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Short abstract:

The paper critically examines the sustainability of the compact city and densification, analyzing actors and tensions related to social equity using the concept of ‘co-agency’. It reflects on the synergy of densification with big data technology, highlighting discourses of control optimism.

Long abstract:

Explosive urban expansion has connected and splintered the urban fabric and the sociotechnical infrastructures that sustain it (Graham & Marvin, 2001; Brenner & Schmid, 2015), resulting in a global (sub)urban technosphere (Otter, 2017) that drives climate change. In response, a hegemonic sustainability agenda has emerged that reframes cities as champions of urban transformation (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2020). Compact urbanism (Haarstad et al., 2023), which envisions dense, efficient, and livable cities, is a widely adopted smart and green growth strategy linked to the technopolitics of urban planning and management. It coexists and interrelates with other models, such as the eco-city and smart city approaches seeking to create an urban operating system (Luque-Ayala & Marvin, 2020). Our paper critically examines urban de/re-densification as a means to achieve compact urban form (McFarlane, 2020), the associated politics of value (Habermehl & McFarlane, 2023), and the proclaimed synergetic potential with big data technologies (Bibri, 2020). We contrast the quality expectations of the compact city with academic research highlighting its tensions and contradictions, particularly in relation to social equity. Our review suggests that this attempt to manage the technosphere frames and translates sustainability in its own control-optimistic way, parallel to trends in smart urbanism (Goodspeed, 2015). Its outcomes depend on the distribution of dis/benefits, potentially disadvantaging already underprivileged groups. We propose ‘co-agency’ as a future research direction to understand the hybrid forms of agency that shape densification processes, and to identify generalizable development scenarios.