Smart-sustainability: A new urban fix?

Urban policy increasingly positions smart urban development as a transformative approach to deliver sustain- ability. In this paper, we question the transformative credentials of smartness and argue that it is better un- derstood as a partial fix for the economic, environmental and social challenges faced by cities. Drawing on the urban sustainability and smart city literatures, we develop the concept of the urban smart-sustainability fix. This concept focuses on how smart-sustainable city initiatives selectively integrate digital and environmental agendas via entrepreneurial forms of urban governance. We develop this concept by examining how the urban smart- sustainability fix is constructed in the European Commission’s flagship smart cities and communities lighthouse projects, focusing on the Triangulum initiative. Our research reveals three elements of the urban smart-sus- tainability fix: (1) the spatial development of smart-sustainable districts; (2) the digitisation of urban infra- structure to reveal hidden processes; and, (3) collaborative experimentation with low-carbon and digital tech- nologies. We argue that this has produced urban districts that are attempting to reduce their carbon emissions while promoting green economic growth. The main aim of the urban smart-sustainability fix is to make the urban realm more manageable resulting in amplification, rather than transformation, of the dominant ecological modernisation agenda of sustainable development.