To minimize market fragmentation, optimize efficiencies through compatible digital architectures, and encourage collaboration, high-level smart city harmonization efforts have been advocated across Europe. This paper critically analyzes attempts by the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities Six Nations Forum (EIP-SCC 6N) to constitute a common smart city management framework through application of a generic Blueprint. Analysis highlights how these efforts are brought to bear through four techniques: simplification, interoperability, integration, and authorization. Examining the adoption (and rejection) of these techniques underscores the importance of attending to distinctive urban contexts and alternative ways of knowing and acting in the city.

Research on smart urbanism predominantly focusses on the production of digital knowledge. In response, this paper probes the potential and limitations of digital devices producing the kinds of knowledge needed for governing urban environments. Based on four case studies in Europe, the paper investigates what kinds of knowledge become privileged and what kinds of knowledge get overlooked when digital devices are deployed to inform urban governance. We find that non-digital knowledges are easily eclipsed, yet remain vital to effective and inclusive urban environmental governance. Our findings suggest that digital technologies need to be developed in ways that are attentive towards the different kinds of knowledge (digital and non-digital) that may be necessary for effective and inclusive urban governance. This holds for the knowledges that are used to develop digital devices and the knowledges intended to be generated through them, as well as openness towards unanticipated or overlooked knowledges that still matter.

First published in 1997, This book presents a detailed analysis of the Integrated Pollution Control (IPC) policy process. Using developments in the late nineties in the public policy literature to analyse and produce answers to why the government introduced IPC and how has IPC policy been implemented.