This article addresses the expansion of urban public services in major Nordic cities, from 1850 to 1920. We argue that changes in political discourse were the driving force that prompted politicians to act on behalf of the urban public, significantly before the rise of the universal welfare state. The discursive changes are explored through three analytic concepts: publicness, urban citizenship and the welfare city. We start by presenting a short overview of the development of urban public services. Then we demonstrate how these concepts may be used in conjunction to explain the historical changes. Finally, the material effects are discussed in three case-studies, addressing freshwater pipes, public transport and municipal health care, respectively.

This paper addresses digital innovation challenges and facilitation strategies in resource-constrained high-reliability organizations. While the extant literature offers rich insights into the barriers, enablers, and outcomes of digitalization processes, our understanding of how digital innovation occurs in environments characterized by multiple constraints is still limited. Specifically, high-reliability organizations prioritizing reliability of their operations can face significant challenges in their digitalization efforts, which can be further exacerbated by a lack of resources and digital capabilities. Building on two cases of digital innovation in the Swedish urban water and sewerage sector, the paper contributes to the literature by discussing how collaboration between the highly constrained organizations and technology providers can still lead to digitalization against the odds. Specifically, the paper puts forth a multi-level framework capturing digital innovation adoption barriers and facilitation strategies employed by technology providers, and discusses the study's implications for theory and practice.

Historically, water utilities have favored the modern ideal of piped infrastructure despite shortcomings in ensuring water access to the urban poor. Consequently, various state and non-state actors play influential roles in shaping water access to the poor through piped and non-piped socio-technical regimes of water provision. However, the existence of piped and non-piped water regimes and how they interact is often not seen as the work of municipalities, and as a result, a plethora of vital water services and actors are still largely ignored in water policy and decision-making. Drawing upon two empirical case studies in Delhi and Nairobi, this article foregrounds the role of conflict and cooperation in the interaction between piped and non-piped water regimes using an analytical framework that builds on Science Technology Studies and Urban Political Ecology.

Water and sewage (WS) systems are, like most grid based infrastructural systems, often centralised and hierarchical and the end user has almost no possibility to influence the technical standards, business models or system architecture. The preferred method for connecting new areas to the grid are underground water pipes and gravity flow for sewage. Thus, the WS system is "tightly coupled". It is hard to change and conservative in its system culture, exhibiting a strong "momentum" or "path dependence".In this article we investigate an unusual case in the development of WS-systems. As a rule, WS-systems, as most infrastructural systems, develop gradually through incremental innovations, and system owners/utilities traditionally build their systems "from the inside out". In our case, we investigate a situation where the end users took the initiative to connect a residential area, Aspvik, part of the municipality of Va & BULL;rmdo & BULL;, outside Stockholm, Sweden, to the municipal grid and thus expand the WS-system, not from the inside out, but from the outside in.Furthermore, we highlight another unusual feature: the role of a resident that acted as the "entrepreneur" in this process of WS-system expansion. The entrepreneur had unique trust building abilities in the local community, which the regime actor (the WS utility), could not match. Historically, inventor-entrepreneurs have been common, acting as "system builders" in the establishment phase of new infrastructural systems. However, entrepreneurs outside the regime are not common in the WS sector.Although atypical in mature WS systems in developed countries, these types of local initiatives or hybrid solutions are common in developing countries. In this article, we argue that there are lessons to be learnt from our case, when dealing with system expansion processes both inside and outside the Global North.

This article deals with ongoing attempts to recover heat and greywater at property level, based on an in-depth study of Stockholm, Sweden. We explore different socio-technical development paths from now up until 2050 using a novel combination of on-property technology case-studies, actor studies and system-level scenario evaluation, based on Artificial Neural Networks modelling. Our results show that the more conservative scenarios work in favour of large-scale actors while the more radical scenarios benefit the property owners. However, in the radical scenarios we identify disruptive effects on a system level due to disturbance on wastewater treatment plants, where incoming wastewater can be critically low for up to 120 days per year. At the same time, net energy savings are relatively modest (7.5% of heat demand) and economic gains for property owners small or uncertain. Current policies at EU and national level around energy-efficient buildings risk being counter-productive in cases when they push property owners to install wastewater heat recovery technology which, in places like Stockholm, can create suboptimal outcomes at the system level.

Science and technology studies and urban political ecology have made important contributions to the understanding of water provision in the Global South. In this article we develop insights from these fields with the aim to understand the blurring boundaries of urban water regimes and their power relations mediated by actors, institutions and technology. Furthermore, we explore how urban water regimes can form a critical interface which is a form of institutional-actor space where formal and informal water regimes encounter each other through conflict and cooperation.

This study investigates the Jisomee Mita, an innovation based on ICT-powered metering at property level aimed at increasing access to piped water and sewerage in low-income areas in Nairobi, Kenya. We present empirical findings from field investigations and actor interviews, which are analysed using a novel framework drawing on studies of business models, sustainability transition, and the history of technology. We explore the critical interface between utility infrastructure and potential customers as a locus of innovation. We find that the property owners are the main benefactors of self-read meters, while low-income end-users still depend on over-priced and unsafe water. The Jisomee Mita thus cannot be called a pro-poor innovation in its current implementation and context.

This article investigates the attempts to regulate innovation in Sweden's road traffic system, specifically small, two-wheeled motorized vehicles or mopeds. Regulators wanted to establish a definition of the moped as a utility vehicle. Moped users and producers challenged their intentions, envisioning the moped as a vehicle for leisure. Our close reading of artefacts allows us to trace the evolution of moped technology and to conceptualize innovation in the moped niche. Situating moped innovation within the context of regulatory attempts and social change, we show how the imposition of technical requirements failed to regulate specific usage of a consumer technology. More broadly, the case study shows how users together with the producers find ways to innovate and shape technologies for their own purposes.

This article examines innovation activities in water infrastructure in Nairobi, Kenya. The focus is on efforts by Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Corporation (NCWSC) to provide water services to the inhabitants in the informal areas of the city using an automated vending machine, or Pre-Paid Dispenser (PPD). In this study, we investigate what happens when a regime actor like NCWSC tries to implement an ambidextrous (two-handed) strategy: managing the existing system according to conventional practice and at the same time innovate in new technical solutions and business models to cater for unconnected users. Besides presenting our results, our aim in this article is also to introduce a research strategy for innovation studies in infrastructural systems in low-income urban areas. Three interconnected parts stand out as our contribution: First, we present a novel conceptual framework, by adding ideas from innovation studies to the Large Technical Systems approach. We investigate how regime actors can innovate to provide water to unconnected users, without expanding the system in a traditional way. Second, we propose a novel method for analysing and understanding innovation on the margins of the infrastructural system, or in our terms, innovation in the critical interface. Central to our method is, through empirical observation, to identify misalignment between the innovation (PPD) and contextual factors at the local level, where the innovation is implemented (interface misalignment), and misalignment between the innovation and the existing water regime (internal misalignment). We use a qualitative method and results forms as a basis for further research and starting point for regime actors in search of an improved ambidextrous strategy. Third, we analyse the innovation process per se. In the Nairobi case, we assess the ambidextrous innovation strategy, and claim that the PPD functions as an adapter in the critical interface, enabling the regime actors to operate in an environment of misalignment.

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Motorization was a superordinate societal goal in post-war Sweden. Through planning and regulation, politicians and technocrats within the state administration made common cause with industry and l ...

Historically, the modern infrastructure ideal has dominated the imagination of urbanists. As a consequence, cities and their infrastructures of pipes, roads, wires and trams, have largely been buil ...

In this paper we discuss the introduction of collaborative writing (CW) tools in a course designed with learning activities based on problem-based learning (PBL), authentic case methodology, and teamwork. We argue that CW is a vital, but poorly understood, part of teamwork, and a black-box activity. Our ambition is to open the black box of CW and discuss how CW concepts can enrich teamwork activities. We build on our students’ reflections on challenges linked to CW in a teamwork setting. In total the data consisted of 77 individual reflection papers, which were analyzed using constructs from prior literature on CW. Our results show that our students actively used CW tools and strategies and that CW had a large impact—and, in fact, enhanced teamwork management. The CW tools also helped in creating sustainable teamwork in the sense that they enhanced the three criterions of team performance: productivity, cohesion, and learning.

In this article we contribute to the discussion of infrastructural change in Africa, and explore how a new theoretical perspective may offer a different, more comprehensive and historically informe ...

This paper investigates problem areas related to energy efficiency implementation in Swedish multifamily buildings. The paper first presents a generic list of (theoretical) problem areas identified through a literature survey. Using a qualitative approach, the paper also investigates if the problem areas identified in the literature also have an impact on the Swedish building sector. Results from the interview study reveal a strong coherence between problem areas in the literature and those expressed by the interviewees. However, this paper identifies seven novel challenges that cannot be derived from the list of barriers in the literature. Moreover, results reveal that as many as 12 problem areas have their origin in national factors such as agreement structures, incentive schemes, and cost calculation methods.