Jonathan Rutherford’s research while affiliated with Gustave Eiffel University and other places

This introduction to the special issue critically explores the pervasive logic of solutionism in infrastructure-led urban development and planning-a logic marked not only by the strong belief in the transformative power of infrastructures but also by a tendency to reframe how urban problems are prioritised and governed. Although infrastructures are increasingly positioned as key tools for urban decarbonisation, circularity, resilience or smartness, this introduction critically questions dominant solutionist approaches to complex urban problems. Drawing on recent urban scholarship, it explores infrastructures as ongoing, relational, and contested sociotechnical processes, rethinking transformative urban change as a situated, incremental, and ambiguous process shaped by local politics, materiality, and everyday repair and patching. Contributions to this issue highlight how infrastructural initiatives, even when partial or unrealised, can challenge dominant interests and practices and open space for alternative urban futures. Rather than repudiating infrastructural solutions, therefore, we suggest that the special issue foregrounds infrastructures' contested potential to enable progressive, transformative change. We pull out four transversal themes from the papers, around rethinking governance, repoliticising infrastructure development, embracing incremental and context-sensitive approaches, and expanding conceptions of justice. In doing so, we call for approaches to infrastructural transformation that remain open to uncertainty, friction, and possibility.

This paper examines the understudied relationship between nature conservation and climate control in botanic gardens. Drawing on research conducted at Kew Gardens in West London, we analyse how the relations between climate control, techniques that allow the creation of particular microclimatic conditions in volumetric enclosures, and ex‐situ—out of nature—botanical management have changed over time. The paper shows how climate‐controlled conservation works through three spatial‐technological modes—acclimatisation, climate simulation, and climate security—that reconfigure in‐situ and ex‐situ relations. These modes increasingly transcend local environmental conditions, creating the possibility of conservation without natural climate. The paper extends existing geographies of climate control by focusing on the role of technology in permitting plant life to be moved between different geographical contexts, in enabling ex‐situ and in‐situ natures to become increasingly entwined, and in constructing enclosed conditions decoupled from local climate. Secure climate‐controlled conservation now strategically transforms ex‐situ botanic gardens into the actual sites, and in some cases the last remaining sites, of these natures.

Introduction Recognition that the urban context is now the key site of societal vulnerability – and of its management through infrastructural interventions at the nexus of climate, ecological, population, technological, and other security concerns – is claimed to be the ‘hegemonic discourse of our time’ (Davoudi, 2014: 371; see Braun, 2014; Derickson, 2018; Bulkeley, 2021). Critically, the issue of vulnerability is a matter of strategic and systemic concern for both civil society and the military– security complex. Within the US military, there is now widespread acknowledgement that key operational defence facilities located in North America are also vulnerable to multiple forms of turbulence because they are reliant on the same centralized electrical grids as neighbouring cities and communities. Consequently, there is emerging commensurability between urban resilience and military security. In both sectors, establishing enclaves of critical assets with bespoke infrastructure configurations via the installation of smart microgrids appears to offer protection against both human and climatic threats. The development and roll-out of smart microgrids are being rapidly accelerated in US urban and military contexts to enable a new automated management of interruptions to the central grid (Rutherford and Marvin, 2022). Smart microgrids are energy systems of varying sizes/scales within specific territories that draw on local sources of energy production, increasingly focused on renewables, and storage capacity. Key to their functionality is the way systems are reconfigured to switch in ‘microseconds’ between ‘grid-connected’ and ‘islanded’ modes, thus seamlessly maintaining fail-safe power for a variety of ‘critical assets’. Smart microgrids are emerging infrastructural configurations that are always on ‘alert’. As such, they aim to secure operational continuity through hardware-and software-enabled adaptive functionalities that operate in ‘real time’ and that are configured simultaneously for on-and off-grid operations and normal/emergency modes. They operate by removing the temporal interval between the detection of the emergency and the initiation of the response, thus eliminating power interruption for those critical assets connected to a microgrid. This chapter examines the emergence of the smart microgrid as a logic of grid security that can seamlessly switch between different grid configurations in microseconds. Crucially, this does not provide continued power for everyone because the ‘critical assets’ whose functioning must be guaranteed are pre-selected, producing a differentiated form of urban resilience (Rutherford and Marvin, 2022).

This paper critically examines why urban studies should be interested in the emergence of controlled environment agriculture. Over the last decade, there has been significant commercial and urban policy interest in controlled environment agriculture systems for producing food in enclosed environments. Furthermore, there has been a significant expansion in research publications on urban controlled environment agriculture, stressing the novel character of these systems and the complex relationships with the conventional concerns of urban agriculture. The paper subjects these claims to critical scrutiny and then reconceptualises urban controlled environment agriculture as an emergent urban infrastructure of artificial, highly productive microclimates and ecosystems for non-human life designed to increase the productive use of ‘surplus or under-utilised’ urban spaces. We argue that controlled environment agriculture tries to secure food production through three spatial–temporal fixes: (1) the enclosure move – holding food closer by substituting the increasingly hostile outdoors for the controlled indoors in order to optimise yield, quality, efficiency and the ‘cleanness’ of the food; (2) the urban move – holding food closer to the city by substituting rural agricultural space for urban space to shorten supply chains and thereby help secure food production and improve its green credentials; and (3) combining 1 and 2, the urban interiorisation move – holding food yet closer still by moving food production into city buildings and intricate infrastructural systems, increasing control by securing total environments. In these ways, the paper shows how urban controlled environment agriculture selectively extends existing logics of urban and rural agriculture and identifies the future research challenges for urban studies.

Increasing threats to the electrical grid are generating responses that seek to secure selected “mission critical” assets essential to the functioning and continuity of life. Focusing on military and urban domains in the United States that use the smart microgrid as a technique for securing “always-on” power during grid failure, we explore the core rationales, socio-technical configurations and wider implications of these projects. The paper argues that smart microgrid systems are an adaptive mode of grid expansion that utilizes the off-grid “islanding” and grid-tied functionalities of microgrids to secure urban operational continuity. They constitute a relational systemic reconfiguration that draws on, develops and holds together expertise and interdependencies across domains to construct an integrated response to grid vulnerability. Smart microgrids thus bring into view an emerging set of spatial–temporal dynamics and implications through which the interval of disruption is eliminated and power maintained, albeit for selected designated critical assets.

Indoor and outdoor leisure environments are increasingly understood to be mutually constituted through merged relationships but there has been less focus on the actual forms that hybridisation can take. This paper provides an analysis of forms of hybridisation through time by focusing on the socio‐technical configurations through which three leisure environments are materially constituted. We analyse the key functional elements of these configurations: the technological systems and their genealogies over time that allow the making and unmaking of activities; the spatiality of facilities and systems in terms of their locations and connections across space; and the construction by providers of user pathways between indoor and outdoor activities. The paper uses this structure to compare purpose‐built indoor recreational spaces located in the city region of Greater Manchester that recreate outdoor activities focusing on skydiving, skiing and ice wall climbing. We construct a framework of three modes of hybridisation – emergent, merged, stretched – that contributes a deeper understanding of the diversity, intensity and changing temporality of interrelations between indoor and outdoor environments.

This paper studies the diverse actions, interventions and strategies initiated to address rising energy vulnerability among low-income households in the Barcelona region over the last decade. Drawing upon recent conceptual work around the politics of energy and in-depth fieldwork conducted over more than two years, we trace the different processes and sites through which the basic socio-material conditions of domestic access to energy have become politicised. We show how this involves a two-stage movement of deconfinement and reconfinement. In a context marked by austerity, an energy inefficient urban fabric and a centralised and oligopolistic energy system, energy vulnerability emerged from the domestic and private sphere to become framed as a public problem through parliamentary debate, social protest and local authority initiatives. Yet, energy access and vulnerability have also to some extent been recontained in the space of the household through the focus of recent local policy intervention on ‘low cost’ measurement, audit and equipment of domestic energy use. We argue that in reprivatizing what had become a public issue and thus redistributing responsibility for change to the household level, authorities and practitioners continue to ignore the systemic factors behind energy vulnerability situations and reproduce a status quo that benefits only energy utilities. The contribution of the paper is thus to show a politics of energy access that is increasingly constituted through entangled, fluid, blurred forms of relations between domestic and collective issues. This politics allows, for example, the need for systemic change to be framed as ostensibly a concern of households and to be met through fragmented, low-cost, metrological measures at that level.