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Smart cities are increasingly advocated by governments and the private sector as the primary means to deliver urban sustainability. Particularly in Europe and North America, the smart city is envisioned as a place where digital technologies are deployed to ‘solve’ urban sustainability problems. Such visions have been broadly cri- tiqued in the urban studies literature for reflecting techno-utopian

The wisdom of ‘smart’ development increasingly shapes urban sustainability in Europe and beyond. Yet, the ‘smart city’ paradigm has been critiqued for favouring technological solutions and business interests over social inclusion and urban innovation. Despite the rhetoric of ‘citizen-centred approaches’ and ‘user-generated data’, the level of stakeholder engagement and public empowerment is still

Existing post-occupancy research rarely considers the importance of the sociality of the building user community and its building user group dynamics. A social value agenda is proposed to promote user- centred design within the built environment, by looking beyond physical design to consider the dy- namic interactions that exist between people and their built environment within the social context

We reflect on the decision to abandon the mainstreaming of zero-carbon house building in England, in the context of our paper (Walker et al. 2015) that took this long-standing policy commitment as its case study. We consider this denouement as further evidence of how the exigencies of capital accumulation resist moves towards low-carbon transition. We reflect on what it reveals about the relation

Considerable overlap exists between post-occupancy research evaluating building design quality and the concept of ‘social value’, popularised by its recent application to issues of the public realm. To outline this potential research agenda, the paper reviews design quality research on buildings in rela- tion to users and their social context where the term ‘social context’ refers to building user

This special issue presents findings from the ‘Conditioning Demand: Older People, Diversity, and Thermal Experience’ re- search project undertaken between 2011 and 2013. The aim of the project was to address the confluence of two key future trends: Europe's ageing population and the need to reduce domestic en- ergy consumption to counter rising utility prices and the in- creasing threat of climate

Optimising the energy performance of buildings is technically and economically challenging but it also has significant social implications. Maintaining comfortable indoor conditions while reducing energy consumption involves careful design, construction, and management of the built environment and its inhabitants. In this paper, we present findings from the study of a new low energy building for o

Living labs and co-production are increasingly popular strategies for universities to address sustainability challenges and yet the links between them remain largely implicit. This paper discusses the potential of living labs to provide a holistic and iterative framework for the co-production of knowledge. The University Living Lab initiative was launched in 2012 to transform the University of Man

The UK housing stock will play an important role in achieving the 2050 national carbon reduction targets. Upgrading the energy performance of the existing housing stock is a significant challenge because retrofit activities are shaped by a wide range of fragmented policies, programmes and actors. Existing approaches to housing retrofit focus on regulations, financial incentives and information pro

Urban nature is typically managed through top-down, bureaucratic, and expert-driven approaches that tend to rationalize and simplify the interactions between humans and their surround- ings. In the last few decades, there has been a significant push in cultural geography and the design disciplines to develop a relational ontology of urban nature, a perspective that emphasizes the hybrid connection

Seattle has long been considered a city in harmony with nature, a metropolis inseparable from and infused with the dramatic and picturesque Pacific Northwest landscape. Today, the city is frequently cited as a leader in sustainable urban development and this is due in large part to its unique relationship with its natural surroundings. However, the historical record of Seattle reveals this harmoni

We consider in this paper the relations between built form and everyday practices of home-living. These we see as co-constituting a combined domestic carbon space in which sociomaterial interdependencies are constantly at work. Carbon emissions are necessarily caught up in these interdependencies and not separable from them. We use the case of the mainstreaming of zero carbon (zero-C) housing in t

The notion of the ‘urban laboratory’ is increasingly striking a chord with actors involved in urban change. Is this term simply a metaphor for urban development or does it suggest urbanization by substantially different means? To answer this question, we review the work of science and technology studies (STS) scholars who have empirically investigated laboratories and practices of experimentation

The increasing threat of climate change has created a pressing need for cities to lower their carbon footprints. Urban laboratories are emerging in numerous cities around the world as a strategy for local governments to partner with public and private property owners to reduce carbon emissions, while simultaneously stimulating economic growth. In this article, we use insights from laboratory studi

Drawing on a postcolonial perspective and theories of strategic narratives and silences, this article looks at how Sweden’s feminist foreign policy (FFP) was reported in the media of conflict-affected states. It improves our understanding of feminist foreign policy reception by showing that from twenty selected countries, only newspapers in ten states had content on the FFP. It is argued that this

SUMMARYHigh prenatal detection rates of complex congenital heart defects (CHD) Aim: To analyze prenatal detection rates of complex CHD after the implementation of an expanded three-tiered screening model at the Skane University Hospitals in Lund and Malmö in 2015. Methods: Retrospective review of pregnancies screened from January 1, 2015 and being born by June 30, 2018. Complex CHD was defined as

The Arctic is exposed to even faster temperature changes than most other areas on Earth. Constantly increasing temperature will lead to thawing permafrost and changes in the methane (CH4) emissions from wetlands. One of the places exposed to those changes is the Abisko-Stordalen Mire in northern Sweden, where climate and vegetation studies have been conducted since the 1970s. In our study, we anal

Archaea often live in extreme, harsh environments such as acidic hot springs and hypersaline waters. To date, only two icosahedrally symmetric, membrane-containing archaeal viruses, SH1 and Sulfolobus turreted icosahedral virus (STIV), have been described in detail. We report the sequence and three-dimensional structure of a third such virus isolated from a hyperthermoacidophilic crenarchaeon, Sul

Transposon mutagenesis is a tool that is widely used for the identification of genes involved in the virulence of bacteria. Until now, transposon mutagenesis in Clostridium perfringens has been restricted to the use of Tn916-based methods with laboratory reference strains. This system yields primarily multiple transposon insertions in a single genome, thus compromising its use for the identificati