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The development of a digital social credit system in China has sparked debates around urban governance and citizenship performance. Although China’s social credit system is portrayed as a single technical system, the article offers a new perspective on digital social credit focused on geographical variegation. We analyze how variegation is manifested through use of multiple data streams and a diverse range of aims operationalized in various social credit systems at the municipal level. Social credit can be seen as part of algorithmic urban governance and an instrument of urban citizenship performance through scoring, ranking, incentives, and punishments. Analysis of social credit systems’ development in Chinese cities contributes to debates around the role of the urban Global East and evolution of digital and algorithmic governance in and beyond China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as an impactful feature of the life, planning and governance of 21st-century cities. Once confined to the realm of science fiction and small-scale technological experiments, AI is now all around us, in the shape of urban artificial intelligences including autonomous cars, robots, city brains and urban software agents. The aim of this article is to critically examine the nature of urbanism in the emergent age of AI. More specifically, we shed light on how urban AI is impacting the development of cities, and argue that an urbanism influenced by AI, which we term AI urbanism, differs in theory and practice from smart urbanism. In the future, the rise of a post-smart urbanism driven by AI has the potential to form autonomous cities that transcend, theoretically and empirically, traditional smart cities. The article compares common practices and understandings of smart urbanism with emerging forms of urban living, urban governance and urban planning influenced by AI. It critically discusses the limitations and potential pitfalls of AI urbanism and offers conceptual tools and a vocabulary to understand the urbanity of AI and its impact on present and future cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart urbanism is an established research area in geography and the social sciences. We draw on 'worlding-provincialising' strategies identified in an Urban Studies Special Issue from February 2021 to explore how smart infrastructures, a form of smart urbanism, disrupt representations of informality and urban development in new and productive ways. Focussing on the disruptive or troublesome implications of smart infrastructures reveals site-level considerations for developing policy and practice, where acknowledging the nuanced context for its use can present opportunities for not only understanding energy transitions in the Global South, but also creates opportunities for cross-learning. Drawing on our collective insights on a solar mini-grid project in Qandu-Qandu, Cape Town, we sketch out three ways the disruptive aspects of solar energy can be helpful for re-building knowledge on the informal city by: (i) re-positioning notions of 'formal' and 'informal' infrastructure(s) in urban planning and policymaking; (ii) highlighting new avenues for citizen autonomy; and (iii) recasting the informal city as a site for continuous innovation and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue using smart technologies beyond the grid disrupts the access and use of existing energy sources, with profound impacts on everyday social life. We show how off‐grid smart energy solutions constitute their own politics when considering existing conceptualisations of urban infrastructures in geography and the social sciences. To expose its politics, or "micropolitics", we consider how tensions occur at the interface between infrastructures, where there are additions and modifications. We draw on an empirical example of Qandu‐Qandu, an informal settlement in South Africa, to highlight how the placement, technical capabilities, and flexible financing options associated with off‐grid solar energy create micropolitics with profound implications for everyday life. To conclude, we reflect on the value of using disruptions for understanding and enhancing equity in off‐grid settings, contributing to the broader sustainability transitions narrative, and its "liveliness". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eco-urbanism encapsulates a range of approaches to the management of urbanisation processes and environmental imperatives in contexts of rapid industrial and economic change. The paper focuses on two eco-urban initiatives in China and the UK over a temporal lens stretching from the mid-2000s to the early 2020s, in order to critically engage with the question of how eco-urban projects develop and often undergo radical changes over time, as well as being changed through significant ruptures, periods of stasis and fluidity in the actor-networks involved in project visions, financing and development. Our comparative approach identifies cross-cutting processes operative across two projects at different scales and in different techno-political contexts. The paper argues that longitudinal analysis is key to enabling a view of transitional trajectories as unfolding, and as a way of moving past oft-repeated assessments of specific projects according to a 'failure/success' binary. In order to do so, the paper considers eco-urban projects through a theoretical lens that views projects as unstable assemblages exhibiting change over time on the one hand, but that also recognises the dynamic resilience of geographical imaginations around eco-urban projects, that means that these projects endure (albeit often in different guises) over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]