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Paper short abstract

This paper mobilizes insights from the field of Sustainability Transitions to provide a fresh analytical perspective on ongoing smart city developments

Paper long abstract

In recent years, the 'Smart City' has emerged as a popular term amongst engineers, policymakers, architects, scholars and others interested in the proliferation and mainstreaming of connected information- and communication technologies (ICTs) that might reshape the social- and material fabric of cities. This paper mobilizes insights from the field of Sustainability Transitions to provide a fresh analytical perspective on ongoing smart city developments. At the heart of this perspective are the ideas of the city as a complex patchwork of socio-technical systems, the struggle between obdurate stability and transformative change and the notion of experimentation. We argue that an analytical division along the lines of (1) materiality, (2) institutions and (3) discourse provides a fruitful starting point for the analysis of smart urbanism in experimental settings and we illustrate this with examples from the Netherlands and Germany