Philipp Späth

Increasing energy retrofit rates is considered essential for reducing housing-related greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in Central and Northern Europe. In Germany, despite ambitious and costly policies, annual retrofit rates have remained largely stagnant at around 1% of the housing stock. The current trend of modern methods of construction (MMC) and digitisation have renewed hope that serial retrofit and service platforms could enable the scaling up of energy retrofits by reducing costs, disruptions and management burdens, especially for non-professional property owners. While a growing literature explores this potential, empirical research on the region-specific conditions to scale up serial retrofit remains limited. To address this gap, this study interviewed intermediaries and professionals who organise retrofits in the Freiburg region in south-west Germany. Their views were sought on the challenges and opportunities for serial (prefabricated) retrofit facilitated by digitised planning, platform thinking, and collaboration among trades and other partners. Applying the challenge-oriented regional innovation systems (CORIS) framework revealed an early-stage reorientation pathway in the region, providing entry points for scaling up MMC. PRACTICE RELEVANCE There is leeway for practitioners to deepen existing and create new networks across sectors and trades, and to experiment with collaborative methods, working towards serial approaches. The early adoption of innovative methods and the use of regional and renewable resources is recommended to strengthen both ecological sustainability and the regional economy. As for governance, the provision of digital tools and legal bases for data collection is essential to promote a transformation pathway for MMC and platforms. Institutional innovations such as publicly funded one-stop shops and database can contribute to a comprehensive housing transition.

Given the contested nature of urban futures, we approach the term “transition” as a floating signifier to investigate imaginaries of transformation. Focusing on urban mobility transitions, we demonstrate the plurality of associations with a post-transition future. This perspective allows the identification of underlying tensions and incommensurabilities between competing visions of the future. Q method is applied to explore imagined mobility futures among professionals working on mobility and urban development in Hamburg. The results show that even among those directly engaged in mobility transitions in their day-to-day work, there are plural and often conflicting views on what such transitions can and should achieve. The research offers insights into the coordinating role of floating signifiers in processes of socio-technical change. While these signifiers perform an important coordinating function in the governance of socio-technical change, they are inherently susceptible to capture.

Building on the contributions to the article collection “The Governance of Sustainable Energy Transitions in the Global South “, this editorial offers a sketch for a research agenda on transitions research with a main focus on Africa. Still being ill-defined in its concrete contours, this research agenda engages with the central themes of heterogeneity, politics, and the material basis of energy transitions. In this editorial, we address both procedural and content-related questions. Regarding procedural questions, we inform about the context in which this collection emerged. On that, a workshop held in Accra in September 2019 was a key milestone. We contextualise the challenges that some workshop participants had with developing their contributions into publishable articles in the context of uneven academic support structures and knowledge hegemonies. Finally, we introduce the contributions to our article collection, emphasising how they connect and contribute to our draft research agenda. With regard to the content dimension, this article collection builds and proclaims the need for plural approaches to understanding energy transitions in Africa. A plurality of specific context conditions calls for pluralistic analytical perspectives. Not taking for granted hegemonic, western ways of understanding energy systems and explaining change, we rather depart from engagements with the diversity of changes that aggregate into transition pathways—a diversity that in the context of Africa is impossible to overlook. To implement such a pluralistic research agenda, scholars need more opportunities to network, exchange and publish.

Hamburg participates in the EU-funded research and development project mySMARTlife (mSL) with experiments involving smart city technologies, among others in the field of transportation infrastructure. These experiments are shaped by a public-private consortium in accordance with a call of the EU research and innovation program “Horizon 2020”. They focus on close to the market technologies. The experiments aim at citizen participation. Yet, what technologies are experimented with has been decided and contractually fixed by the consortium beforehand. We explore tensions in this kind of setup, and how entrenched approaches to planning of transportation infrastructure are challenged by new subjectivities, expectations, standards and procedures. From our perspective, it is highly questionable whether a purely expert driven process can produce outcomes that sufficiently reflects local residents’ ideas of sustainable and appropriate changes to urban infrastructures. For this reason, candidate ‘solutions’ for future mobility demands should be exposed to societal deliberation at an earlier stage in their development.Our exploration of (possible) interplays between such an experimental approach to the shaping of infrastructures and the pre-existing integrated approach to planning has been a modest first step, and more empirical research would be needed to draw solid conclusions. It seems worthwhile to analyse more deeply the in- and exclusiveness of the actor constellations in such processes, the role of coincidences or strategies behind the selection of partners, and a possible gate-keeper function of the process initiator.

This article studies local enactments of “smart” in and through visions of six smart district development projects. We show that smart cities’ framings of the future are inevitably diverse, emerging from local assemblages consisting of a wide array of heterogeneous elements that translate global imaginaries of the smart city to meet local specificities, needs and agendas. We demonstrate that visions may describe the process of district planning and design, the materiality of the envisioned district and the governance of the district; and that smart visions may play three distinct roles – they may act as mobilizers, instrumentally (i.e. as tools to achieve specific sociotechnical goals) and to exclude alternatives. Knowledge forms a key constituent of smart visions, and acts to include some while excluding others. We therefore suggest that further research should focus on the political and controversial construction and use of knowledge in visioning processes.