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The technological vision of smart urbanism has been promoted as a silver bullet for urban problems and a major market opportunity. The search is on for firms and governments to find effective and transferable demonstrations of advanced urban technology. This paper examines initiatives by the UK national government to facilitate urban technological innovation through a range of strategies, particularly the TSB Future Cities Demonstrator Competition. This case study is used to explore opportunities and tensions in the practical realisation of the smart city imaginary. Tensions are shown to be partly about the conjectural nature of the smart city debate. Attention is also drawn to weakened capacity of urban governments to control their infrastructural destiny and also constraints on the ability of the public and private sectors to innovate. The paper contributes to smart city debates by providing further evidence of the difficulties in substantiating the smart city imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social housing providers in many advanced economies have been directed towards market-orientated and commercial business models, whereas the scope of the private rental sector has been increasingly expanded to the provision of housing for low-income households. Where these developments coincided, the demarcation between the activities of social and private landlords has blurred, with the result of increasing competitive pressure on both groups. This paper sheds light on the behavioural aspects of competition by introducing the concept of inter-landlord rivalry in local rental housing markets. Drawing on data from 36 in-depth interviews with social and private landlords in Coventry/England and Breda/the Netherlands, this study shows that existing perceptions of rivalry among most landlords are exceptional in low-income renting but pronounced in more expensive, commercial rental segments. The paper will demonstrate that these perceptions are highly subjective and non-reciprocal. Moreover, competitive perceptions and interactions are strongly affected by political and market structural settings, and appear to be dependent on the trade-off between the social mission and commercial goals of individual housing associations in the social housing sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) is a long-term concession of services used by the UK Government to capture private capital to fund public projects. This model is being increasingly applied in Portugal and the assessment of its competitive advantage is very important to Portugal. The empiric study undertaken both in Portugal and the UK has permitted some conclusions to be drawn already. PFI has developed the way the construction industry is managed, and has increased the competitive advantage of UK construction industry acting in the four vectors of competitive advantage: innovation, quality, efficiency and attention to the client. Innovation occurred through new designs that were more efficient and cost effective through the project's whole life cycle. There is the widespread use of management tools: whole life cycle costing, risk management and benchmarking. PFI also improved communication in the UK construction industry, forcing interaction and feedback from all stakeholders in a project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]