Heritage protection can sometimes disrupt the remaking and reimaging of cities by prioritising and protecting alternatives based on non-market values of architectural and historical significance. In England, the "post-war listing" programme has positioned state heritage protection as an unlikely advocate and defender (sometimes of last resort) of the diminishing material and symbolic legacy of the architecture of the welfare state and its socialist values from the 1950s and 1960s. In this paper, we explore what might be at stake ideologically, materially, and symbolically in the protection of post-war architectural heritage in England. While post-war listing has creating scope for alternatives, its subaltern role (in and against the state) has been limited in various ways by state strategies of market-based regeneration that erode and marginalise social housing and welfarist rights to the city. Although heritage protection has been only a minor irritant in the politics of regeneration, the paper explores what might be at stake for the Left in engaging more explicitly with heritage building protection and the selectivity of heritage value.

Strategies to develop and attract the creative industry and promote new urban cultural identities have been an important part of post-industrial regeneration in cities around the world. There is evidence that similar processes are now underway across China as established cities move away from low-value industrial development and compete to attract higher-value economic activity and skilled workers by investing in cultural industry infrastructures. In this paper we explore how a long-running cultural policy intervention in Shenzhen - the Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (the UABB) - has been used strategically to create infrastructures and atmospheres of urban creativity around art, culture and creative industries as part of an explicit urban repositioning strategy. Drawing on in-depth situated research, the paper examines the processes and impacts associated with the UABB and what it might reveal about the preexisting and changing politics of urban (re)redevelopment in leading Chinese cities.

Debates about flexibility in the granting of planning permission have a long history. Increased flexibility is often associated with pro-development planning and reduced control. However, flexibility can help to achieve enhanced planning outcomes and is sometimes necessary in managing uncertainty and complexity as development is built out.This paper explores this 'flexibility dilemma' within the English Nationally Significant Infrastructure Planning regime (NSIP) that was introduced in 2008 to fast-track the delivery of major infrastructure projects. Drawing on rigorous extensive and intensive primary research spanning consent and delivery, the study explores how government and developers have negotiated tensions around flexibility and certainty and the consequences for effective project delivery. In particular, the paper seeks to understand why opportunities have been limited for deviation and change post-consent when the NSIP regime is often seen as a pro-development reform.Focusing on the under-researched area of post-consent planning - and by researching across consent and implementation - this paper makes a distinctive and original contribution to international planning research. The application of a 'post-consent perspective' reframes the question of where and why flexibility might be needed and offers a more nuanced perspective on the flexibility dilemma in planning.

Sidewalk delivery robots are increasingly being deployed in diverse urban contexts, raising issues about the most appropriate form of regulation to maintain pedestrian flows and protect the public. This paper examines the evolution of sidewalk robot governance in a "hot spot" of urban robotic application in the State of California (USA), where different municipal authorities have experimented with prohibitive, permissive and collaborative forms of sidewalk re-regulation in response to the various potential disruptions and risks associated with the new technology. Combining detailed policy analysis and interviews, the paper takes forward literature on the regulatory challenges and opportunities in making space for urban robotics as a disruptive technology.

The 2008 Planning Act introduced a new approach for determining large ('nationally significant') infrastructure projects in a new national process that would unify consent regimes and speed up decisions within fixed timescales outside of local planning. Major housing schemes have been excluded from this process, despite repeated attempts by recent UK governments to allocate more land for housebuilding through parallel reforms to the English planning system. This paper explores why Nationally Significant Infrastructure Planning (NSIP) has not been used for housing schemes, using the example of housing to reflect on debates about potential democratic deficits in the NSIP process and the selective politicisation of infrastructure planning in England. In doing so, the paper makes a distinctive contribution to practice and research by linking together debates about the politics of planning for housing in England and international literature on democratic process in the delivery of critical infrastructure.

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.

Climate/ecological breakdown and automation are two defining challenges of the current era, yet there is little research on their conjunctural intersection. Across experimental landscapes from agriculture to conservation to mining to weather modification, automation technologies are increasingly being presented as the key to fixing, managing and even transcending the turbulent ecologies of the Anthropocene which threaten social and economic reproduction. This emerging set of visions, experiments and uses rest on the systemic capabilities of bundled robotic and autonomous system technologies (e.g. advanced sensors machine vision, artificial intelligence, robotics) to see, know and intervene in the biophysical world in new ways. This, we argue, potentially represents a shift beyond logics of mitigation and adaptation towards engineering nature in the face of converging environmental threats. Synthesising insights from existing literature, we develop a conceptual framework for understanding the 'new ecologies of automation' and diverse, site-specific applications across what we call 'operational ecologies'. We then explore a range of diverse exemplars, creating a typology of operational ecologies before discussing key logics, themes and directions for critical research. Overall, the paper makes a significant and original contribution to knowledge in critical geography, and the under-researched intersection between political ecology and automation studies.

Strategies to reduce carbon emissions are set to be a powerful force of economic restructuring, creating new economic opportunities, and also disruption and divestment for some firms and sectors. A pressing issue for 'just transitions' is whether low carbon economic restructuring will challenge or reinforce prevailing geographies of spatial inequality and labour market (dis)advantage. In this article we return to the economic restructuring literature of the 1980s and 1990s to provide a theoretical framework for understanding 'spatial divisions' of low carbon work and how they might be shaped to ensure economically just transition. Our approach foregrounds questions of skills, training and pathways to employment across supply chains as key dimensions of just transition, providing a framework for analysis and intervention. The paper, therefore, brings new critical perspectives on low carbon transitions by conceptualising decarbonisation as a form of spatial economic restructuring and its potential implications in reinforcing and/or working against the existing patterns of uneven spatial development.

Research and wider societal debates has explored the potentially transformative role of AI in extended social control and hyper-capitalist development in China. In this paper, we use those debates to reflect on experiments with Urban AI in China. The key issue is whether AI offers something distinctive or different compared with the logics and imaginaries of ideas of the smart city. Analysis of emblematic sites of urban AI management in the cities of Shanghai and Hangzhou demonstrates: the resonances and dissonances between urban AI and smart. But they also demonstrate distinctive and complex landscape of urban AI experiments that is not neatly captured in social control and free market applications perspectives on AI. Moreover, the urban experimental contexts in which AI is being rolled, reveal aspirations for creating new “digital empires,” exploring new limits on data power and potential social resistance. The paper makes a distinctive contribution by providing a new framework for comparing logics of computational urban management in the context of emerging AI applications. As such the paper provides a distinctive framework for situating future applications of urban AI management in China and identifies the future urban research priorities.

There has been growing research interest in processes of selective ‘ecological gentrification’ and ‘environmental enclosure’ in cities where environmental controls are used to attract and retain more affluent residents and attract higher value economic development. This dimension of urban policy might be increasingly relevant to major Chinese cities, which are facing increasing competitive pressures to reorient modes of growth and development around ecological security and quality of life in social and environmental domains. In that context, we examine the development and implementation of the ‘basic ecological control line’ policy (BECL) in the fast-growing city of Shenzhen. In essence the BECL marks a rezoning of the city to enhance ecology and reverse previous environmental degradation, but in doing so it also does political work in reordering space in line with changing economic and social priorities. The question we ask is how the BECL might be read in the context of ecological gentrification and the wider political context of Chinese urban policy. Through detailed empirical investigation, we trace the political economy of the BECL and draw out the insights it offers on transitional urban economy-ecology relations in China and theories of urban environmentalism more generally.

This chapter examines how definitions of the green economy and shaped by and seek to shape norms and discourses of economic development. It draws on multi-level governance theories alongside literature from critical accounting to investigate ways that urban policy actors have sought to make the case for investment in the green economy. The chapter aims to expand existing conceptualisations of the politics of calculation (in a multi-level governance context) to illuminate how calculations represent a range of assumptions about territory, the way people live and the nature of place and society in the present and the future. Empirically, the chapter focuses on a series of ‘Mini-Stern’ reports commissioned by urban governments in England that took as inspiration Nicholas Stern’s influential 2006 report on the economics of climate change. The chapter analyses how these reports use various calculative devices relating to carbon reduction in order to justify, de-risk and legitimise what might be seen as experimental or risky policy options; and the implications for how cities are represented as a result.

Globally cities are becoming experimental sites for new forms of robotic and automation technologies applied across a wide variety of sectors in multiple areas of economic and social life. As these innovations leave the laboratory and factory, this paper analyzes how robotics and automation systems are being layered upon existing urban digital networks, extending the capabilities and capacities of human agency and infrastructure networks, and reshaping the city and citizen's everyday experiences. To date, most work in this field has been speculative and isolated in nature. We set out a research agenda that goes beyond analysis of discrete applications and effects, to investigate how robotics and automation connect across urban domains and the implications for differential urban geographies, the selective enhancement of individuals and collective management of infrastructures, the socio-spatial sorting of cities and the potential for responsible urban innovation.

Cities have tended to be seen as net consumers of ecological goods and exporters of ecological bads. However, over recent years urban metabolism, circular economy and bioeconomy concepts have sought to rebalance this seemingly parasitical relationship by seeing the urban as an ecological resource to be exploited for profit. In this review paper, we investigate the ways in which the assets and metabolic flows of the city are being recharacterised as a source of value to be maintained, extracted, enhanced and exploited. Our approach is twofold. First, we examine areas of latent potential for urban bioeconomic exploitation and issues raised in terms of fair and just cities. Second, we examine issues, tensions and challenges in reimagining the city as a site of bioeconomic value. The paper makes a distinctive contribution to the literature by defining and critically analysing the new urban bioeconomy as a form of environmental value creation.

In contrast to their use in warfare and surveillance, there is growing interest in the potential of "drones for good" to deliver societal benefits, for example by delivering medical products and other essential goods. Yet development of medical and commercial delivery has been limited globally by restrictive regulation to protect airspace safety and security. In this paper we examine how certain African countries have become testbeds for new forms of drone infrastructure and regulation, driven by the overlapping interests of governments, drone operators, and international development agencies. In particular we explore the factors that have led to the development of an advanced medical delivery network in Rwanda and contrast that with the closing down of airspace for drones in Tanzania. The paper makes a distinctive contribution to research on the ongoing constitution of dronespace as a sphere of commercial and governmental activity. Rwanda's drone delivery system is seen as the forerunner for the wider enclosure and parcelling up of the lower atmosphere into designated drone corridors that limit the democratic and disruptive potential of drone activity in line with prevailing logics of airspace regulation.

Advances in robotics, artificial intelligence and automation have the potential to transform cities and urban social life. However, robotic restructuring of the city is complicated and contested. Technology is still evolving, robotic infrastructure is expensive and there are technical, trust and safety challenges in bringing robots into dynamic urban environments alongside humans. This article examines the nascent field of ‘urban robotics’ in three emblematic yet diverse national-urban contexts that are leading centres for urban robotic experimentation. Focusing on the experimental application of autonomous social robots, the article explores: (i) the rationale for urban robotic experiments and the interests involved, and (ii) the challenges and outcomes of creating meaningful urban spaces for robotic experimentation. The article makes a distinctive contribution to urban research by illuminating a potentially far-reaching but under-researched area of urban policy. It provides a conceptual framework for mapping and understanding the highly contingent, spatially uneven and socially selective processes of robotic urban experimentation.

ABSTRACT Attitudes to the European modernist social housing experiments of the 1950s and 1960s are complicated and contested. Once derided as a failed and elitist social project, over the last two decades, there has been growing appreciation of the design principles and ethos of the post-war Architecture of Social Intent (AOSI), assisted by a proactive programme of national conservation protection. In this paper, we reflect on a university action research project to explore what the AOSI might mean to a younger “millennial” generation. Using an undergraduate action-research project from the UK, we explore millennials responses to the idea of the AOSI but also the perceptions of the welfare state associated with it and the state’s changing role in social housing provision. The paper makes a distinctive contribution to the growing literature on changing perceptions of modernist heritage, making a case for wider public engagement with urban change and design aesthetics.

In 2014 the UK government announced plans to reduce opposition to housing development by making a direct payment to households in England.(1) This was part of a wider experiment with behavioural economics and financial inducements in planning policy. In this paper, we explore this proposal, named 'Development Benefits', arguing it offers important insights into how the governing rationality of neoliberalism attempts to govern both planning and opposition to development by replacing political debate with a depoliticised economic rationality. Drawing on householder and key player responses to the Development Benefits proposal we highlight significant levels of principled objection to the replacement of traditional forms of planning reason with financial logics. The paper therefore contributes to understandings of planning as a site of ongoing resistance to neoliberal rationalities. We conclude by questioning whether Development Benefits represent a particular strand of 'late neoliberal' governmentality, exploring the potential for an alternative planning rationality to contest the narrow marketisation of planning ideas and practices.

Increasing the density of existing urban areas can support urban regeneration and environmental sustainability by limiting urban sprawl and linking housing to transport infrastructure. However, making space for 'soft densification' - small-scale incremental densification poses challenges in managing development with the cumulative aesthetic, social and infrastructurel impacts of such change. We highlight tensions between residential interests in maintaining existing housing densities and arguments for greater urban density. The paper demonstrates the importance of active management of soft densification and the challenges of reconciling competing interests, arguing that soft densification needs to be taken more seriously by politicians, planners and urban theorists.