Simon Joss

University of Glasgow | UofG · Division of Urban Studies

'Interest in the sustainable city is growing around the world and with it come important questions about governing sustainable urban development. Why are there blockages to achieving the goal of a sustainable city? How is it possible to overcome the practical difficulties that initiatives often face? And how can an increasingly technocratic focus b...

This research report provides a conceptual and empirical overview of the emerging field of eco-city frameworks. It conceptualises the rise of indicators, standards and frameworks for sustainable urban development from the twin perspective of innovation and governance. The empirical research encompasses over 40 frameworks used globally. The report c...

Efforts to innovate in urban sustainability have in recent decades culminated in a new phenomenon: eco-cities. In recognition of the key role played by cites both as the cause of, and potential solution to, global climate change and rapid urbanisation, the concept and practice of eco-cities have since the early 2000s gained global significance and...

The global mainstreaming of urban sustainability policy, since the early 2000s, points to a new phenomenon: the ‘ubiquitous eco-city’. Its key features – based on the analysis of a census of 178 initiatives – include: the significant, global proliferation of eco-city initiatives; increased international knowledge transfer activities involving both...

Developing an appropriate governance model for smart city is complicated as it involves a variety of social and technical components. This article addresses the question of how a network model can provide a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic interactions among smart city components and their evolution over time by proposing a network-based...

The 15-minute city has emerged as a key urban development theme in recent years, and especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. It has also become a focus point for tensions and debates over future urban trajectories, including over the role of automobility as the key technology that defines the experience of the urban. While the 15-minute city has be...

Globally, smart cities attract billions of dollars in investment annually, with related market opportunities forecast to grow year-on-year. The enormous resources poured into their development consist of financial capital, but also natural, human and social resources converted into infrastructure and real estate. The latter act as physical capital...

In this Supplementary Document (PDF file below), we summarise the spatial typology of smart cities that we used in our article on the smart city as manifestation of 21st century capitalism (De Jong et al, 2024). The document lists six spatial types of smart city: [1] Science parks and smart campuses; [2] Innovation districts; [3] Smart neighbourhoo...

In the late 2010s, publics in the UK encountered new kinds of street furniture: Strawberry Energy Smart benches in London and InLinkUK kiosks in Glasgow, with smart features such as phone charging, free Wi-Fi, free phone calls, information screens and environmental data. This article analyses how smart street furniture is socially constructed by re...

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has, from the outset, been characterized by a strong focus on real-time data intelligence and the use of data-driven technologies. Against this backdrop, this article investigates the impacts of the pandemic on Scottish local government’s data practices and, in turn, whether the crisis acted as a driver for dig...

Platform urbanism has emerged in recent years as an area of research into the ways in which digital platforms are increasingly central to the governance, economy, experience, and understanding of the city. In the paper, we argue that platform urbanism is an evolution of the smart city, constituted by novel, digitally-enabled socio-technical assembl...

This article provides new evidence of the ways that smart cities materialize within specific sites and contexts through smart street furniture (SSF). Drawing on empirical data generated through mixed-method field research, the article examines the situated data relations that emerge in the context of the adoption of InLinkUK smart kiosks in Glasgow...

Datasets underlying the article Joss et al (2022) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264275122000828?via%3Dihub

In response to the need for ecological transition, a multitude of eco-city and eco-neighborhood initiatives have been instigated around the world. A major challenge has been the charge, captured by terms such as ‘eco enclaves’ and ‘environmental gentrification’, that these initiatives poorly attend to questions of social diversity and spatial equit...

[Open access article: see DOI link] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This data article presents a tripartite dataset that formed the empirical basis for a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the use of city labels denoting sustainable urbani...

This collection critiques the rhetoric of ‘smart cities’. It seeks to engender a timely debate about what future cities might look like and what their concerns should be. Using a multi-disciplinary perspective, it features acclaimed scholars whose work investigates the proposed networked digital technologies that ostensibly affect planning policies...

Watch the accompanying presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkqL92bBTTg

Process tracing, or causal process observation, is a qualitative method for policy analysis / evaluating policy implementation.

SDG11 – ‘making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ – draws attention to the criticality of urban governance in the quest for sustainable development. Reflecting this, diverse city labels, such as ‘sustainable city’ and ‘smart city’, have been mobilized by urban actors and scholars to consider cities’ responses...

Around the world, local innovations in the management and development of urban space are often significantly shaped by national government competitions. This article argues that the competition is a characteristic but under-discussed feature of contemporary national policymaking on urban innovation, and considers how such competitions might be more...

The Smart Publics project focused on the introduction and usage of smart kiosks and benches. The project explored public perceptions of the BT InLink kiosks and the Strawberry Energy smart benches, and identified emerging issues for the design and governance of these. The small-scale one year project was carried out by an interdisciplinary research...

Seminar presentation discussing the interrelated methods of biblio- and webometrics, as applied in two research projects on smart sustainable urbanism.

Despite its growing ubiquitous presence, the smart city continues to struggle for definitional clarity and practical import. In response, this study interrogates the smart city as a global discourse network by examining a collection of key texts associated with cities worldwide. Using a list of 5,553 cities, a systematic webometric exercise was con...

The smart city has become a main prism through which urban futures are viewed. With it comes the promise of big data technology enabling more resource-efficient urban systems and improved governance. Increasingly, however, this technocentric view is being challenged, at least rhetorically, by seeking to place people at the heart of smart city devel...

As global cities, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing operate in international economic networks; however, they are also each firmly embedded within a regional context and are surrounded by less populous and less internationally recognized neighbors. Together they form so-called mega-city regions referred to as the Greater Pearl River Delta, the Yangtz...

Cities have become a focal point for efforts to transition towards a more sustainable, low-carbon society, with many municipal agencies championing ‘eco city’ initiatives of one kind or another. And yet, national policy initiatives frequently play an important – if sometimes overlooked – role, too. This chapter provides comparative perspectives on...

The policy pointers presented in this report are the result of a three-year (2015-18) research project led by Federico Caprotti at the University of Exeter. The project, Smart Eco-Cities for a Green Economy: A Comparative Analysis of Europe and China, was delivered by a research consortium comprising scholars and researchers in the UK, China, the N...

Growing practice interest in smart cities has led to calls for a less technology-oriented and more citizen-centric approach. In response, this article investigates the citizenship mode promulgated by the smart city standard of the British Standards Institution. The analysis uses the concept of citizenship regime and a mixture of quantitative and qu...

Over the past few decades, increasing attention given to the issue of urban sustainability has been reflected in the spread of ‘eco-city’ policies and initiatives. However, the past few years have seen the growing use of a new terminology, around the idea of the ‘smart city’. This new agenda has incorporated many pre-existing themes of urban develo...

In response to policy-makers’ increasing claims to prioritise ‘people’ in smart city development, we explore the publicness of emerging practices across six UK cities: Bristol, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Milton Keynes, and Peterborough. Local smart city programmes are analysed as techno- public assemblages invoking variegated modalities of public...

The UN-HABITAT III conference held in Quito in late 2016 enshrined the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) with an exclusively urban focus. SDG 11, as it became known, aims to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable through a range of metrics, indicators, and evaluation systems. It also became part of a post-Quito 'New Urba...

Feature article on smart cities and related lessons from recent UK smart city initiatives. Published in: Public Sector Executive 2017/18: p.40

Feature article on smart city policy trends in the UK

With Asia’s cities undergoing unprecedented growth in the 21st century, lauded the ‘urban century’ by many, Sustainable Cities in Asia provides a timely examination of the challenges facing cities across the continent including some of the projects, approaches and solutions that are currently being tested. This book uses numerous case studies, ana...

Monsoon Assemblages is a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 697873). Monsoon [+ other] Airs is the first of three publications by Monsoon Assemblages arising from symposia held at the University of Westminster (2017-2019). Thes...

The history of the smart city may be a brief one, but it has already left an indelible mark on contemporary discourses on urban development and associated innovation practices. Only a couple of decades ago, the term ‘smart city’ was hardly used by scholars, let alone by policy makers and practitioners. Yet, within the last decade or so, the term ha...

[Full text: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/eco-cities/reflections] The history of the smart city may be a brief one, but it has already left an indelible mark on contemporary discourses on urban development and associated innovation practices. Only a couple of decades ago, the term 'smart city' was hardly used by scholars, let alone by policy makers...

This research report presents the findings of an ongoing multi-centre comparative analysis of ‘smart-eco city’ initiatives in the UK. The ‘smart-eco city’ concept captures the recent trend for future-oriented urban development schemes that display both ‘green’ and ‘smart’ ambitions. More precisely, the smart eco-city is defined here as an experimen...

Over the last few decades, China has seen a steep rise in diverse eco city and low carbon city policies. Recently, attention has begun to focus on the perceived shortcomings in the practical delivery of related initiatives, with several publications suggesting a gap between ambitious policy goals and the emerging realities of the newly built enviro...

The ‘eco-city,’ and related concepts and practices of ‘sustainable urbanism,’ have since the early 2000s gained growing international popularity and entered mainstream policy as a consequence of the forceful combination of global climate change concerns and a rapidly urbanizing world population. Sustainable urbanism engages with various aspects of...

Over the last couple of decades, metropolitan areas around the world have been engaged in a multitude of initiatives aimed at upgrading urban infrastructure and services, in an effort to create better environmental, social and economic conditions and to enhance cities’ attractiveness and competitiveness. Reflecting these developments, many new cate...

The term 'smart city' has enjoyed a rapid rise in popularity since the late 2000s. This essay reviews the use of the term and its conceptual dimensions - describing how smart city initiatives attempt to reconcile economic, environmental and social objectives through interconnected governance and coordination, using information and communication tec...