experience.
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7
Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures
In analysing the ‘fateful’ presence of ‘social futures’ in people’s everyday

lives, John Urry (2016) observes the inherent paradox that futures are
always mysterious and difficult to know and predict, and yet the task
of anticipating them is a necessary one for many different organizations
and bodies: ‘the time of the future is now…’ (p. 7). Likewise, Robert
Beauregard (2015) reminds us that urban planning is always intrinsi-
cally concerned with making and negotiating city futures, but this is
done through engagement with an existing diverse material world full
of both stabilized relationships and ‘open possibilities’ (p. 171). In
this book, I have argued that infrastructure is a core site and process
of always emerging urban socio-technical futures. Adopting a relational
socio-technical perspective in which technological components and
social relations are always already intertwined, urban infrastructure has
been studied as a constantly emerging material political configuration
or achievement, comprised of a shifting set of struggles over constitu-
tive parts, relations, qualities and effects of infrastructure which forge
potentials and limits of urban socio-technical change. In this short con-
clusion, I highlight and discuss further three main points developed

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_7
174
J. Rutherford
throughout the book, about why infrastructure matters, how infrastruc-

ture comes to matter, and what can be gained from pursuing explora-
tions of urban infrastructure futures.
Urban World-Making:
Why Infrastructure Matters
A driving argument across the chapters has been to demonstrate infra-
structure to be a key site and process of urban transformation that is
being redeployed to enact diverse sustainable strategic urban futures.
Through providing essential services and resources, through connect-
ing together (and thus defining at least to some extent) people, com-
munities and territories, and through reinforcing tensions and debates
around particular visions, components and distributions, infrastruc-
ture comes to constitute contested negotiations of possible collective
futures—socio-material enactments of what may be sustainable, low
carbon, smart cities of tomorrow. As a policy instrument, infrastruc-
ture is mobilized to transform visions, imaginaries and discourses of
improvement into physical socio-technical systems which claim to
extend suburban living spaces (Chapter 2), clean and green the waste
and pollution outputs of a city (Chapter 3), produce new efficiencies
and forms of control over energy flows (Chapter 4), integrate and relo-
calize material resource flows (Chapter 5), and harmonize production
and consumption of energy (Chapter 6). As such, infrastructure is a pri-
mary tool of sustainable urban planning practice, capable of providing
tangible results such as the CO2 emissions reductions directly attributed
to the extension and greening of district heating infrastructure systems
in Stockholm and more recently in Paris.
The focus of the chapters has been on engagements with the mate-
rialities of infrastructure, through which actors acknowledge that its
technological components and physical properties have wider effects
and consequences. Whether it is about suburban development, low
carbon, energy transition, eco-city integration or smart, urban infra-
structure matters within sustainable city-making processes because it
enables urban futures to be constituted materially. Suburban infrastruc-
ture planning in Chapter 2 was, for example, conceived as finding ways
7 Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures
175
to allow different configurations to exist and to co-evolve, requiring

understanding and coordination of technological functioning, routines
and responsibilities created through material entanglements, as well as
the diverse concerns and interests of those present. In turn, methodo-
logically, infrastructure can be a fruitful, grounded location from which
to study the material emergence of these futures. This emergence con-
cerns reconfiguration of mostly existing infrastructure from ‘within’
to meet new ecological constraints and requirements. Even new eco-
districts like Hammarby Sjöstad rely on existing socio-technical sys-
tems rather than new technical innovations (Chapter 5). Current trans-
formations of infrastructure can be seen as at once the presupposition,
medium and outcome of an ongoing search for desirable urban futures
that must nonetheless flow out of extant conjunctures. Both Graham
and Marvin (2001) and Edwards (2002, p. 191) argue that infrastruc-
tures demonstrate the co-construction of technology and modernity. In
this vein, Larkin suggests that, as well as a technical function of service
delivery or circulation over distance, infrastructures articulate a distinct
collective sense of possibility or symbolic meaning where ‘they emerge
out of and store within them forms of desire and fantasy’ (Larkin 2013,
p. 329). Indeed, Larkin’s argument is that this ‘poetic’, aesthetic or affec-
tive dimension to infrastructure is no less material and political than its
technical, physical and functional dimension (see also Murphy 2016).
Infrastructures constitute progress, modernity, and bring future worlds
into being. As well as mediating vectors for access to water and elec-
tricity, eco-modernity now demands particular forms, qualities and con-
figurations of infrastructure for ensuring sustainable, low carbon, smart
urban futures. It follows, of course, as we have seen throughout, that
there is a politics to these framings and constitutions of infrastructures,
modernities and futures. As Gandy (2014, p. 222) observes ‘In some
cases the upgrading of infrastructure networks, especially if linked to
urban redevelopment projects or other forms of land speculation, can
itself become a tool of governmentality that serves to sharpen and rein-
force social inequalities’. From the chapters, I argue that we have also
moved to understand ‘infrastructure’s political address—the way tech-
nologies come to represent the possibility of being modern, of having a
future…’ (Larkin 2013, p. 333), or how urban infrastructure comes to
matter.
176
J. Rutherford
Material Politics: How Infrastructure

Comes to Matter
The chapters have demonstrated that infrastructure is not an exist-
ing foundation upon which pre-existing rational politics takes place,
but it is both constitutive of new political possibilities around urban
futures, and shaped itself by these. In tracking water, carbon, energy
and information flows through the urban fabric—charting the effectiv-
ity of material sites and processes of socio-technical change (Chapters 3
and 4)—this research analysed how infrastructure comes to be forma-
tive of potentials for wider change. This required focusing at once on:
rationales for development, circulation and uptake of technologies and
flows; how infrastructures become materialized and are made visible
and political; and their broader sociopolitical implications. As we have
seen, infrastructure becomes a part of plans, of ideal trajectories, of ideas
around how to change entrenched unsustainable path dependencies. It
also surges into view at particular key moments when decisions have to
be made (e.g. around contracts) or in times of crisis. It intersects more
broadly with issues of ownership, responsibility, coordination, finance
etc., and can become part of the story around these issues or a device
through which issues are foregrounded or negotiated. Tensions and con-
flicts running through infrastructure thus become crucial to the unfold-
ing of infrastructure processes and to understanding inherent struggles
over emerging pathways to ‘sustainable’ urban futures.
At the same time, I argue that active, vibrant infrastructure is vital
to this material politics. We have seen that socio-technical systems are
rarely passive in their make-up, functioning and activity. Exploring and
understanding infrastructure always involves taking into account its
dynamic and fluid deployment, lively and leaky constitution (Graham
and Thrift 2007) and the shifting exchanges enabled and constrained.
While there has long been a sense that infrastructures by their very
nature exceed the control of particular individuals and groups—gaining
‘momentum’ in this way (Hughes 1987; Edwards 2002, p. 221)—there
is increasing recognition of a need to ‘take account of the distinc-
tive kinds of effectivity that material objects and processes exert as a
177
consequence of the positions they occupy within specifically configured

networks of relations’ (Joyce and Bennett 2010, p. 5). Using a number
of focused cases, the chapters explored the propensity of the material
world to escape full control, as the entities, flows and objects of infra-
structure circulate, stabilize, mutate and resist within distributed net-
works of relations which collectively effect change. Without decentring
human intentionality, and indeed reinforcing it in many ways, another
view of urban vitality emerges through the mutually constitutive malle-
ability of human and material activity.
I argue then that the chapters have especially shown how infrastruc-
ture comes to matter in material political terms, that particular political
processes are at work in urban infrastructure change, as the compo-
nents and properties of infrastructure become enrolled in negotiations
and struggles over urban world-making. In order to capture this politics
of urban socio-technical futures, I discuss briefly three ways in which
urban infrastructure reconfigurations become politicized or come to
matter across the chapter stories, using notions of demonstration, devia-
tion, and assumption.
A material politics of demonstration includes, but is not limited to,
the most visible forms of contestation and protest around infrastructure
issues and projects. In Chapter 3 most clearly, activist and environmen-
tal groups in Stockholm protested vigorously against ongoing use of
a fossil fuel heating plant and against diversion of public funds to the
construction of a bypass road in the period when the city was vaunted
as the Green Capital of Europe. There is also continuing fervent debate
in France around nuclear energy and its ties to EDF and government
promotion of electric heating in French homes when there are held to
be more efficient heating provision systems especially in dense urban
areas such as Paris (Chapter 4). But demonstration is also about activ-
ities which reveal or make visible or render exemplary or comprehen-
sible in other ways. Indeed, I would argue that much of the politics of
infrastructure derives from the work of a variety of actors in attempt-
ing to reveal properties and relational workings of infrastructure com-
ponents (hence the focus on knowledge controversies in Chapter 4 for
instance). There are examples of this kind of material political activity in
178
J. Rutherford
all the chapters, whether it is the performative power of the Hammarby

Sjöstad recycling model in Chapter 5 which attempts to summarize and
then divulge the efficient systemic circulations between different infra-
structures to further encourage ecological activity and citizenship, or
the visualizations of energy flows in smart grids (Chapter 6) via meters,
platforms and dashboards through which various publics become
enrolled in projects, or the publicization of the large scale municipal
investment in water infrastructure systems (Chapter 2) which is meant
to show how seriously local politicians and planners are taking the need
to reconfigure zones of residence. In Chapter 5, there is also the pro-
ject evaluation process involving criteria and measures to demonstrate
how virtuous and successful a particular initiative has been over a num-
ber of years. The point is that these demonstrations reveal a particular
take or narrative around infrastructure reconfigurations, which makes
infrastructure actionable or governable, but which then become arenas
of actual or potential1 contest in which other perspectives can emerge,
including from the unruliness of infrastructure itself (e.g. water seepage
in Chapter 2, thermodynamic constraints in Chapter 3). By focusing
the aims and activities of a project or initiative on particular material
objects or processes and offering specific, but always partial, claims
about their functioning or purpose, these objects or processes are made
political by becoming open to other divergent readings and assertions.
A material politics of deviation emerges through the relational activ-
ities of differing actors which lead to digression and detour from/
of storylines, trajectories and linear flows associated with sustainable
urbanism and infrastructure objectives. The starting point of all the
chapters was some form of sustainable objective as outlined in munic-
ipal planning documents or strategic city plans, and which engaged
practitioners and associated actors on a set pathway to reaching goals by
a certain date. The subsequent analysis in each chapter problematized
these objectives and showed not just that they are inherently contested
1I would argue that we are yet to see a full demonstration of the politics of smart urbanism, for
example, as we are only now beginning to understand many of the ramifications and possible
consequences of deploying infrastructure for capturing and synthesizing people’s everyday activi-
ties (e.g. energy consumption) and circulating real-time digital flows from this data.
179
by other actors present or become a source of struggles over future

directions, but that these contests and struggles are the actual material
content and constitution of urban infrastructure changes through which
futures are negotiated. Tensions and contests over infrastructure could
be sourced in the disjuncture between governmental or ‘expert’ framings
and actions and how components and materials actually work, function
or are taken up in ways ‘excessive’ to bureaucracy and decision-making.
In one way, it is the low carbon, sustainable, smart framings by practi-
tioners which become an infrastructure upon which other actors sug-
gest, do, behave or contest in different ways in order to try to begin to
enact alternative pathways. Charged discussions over the content, form
and modalities of long-term electricity distribution contracts (Chapter 4),
over lessons to be taken from one sustainability project about infra-
structure performance for learning in a new project (Chapter 5), and
over how a clear objective such as ‘fossil fuel free city’ becomes trans-
lated materially into new heating or mobility infrastructure (Chapter 3)
are the actual ways in which urban socio-technical change comes about
as apparently solid and stable objects and measures such as contracts,
performance measures, policy reports and heating pipes become taken
up and interpreted in differing ways and thus become contingent and
multifaceted sites of controversy and debate which may lead to other
perspectives and possibilities. Again then, the argument here is to sug-
gest politics as constitutive of transformations rather than as merely the
outcome of these processes. Through these political deviations, transi-
tions from present to future configurations become materialized less as
simple straight lines than as undulation and disordering. Rather than
something that must be necessarily overcome, disputes over claims to
and practices of urban improvement/enhancement can be produc-
tively seen in terms of impurification as ‘the very gist of what consti-
tutes the emergence and transformation of environments, as well as
their practices and imaginings’ (Gabrys 2009, p. 671). Mike Michael
(2009, pp. 100–101) argues that ‘In the place of an environmental pol-
itics grounded in a purified version of nature, we need a politics that
addresses the complex and dynamic impurifications of technonatures…
a “politics” that encompasses the fact that political actors emerge
from (and are mediators of ) these very technonatural complexities’.
180
J. Rutherford
Beauregard pleads for planners to abandon their all-controlling, one-

for-all, exclusionary tendencies and to become open to and entangled
with ‘the anomalous, the informal, the deviant, and the unexpected’
(Beauregard 2015, p. 170). In short, a material politics of deviation and
impurification moves away from evoking (a return to) pure nature and/
or (a prospect of ) clean green smart, and towards a techno-ecological
politics sustained by hybridity, overflowing and divergence, recognizing
that we inhabit and experience multiple environments, our knowledge
of which is increasingly technologically mediated and contested (White
and Wilbert 2009).
A material politics of assumption can also be identified across the
chapters, involving processes and practices through which different
actors undertake to make sites, objects and systems their own, molding
interpretations of these to fit their interests and purposes, often to the
attempted exclusion of others or other uses. This cuts across all chapters
as diverse actors and sets of interests position themselves in relation to
sustainable policy objectives and directions of change proposed by spe-
cific policy documents. In Chapter 2, for example, many local residents
have ‘bought in’ to a municipal water infrastructure plan which offers
them a more sustainable, cost effective access to water services, mean-
ing that they take on responsibility to self-organize and create routines
and divisions of labour to maintain equipment and systems (making
do). Others are less inclined to accept municipal regulatory encroach-
ment into what they perceive to be the freedom of their living space,
which leads to a quite distinct taking on or ‘inhabiting’ of infrastruc-
ture (doing differently). In Chapter 4, the extent to which local actors
engage with the heating pipes, resource mixes and radiators through
which big energy transition objectives become materialized depends
on a host of factors often revolving around their capacity to integrate
material engagements with infrastructure components into existing
technical and political systems and interconnections/cooperations. In
Hammarby Sjöstad (Chapter 5), the supposed recipe for sustainability
of 75% systems contribution—25% residents’ contribution outlines a
very particular form of assumption where residents need to make less
effort because their consumption and behaviours are largely formatted
through technology deployment. The subsequent issues and problems,
181
from underperforming technologies to the unwillingness of people

to make sacrifices for ecological living, suggest that a rigid fixing of
expected roles and performances of human and non-human actors can-
not in practice be taken for granted. This politics of assumption can also
involve another kind of laying claim where particular actors try to make
links between ‘local’ components and processes of projects and ‘wider’
issues and debates. Infrastructure here takes on another ‘role’ or guise.
In this regard, the analysis in Chapter 5 identified how the broader sig-
nificance or ‘political situation’ of the Hammarby Sjöstad project could
be drawn out as part of narratives of green branding, eco-gentrification
or service privatization. It is likely that further work on local smart
grid configurations (Chapter 6) will continue to be linked to broader
national discussions about data circulation and privacy. Finally, assump-
tion like demonstration also implies thinking about absences, exclusions
and those who are less visible or able to make themselves heard. This
may be particularly the case with regard to future configurations when
perhaps some socio-technical relations are unclear, uncertain or yet to
make themselves discernible.
These material political processes share two traits. First, they are ways
of trying to sustain or create capacity of action or engagement over
time, and beyond specific immediate changes to infrastructure config-
urations. ‘To govern is to foresee’ is the motto to which an urban smart
grid project is ascribed in Chapter 6, which captures the sense that
anticipation and clairvoyance are pertinent modes of urban intervention
with infrastructure as the medium or conveyance of the future. Second,
they are forged around or through relations or engagements with par-
ticular materials, objects and entities which may be infrastructures ‘as
a whole’ or specific components of systems. Demonstration, deviation
and assumption are processes through which things become enrolled
into collectives for differing purposes. They are about actors attempting
to reveal properties of entities and components—the thermodynamic
qualities of heat flows (Chapter 4), the high cost of building a motor-
way bypass (Chapter 3)—or attempting to put these properties to work
for particular interests, or making allowances for their activity and func-
tioning. The political dimensions and outcomes of infrastructure have
long been clear, but in studying emerging city-making processes and
182
J. Rutherford
the central role of infrastructures in these, we begin to see the material/

infrastructural dimensions to politics and political activities: ‘infrastruc-
ture not only has a politics but is a politics’ (Amin and Thrift 2017,
p. 84; see also Barry 2001). A substantial portion of actions, choices
and decisions about urban futures generally is constituted by or through
engagements with the technical and material world. These may well be
(new) obligatory points of passage to sustainable urban futures, which is
also, perhaps especially, a recognition that we as humans are only one of
many actors in emerging collective socio-technical worlds.
There is a sense that we need to rethink questions of ‘who’ and ‘where’
in an age of shifting relations between humans, technology and the
physical environment. Agency and action are more distributed than ever,
and urban vibrancy and dynamics cannot be contained neatly within
city boundaries or policy mandates (Otter 2017). Reworking or rede-
ploying of infrastructure is shown to be contributing to or operating
quite fundamental shifts in human—environment relations, or ‘techno-
natures’ (White and Wilbert 2009). It does so notably by forging efforts
to bypass or transcend perceived or actual limits (spatio-temporal, eco-
logical, technical) in the organization and governing of ‘sustainable’
urban lives (of extant human–environment relations in the networked
city). Infrastructure in the anthropocene can no longer constitute an
instrument for unfettered and limitless growth as in the past, when sys-
tem expansion begat further expansion (Coutard 2010). Yet, material
enactments of emerging urban socio-technical futures, framed as low
carbon, smart etc., can be seen as a means to create new technologi-
cal opportunities out of the constraints of sustainability. From massive
municipal investment in suburban water systems (Chapter 2) or a bypass
road (Chapter 3) to smart logics of real-time commensuration of energy
production and consumption (Chapter 6) via infrastructure integration
and eco-districts (Chapter 5), infrastructure reconfiguration is a process
of redefining the pathways and limits of urban sustainability, at once
extending outwards to new available resources and concentrating pos-
sibilities of ‘autonomy’ within particular areas. This selective transcend-
ence suggests a resurgence of attempts at domination of ‘nature’ (Braun
2014), with infrastructures as ‘artificial environments, walling off mod-
ern lives from nature and constructing the latter as commodity, resource,
183
and object of romantic utopianism…’ (Edwards 2002, p. 221). There

is a gradual move through the chapters towards greater focus on ‘highly
technified economic actions’ and secessionary private ecology, displacing
any conception of sustainability as ‘public ecology’ (Luke 2003, p. 28).
Eco-city initiatives and smart urbanism become here an apotheosis of an
‘industrial ecology’ and ‘machinic metabolism’, a greenwashed techno-
logical ‘modernity’ which connects up homes and consumption practices
and circulates material and data flows in a modern advanced ‘web of life’
(Moore 2015) that can be used by only a few, and must be ‘analysed’,
‘criticized’ and ‘overcome’ (Luke 2003, p. 25). These tendencies to selec-
tive inclusions and exclusions, under the cover of ‘progress’ or ecological
modernization, merit further attention, as they are liable to lead to fur-
ther uneven infrastructure development and consequences as transform-
ative aims are diverted or usurped by ‘business as usual’.
Continuing Infrastructure Futures

An overarching concern of the book has been to broaden our under-
standing of urban infrastructure by tracking through the urban arena
the different rationales and engagements with materialities and flows as
they are put to work in the making of, and struggles over, wider urban
political projects. Across the chapters, infrastructure is never a neutral,
singular, fixed and pre-given grid system rolled out across city jurisdic-
tions according only to official policy. While urban infrastructure policy
contexts are important, and constituted a starting point for stories, the
aim here has been to move beyond the narrow view of infrastructure
and the urban that this implies, and capture encounters with an active
urban materiality being made political through tensions and struggles
which bubble up to unsettle, disrupt or deviate ‘ordering’ visions, objec-
tives and projects of change (see also Easterling 2014). Redeploying
infrastructure materializes or presents an active socio-technical cultiva-
tion of possible urban futures, but this is an inherently contested pro-
cess and a provisional ongoing achievement.
The perspective developed in the book has been based on a notion of
emergence which recognizes that the socio-technical world is always in
184
J. Rutherford
the making and that the processes which constitute this making inher-
ently forge possibilities of change. This immanent view already sets out
a political bearing, for as Amin and Thrift (2017, p. 83) make clear, ‘If
the world speaks back not from out or over there but from in here, then
we find ourselves in a different situation, one in which all manner of
beings are or can be enfranchised even though that enfranchisement
may not be equal’.
Furthermore, it also offers a methodological utility in unpacking,
even debunking, the discursive clarity of sustainable visions and drivers
of socio-technical change, but which is not borne out by material pro-
cesses and practices of actually deploying infrastructure. While many of
the proponents of sustainable city-making encountered in the stories in
the chapters have been quite clear about the aims and supposed benefits
of their plans and actions, the processes studied are far messier, more
uncertain, full of struggles and often less inclusive than suggested or
prescribed. Digging into the materiality of urban change thus offers a
useful method of critically interrogating ambitious, but slippery claims
of green urbanism or urban improvement for the collective good.
In this way, infrastructure futures are shown to be always emerging
processes constituted by, and not just the outcome of, socio-techni-
cal struggles. But what does this perspective focused on tracing mate-
rial political processes mean in practical terms for production of some
kind of meaningful or transformative change? It is here that a form of
normative or ethical commitment to working for change must be fore-
grounded as part and parcel of emerging processes. Recognition that
different types or scales of response or initiative are required to con-
front the social and ecological issues of today is a first step. The infra-
structure configurations and socio-technical arrangements we have seen
in the chapters are unlikely to oversee the transformative change that
is required, bound up as they are with existing political/governmental
formations still mostly oriented towards futures of unfettered economic
growth (see Mitchell 2009). A shift in political commitment towards
equality through progressive collective socio-technical configurations is
a fundamental element of any transformative change (see Luke 2003).
Yet, the potential for such a shift is already present if we place ourselves
within the socio-technical world in the making rather than somehow
185
standing outside of it. Amin and Thrift (2017, p. 6) argue that ‘infra-
structures have their own pinch points, which themselves constitute
political arenas’. I suggest that taking into account, and indeed acting
with, the vitality of the material world—the technicities, flows and enti-
ties of infrastructure over which we only ever have partial control—can
be a crucial part of engaging political action towards socio-technical
change that addresses core social and ecological concerns. In seeking
collective configurations that work towards equality, we need to rethink
our sense of what collective futures may signify. As Urry (2016) suggests,
it means first bringing a public concern and representative public bod-
ies back into societal debates where private or individual interests dom-
inate. But it also means opening out what public or collective actually
is and acknowledging, including and working actively and holistically
with all manner of objects and nonhumans that not only matter in
themselves as part of our world, but with which we are always already
entangled in everything we do and are. This symmetric ‘public ecology’
(Luke 2003) or material politics can forge care-ful and genuinely sus-
tainable infrastructure futures in which the primary task is quite sim-
ply to maintain socio-technical collectives which connect up and work
for all constituents. This vital infrastructure is endlessly fascinating,
reshaping and redeploying the possibilities of urban life itself not least
by forcing a multitude of actors to engage and recombine their efforts
with the material world. It is through sustaining such hybrid cross-
cutting engagements that more desirable, progressive and collective
urban futures may be fruitfully cultivated.
Research too can continue to push at the boundaries of conceptual
thinking about infrastructure and urban life. While the chapters in this
book have been concerned with the politics of infrastructure grids and
systems deployed to support or allow the staging of urban life, I suggest
that there is also a link to be forged in further studies of urban infra-
structure to the recent proliferation of work across the social sciences
which has extended the concept of infrastructure into new domains and
to encompass other things from all kinds of logistics systems to drones,
blood banks and air itself. As part of an overlapping conceptual shift
from flat to volumetric urban perspectives, there appears to be poten-
tial in seeking understanding of infrastructure not just as a base layer
186
J. Rutherford
upon which urban life takes place, but as an ambience or atmosphere

through/within which urban life is actually constituted (Sloterdijk
2009). Infrastructural activity may increasingly resemble an envelope
of existence and vitality forged through effective human and material
interactions, which ‘mixes all manner of beings together in a way that
can genuinely be regarded as evolutionary’ (Amin and Thrift 2017, p.
4). As a key site and means of delivering sustainable urban futures, of
bringing these futures into being, and of actively and vibrantly consti-
tuting how this is done, infrastructure is not just life support system,
but the vitality of life itself.
References
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Braun, Bruce. 2014. A New Urban Dispositif? Governing Life in an Age of
Climate Change. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32: 49–64.
Coutard, O. 2010. Services urbains: la fin des grands réseaux? In Ecologies
urbaines: état des savoirs et perspectives, ed. O. Coutard and J.P. Lévy. Paris:
Economica-Anthropos.
London: Verso.
Edwards, Paul. 2002. Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social
Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems. In Modernity and
Technology, ed. T. Misa, P. Brey, and A. Feenberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Gabrys, Jennifer. 2009. Sink: The Dirt of Systems. Environment and Planning
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Graham, Stephen, and Nigel Thrift. 2007. Out of Order: Understanding
Repair and Maintenance. Theory, Culture and Society 24 (3): 1–25.
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Routledge.
Hughes, T. 1987. The Evolution of Large Technical Systems. In The Social
Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and
History of Technology, ed. W. Bijker, T. Hughes, and T. Pinch. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Joyce, Patrick, and Tony Bennett. 2010. Material Powers: Introduction. In
Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, ed. T.
Bennett and P. Joyce. London: Routledge.
Larkin, Brian. 2013. The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review
of Anthropology 42: 327–343.
11–33.
Michael, Mike. 2009. The Cell-Phone-in-the-Countryside: On Some ironic
Spatialities of Technonature. In Technonatures, ed. D. White and C.
Wilbert. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. Carbon Democracy. Economy and Society 38 (3):
399–432.
Moore, Jason. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso.
Murphy, Douglas. 2016. Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of
Architecture. London: Verso.
Otter, Chris. 2017. The Technosphere: A New Concept for Urban Studies.
Urban History 44 (1): 145–154.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 2009. Foam City: About Urban Spatial Multitudes. In New
Geographies, ed. S. Ramos, S. Allen, S. Boeri, and N. Turan. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Urry, John. 2016. What Is the Future? Cambridge: Polity Press.
White, Damian, and Chris Wilbert (eds.). 2009. Technonatures: Environments,
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Laurier University Press.
Index
A E
Anthropocene 24, 28, 33, 182 Eco-city, ecological urbanism 25–27,
123, 135, 141, 150, 174, 183
EDF 107–111, 113, 114, 161, 177
B Eggers, Dave 1, 2
Biomass, biofuels 75, 83, 84, 105, Electricity 4, 31, 74, 78, 99,
106 102–104, 107, 109–116, 118,
132, 133, 135, 137, 140, 143,
160–163, 175, 179
C Energy infrastructure and systems 45,
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions 78, 100, 102, 116, 118, 124, 150
81, 84, 87, 100, 112, 162, Energy transition(s) 4, 6, 87, 88,
174 100, 101, 106, 110, 114, 115,
CPCU (Compagnie Parisienne de 117, 118, 174, 180
Chauffage Urbain) 103–106
F
D Fortum Värme 82, 83, 133, 135, 137
District heating. See Heating France 6, 105–107, 111, 160, 161, 177
Dufy, Raoul 99, 100, 117, 118 energy policy 110
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license 189
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1
190
Index
G Material politics/material political

Green Capital of Europe award 77, 3, 5, 11, 15, 30–33, 73, 85,
123 91, 100, 116, 117, 150, 173,
176–178, 180, 181, 184, 185
H
Hammarby Sjöstad 127–131, 133, N
136–142, 144, 145, 148, 149, Norrtälje 53–56, 58, 59, 64
167, 169, 175, 180, 181 Nuclear power 74, 100, 110, 112,
design and model 125, 131–133, 114, 117
135, 141, 143, 178
evaluation process 178
infrastructure systems 124, 135, O
137, 144–147, 150, 178 Off-grid systems 57–60
Heating 31, 72, 75, 78, 81–85, 88–90,
102–106, 110–113, 117, 132,
135–137, 140, 143, 145, 148, P
149, 174, 177, 179, 180 Paris 99–102, 104, 107–109,
111–114, 116–118, 159, 160,
174, 177
I energy and climate policy 103,
Infrastructure. See Urban 105–107, 110
infrastructure
Issy-les-Moulineaux 161–163, 165
R
Resource flows 4, 12, 16, 106, 124,
L 125, 146, 149, 150, 174
Low carbon 4, 25, 73, 90, 91, 100,
101, 106, 117, 174, 175, 179,
182 S
Smart 4, 6, 157–163, 165–170, 174,
175, 178–180, 182, 183
M Smart grid 159–161, 164, 178, 181
Materiality/materialities 3, 5, 11, Socio-technical change 3, 5, 7,
14, 15, 19–22, 24, 26, 31, 32, 13–17, 24, 30, 31, 34, 61, 63,
57, 60, 67, 71–73, 87, 90, 92, 66, 102, 118, 119, 125, 146,
102, 104, 114, 117, 118, 127, 148, 150, 165, 168, 173, 176,
150, 166, 174, 183, 184 179, 184, 185
Index
191
Socio-technical perspective 23, 47, T

173 Transition(s). See Energy tran-
Socio-technical transitions 16 sition(s); Low Carbon;
Stockholm 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 60, Socio-technical transitions;
61, 66, 74, 80, 87, 123–125, Sustainability transition(s)
127–130, 133, 135–138, 142,
144, 146–148, 150, 174
City Plan 76, 78, 86 U
energy and climate policy 71, Urban futures 2–5, 8, 11, 18, 21,
73–75, 77, 79, 84–86, 88, 24, 28, 29, 32, 34, 46, 90,
90–92 115, 126, 127, 145, 158, 169,
environmental policy 72, 77, 174–176, 182, 183, 185, 186
79–81, 86–89, 177 Urban infrastructure 2, 3, 9, 11, 32,
STS (science and technology studies) 47, 150, 173, 174, 179, 183
9, 12, 14, 16 politics of 5, 12, 13, 15, 29–31,
Suburban 4, 45–47, 49, 50, 52, 55, 34, 52, 73, 90, 126, 127, 177,
58, 59, 61–63, 65–67, 87, 89, 185
174, 182 Urban materiality. See Materiality/
Sustainability transition(s) 15–17, materialities
19, 30 Urban planning 25, 72, 78, 125,
Sustainability, urban 6, 8, 16, 18, 25, 127, 128, 130, 157, 166, 167,
123, 126, 127, 144, 149, 182 173, 174
Sustainable cities. See Sustainability, Urban political ecology 26
urban
Sustainable urban development. See
Sustainability, urban W
Sweden 51, 71, 72, 74, 106, 136, Waste infrastructure and systems 174
138, 140, 144 Water infrastructure and systems 46,
SymbioCity initiative 124 50, 178

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THE POLITICS OF URBAN SOCIO-TECHNICAL FUTURES

ISBN 978-3-030-17886-4 ISBN 978-3-030-17887-1 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Grafissimo/gettyimages

efficiency and optimal solutions and social scientists concerned by con-

constitutive. Here, the urban is at once the context, constituent and

eco-city integration, smart urbanism) as implemented in Stockholm and

studies and infrastructure situations and experiences in the South, the

urbanism objectives in Stockholm. Focusing on the well-known eco-dis-

Marne-la-Vallée, France Jonathan Rutherford

Graham, Stephen, and Colin McFarlane (eds.). 2015. Infrastructural Lives:

including Anastasia Touati, Lise Desvallées, Catalina Duque-Gomez,

1 Introduction: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure 1

2 Water Infrastructures, Suburban Living Spaces and

3 Engaging Urban Materialities of Low Carbon

4 Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy

5 Infrastructure Integration and Eco-City Futures:

6 Smart Grids and Enhancing Urban Systems:

7 Conclusion: Infrastructure Futures 173

Fig. 2.1 Settlements along the coast in Norrtälje 54

Table 2.1 Percentage of population connected to centralized water

Alan saw no sign of a city-to-be.

© The Author(s) 2020 1

I have also long been unconvinced and discouraged at the disconnect

urban reproduction. Infrastructure offers a pertinent window through

about various ‘sustainable’ urban futures. Such a focus reminds us

configuration at once maintains local material relations and extends these

Urban Processes of Transformative Change

Cities are increasingly seen to have a central ‘role’ in contributing to

of movement and action in some areas on national and international

Infrastructure is understood here as a process rather than any fixed

all-encompassing solution and an omnipresent problem, indispensable

depending on the research interest being explored: in one study, it may

and I (2016b) discuss in more detail the trajectories and deviations

infrastructural change, growth, and learning over time’ (Jackson et al.

Urban Infrastructure Matters: Thinking

politics of urban socio-technical futures by discussing and engaging in

Sustainability Transitions: Understanding Urban

The inherently normative connotations of any notion such as sustaina-

societal functioning and reproduction and how these changes emerge

societal shifts (Meadowcroft 2009; Monstadt 2009; Bulkeley et al. 2011;

extension of productive spaces of debate and negotiation which might

(2012) (and others) have called for dynamics of ‘territorial embedded-

Urban Materialities: Sustaining Human-Environment

Urban materiality is often used as a shorthand for justifying analysis of

had a tendency to overly detach subjectivity, identity and experience

circulation and manipulation’ (Latham et al. 2009). Such a perspective

between humans and their environments, which, as we shall see in the

Ecological Urbanism and a Politics of Techno-Natures

of supposedly exemplar urban projects around the world (Hodson and

to trace and analyse the uneven, conflictual, dynamic and translocal

Infrastructure processes become an ongoing achievement requir-

socio-technical challenges. Albeit perhaps on a more modest scale,

Towards Material Politics/Critical Hybridity

Gandy (2014, p. 24) argues that ‘The story of urban environmen-

but also shifting, uneven relations between technologies, humans and

hominids, creative gardeners, critical publics, political agents’ (White

Barry, Andrew. 2001. Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society.

Bulkeley, Harriet, Vanesa Castan Broto, M. Hodson, and S. Marvin (eds.).

Kamal-Chaoui, Lamia, and Alexis Robert. 2009. Competitive Cities and

Law, John. 1987. Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of

Meehan, Katie. 2014. Tool-Power: Water Infrastructure as Wellsprings of State

© The Author(s) 2020 45

Infrastructure systems are an important means of sustaining this artic-

Thinking (Sub)Urban Infrastructure

Fig. 2.1 Settlements along the coast in Norrtälje 54

Table 2.1 Percentage of population connected to centralized water

Urban Processes of Transformative Change

infrastructural change, growth, and learning over time’ (Jackson et al.

societal shifts (Meadowcroft 2009; Monstadt 2009; Bulkeley et al. 2011;

circulation and manipulation’ (Latham et al. 2009). Such a perspective

Ecological Urbanism and a Politics of Techno-Natures

by drawing out the indivisible social significance of particular system

Planning for Water and Wastewater Systems

Table 2.1 Percentage of population connected to centralized water and waste-

Fig. 2.1 Settlements along the coast in Norrtälje

Fig. 2.2 Summerhouse residence in Norrtälje

Fig. 2.3 Off-grid home in Norrtälje with well and septic tank

Fig. 2.4 ‘Community’ connection to municipal networks (Source Redrawn from

Tensions in Suburban Infrastructure

Hilding-Rydevik et al. 2011), these studies come to a shared conclu-

Energy–Climate Policy in Stockholm

Three Matters of Contention Around

The Municipality, the Heating Company and ‘Darkness’

Fig. 3.2 The rising price of district heating in Stockholm, 2000–2011 (Source

The Congestion Charge and the Motorway:

Energy–Climate Issues and the Politics

Live in the City of Light: Contentious