Governing the Transformation of Urban Infrastructures

Dear Colleagues,

The challenge of making our cities more sustainable is, to a large extent, a challenge of transforming urban infrastructures. Tackling problems such as climate change, resource depletion, or energy security require fundamental transformations of the ways we produce, distribute, and use goods and energy, organize our systems of transport, or food production and consumption. While we see the emergence of a growing variety of new technologies around renewable energy generation, electricity distribution through smart grids, ultra-energy efficient buildings, or new vehicle propulsion technologies, this alone will not solve the problems we are facing. Systemic change needs to deal with the interdependencies of technologies with the social, cultural, and economic dimensions they are embedded in—social practices of use, business models, visions and expectations, regulations and other institutional structures, or the interests and strategies of different groups of actors.

Cities have turned out to be key players in such transformation processes. Despite their lack of legislative power and control over large-scale infrastructures, they command a range of “soft” governance capacities to facilitate sustainable socio-technical change processes—the implementation of sustainability experiments and related processes of knowledge creation and learning, the creation of new actor coalitions between administration, business and civil society around particular environmental initiatives, or the forging of networks between and across cities to join force in tackling environmental and social problems.

Contributions to this Special Issue should empirically deal with cases of sustainable infrastructural change in cities and in particular with governance strategies to shape such transformation processes towards greater sustainability.

Prof. Dr. Harald Rohracher
PD, Dr. Michael Ornetzeder
Dr. Philipp Späth
Guest Editors

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