Assembling Sustainable Smart City Transitions: An Interdisciplinary Theoretical Perspective

Challenging the conventional thinking embedded in the current urban development pathways is crucial in establishing a new science of cities (Batty, 2013). This science is expected to embrace global sustainability principles (Reid et al., 2010) and inform society on how socioeconomic development goals can be met while mitigating the environmental risks and other pressing societal challenges affecting urban spaces. The process towards fostering urban sustainability starts with a rearrangement of our urban environments and the ways we address the provision of urban services. Urban environments are composed of a multitude of interrelated sociotechnical systems (Batty, 2005, 2009), which provide urban communities with the services required to address their societal needs. Housing, transportation, energy, waste management, healthcare, telecommunication, and education are all examples of sociotechnical systems for urban service provision. When urban environments fail to satisfy societal needs in a sustainable manner, reconfiguration processes are required, which are called sustainability transitions: "long-term, multi-dimensional and fundamental transformation processes through which established sociotechnical systems shift to more sustainable modes of production and consumption" (Markard et al., 2012: 956).