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The paper analyses the varieties of smart urbanism to be found in the contemporary urban landscape in the UK. In so doing, it builds on and extends two currently dominant sets of critiques of the smart city: those that call into question its technocratic and top‐down modes of governance, and those that describe the smart city as an empty signifier. The paper makes sense of the UK's variegated local smart urban practices by tracing the emergence of a national, state‐led cultural economy of smart urbanism. Based on an analysis of smart‐city programmes in 34 UK cities, we identify two broad discursive logics through which varieties of smart urbanism are produced and performed. First, the invocation of crisis forms a discursive foundation on which place‐specific logics are based. Second, sets of what we term variegated logics are differently combined to build on the "foundational story" of crisis in the construction of local smart agendas. We discuss three of these variegated logics: the city portrayed as technological simulacrum; the focus on specific sectoral activities; and a chameleonic tendency to envelop previous eco‐urban agendas into smart urbanism. By making these logics visible, the paper opens up a new critical space for debate about alternative future pathways that smart cities might take. The paper analyses the varieties of smart urbanism in UK cities. The paper makes sense of the UK's variegated local smart urban practices by tracing the emergence of a national, state‐led cultural economy of smart urbanism based on specific discursive logics. By making these logics visible, the paper opens up a new critical space for debate about alternative future pathways that smart cities might take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using archival evidence from Hastings' unpublished writings, as well as from representative Townscape publications, this essay chronologically traces the genesis and development of Townscape as social and political project within the history of British planning theory. Revising recent scholarship on Townscape, the article posits that Townscape embraced a conservative project, in many ways resistant to the emerging welfare state and to the dominant government consensus for regionalist principles of post-war reconstruction. It argues that Townscape posited an anti-collectivist model of society, bound together, not through a consensus of aims or viewpoints, but through a composite ecology of individualizing difference, developed according to one's unique cultural role or ‘bias’. Paralleling conservative British political discourses of the period, Townscape aestheticized and naturalized such differences through a tri-partite model of social types and a metaphorical construction of society as nature. Understanding the central significance of this social and political symbolism allows for new understanding of Townscape's construction of social complexity, as well as its use of organic analogies to describe social difference. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As emblematic spaces of social and cultural contamination, the Victorian street and underworld have had remarkable afterlives in twentieth-century reinterpretations of Victorian cityscapes. This article explores what persists in our vision of the nineteenth-century city well over a century after it was, so to speak, first seen, and how what persists impacts on our attempts to reconstruct that act of seeing. In the lived spaces around us there is in fact continuity, in that the city is a palimpsest and patchwork of Victorian and post-Victorian materials. However, to see those spaces as Victorian is in fact to elide a historical process of physical accumulation and syncretism. This article explores spectral 'afterimages' of the Victorian street and underground, in a variety of contemporary sources, ranging from Gary Sherman's Death Line (1972) and John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday (1980) to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador, 1988), the material culture of steampunk and the Telectroscope by the artist Paul St George. It traces two distinct genealogies of renderings of Victorian urban spaces in current popular culture. While filmic renderings are obsessed with the ghostly circulation of Victorian spectres haunting the present, steampunk artists imagine an alternative temporality, locating the origin of an alternative future in the mobility of Victorian metropolitan culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses an architectural installation incorporating the holographic shadows of water installed in a miniature townscape as part of a collaborative, developmental, group exhibition. The installation concept is outlined and its impact on the ability to stimulate architectural interventions, which would not normally be possible within a full-scale environment, is considered. The influence of a major large-scale holographic installation is outlined and the requirement to suspend belief, within the current exhibition, is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]