7

Smart cities as strategic actors

Insights from EU Lighthouse projects in
Stavanger, Stockholm and Nottingham

Håvard Haarstad and Marikken W. Wathne

Introduction
In this chapter, we take issue with the idea that smart city development is driven
primarily through universalist and techno-optimistic ideas and policies. Instead,
we conceptualise cities as strategic actors that utilise the resources from smart
city discourses to mobilise initiatives, projects and networks to benefit their own
priorities and interests – including sustainability ambitions. As we show through
our discussion of European Union (EU) Lighthouse projects in three cities –
­Stavanger (Norway), Nottingham (United Kingdom) and Stockholm (Sweden) –
local politicians and planners are enrolling and reframing pre-existing initiatives
into the smart agenda, creatively using it to further their own goals.
The critical issue of current smart city development is not so much that cities
are overrun by a universalist smart city agenda, but rather which actors define
the smart agenda locally and what the ensuing outcomes are for sustainable ur-
ban development. This is not to deny that there is a hegemonic policy discourse
that presents blueprint technological solutions as the way forward for cities across
the world, and that this has resonance with many local decision-makers. With
the growing challenges tied to urban areas, ‘smart city’ solutions are commonly
presented as the antidote. By adding new technologies to old urban systems, and
thus increasing urban efficiency, the smart city approach to urban planning is
seen as both increasing economic competitiveness and reducing the stress cities
put on the environment. Becoming ‘smart’ is trending among city administra-
tors and the concept has become a fundamental approach to urban development
(Thorne and Griffiths 2014).
Correspondingly, social scientists have critiqued the smart city discourse
as overly focused on the technological aspects, driven by a techno-­optimistic
­approach to urbanism, and failing to recognise local needs and contexts
 Lighthouse projects: Stavanger, Stockholm, Nottingham 103

(Townsend 2013, Luque-Ayala et al. 2014, Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2015,

March and Ribera-Fumaz 2016). It is also argued that smart city strategies
placate corporate marketing campaigns (Hollands 2008; Söderström et al. 2014,
Viitanen and Kingston 2014). However, there is a danger that academic analyses
downplay or disregard the way urban actors and city o ­ fficials – many of whom
are conscious about, and critical of, universalistic and techno-driven urban
development – use these discourses as windows of opportunity to pursue their
own agendas.
In line with the overall objective of this book, we argue that such local con-
texts have a substantially more important role in shaping local smart city strate-
gies than what is often assumed, vis-à-vis supranational discourses and agendas.
By examining the smart city projects in three of the EU’s ‘Lighthouse cities’, we
argue that even if driven by international funding and ideas, smart city strate-
gies tend to facilitate the continuance and further development of pre-planned
projects when integrated into pre-existing cityscapes. In turn, we need to un-
derstand ‘actually existing’ smart cities (Shelton et al. 2015) as negotiated in their
processes and hybrid in their outcomes.
The chapter is based on empirical data from in-depth interviews, site visits
and participation in smart city events. Interviewees included 19 project managers
as well as company representatives and other stakeholders in the three cities. In
addition, we participated at three Nordic Edge Expo conferences in S­ tavanger
(2015–2017), the EV charging point infrastructure conference in Nottingham
(2017) and a demonstration of one of the implementation sites in Stockholm (2017).

Smart cities as strategic actors

Recent urban theory seems to lend support to this chapter’s perspective on smart
cities as proactive and strategic actors. Certainly, there are a multitude of ways
to look at the city and its particularities. Yet the relational view – which under-
stands cities as created through their connections and relationships with other
places, cities and scales (eg. Massey 2010) – has become foundational for much of
the literature. As Robinson (2016) argues, urban studies is searching for a more
global approach to understanding cities. While the contemporary urban world
has long been associated with globalised ‘flows’ (i.e. Castells 1996), urban schol-
ars in geography and beyond are now grappling with ways of connecting these
flows with the contexts and materialities through which they are produced and
contested (McFarlane 2011, McCann and Ward 2012, Healey 2013). In turn, cit-
ies are seen less as the surfaces at which globalisation processes play out, and more
as arenas for proactive and selective engagement (Robinson 2013).
Bringing these ideas to our understanding of the making of smart cities means
that we need to reframe the way the latter tend to be conceptualised. We argue
that social scientists too often have analysed the smart city agenda as a profusion
of a universalised agenda driven by ubiquitous powerful actors. For example,
Söderström and colleagues (2014) analyse the smart city agenda as corporate
104 Håvard Haarstad and Marikken W. Wathne

storytelling, emphasising how smart urbanism is an ideological construct given

content by the likes of IBM. Viitanen and Kingston (2014) argue that the un-
derlying principle of smart city strategies has been to expand the market for new
technology products and services. Similarly, others have portrayed the prevailing
smart city agenda as a new type of urban entrepreneurialism where technologi-
cal optimism and business interests are key frames of reference (Hollands 2008,
Greenfield 2013).
There is clearly something to this, but we would contend that this narrative is
only part of the picture. And since many of the analyses seem to stop short of en-
gaging with what Shelton and colleagues (2015) call the ‘actually existing smart
city’, the narrative tends to downplay how urban decision-makers and planners
engage with the smart city agenda in active and strategic ways, as seen in Burton
and colleagues’ analysis of Bristol and Manchester in this volume. Urban actors
cannot be assumed to be dupes in the empire-building aspirations of the tech
industry. As Kitchin (2015: 132) suggests in his review of the smart city litera-
ture, there is ‘an absence of in-depth empirical case studies of specific smart city
initiatives and comparative research that contrasts smart city developments in
different locales’, and ‘weak collaborative engagement with various stakeholders’.
Our work can serve to remedy this.
To understand the role of cities in relation to the smart city agenda, we argue
that we need a vocabulary that can analyse them as active and strategic, rather
than passive ‘receivers’ of smart city projects. Central to the process of making
cities smart is a negotiation in which urban actors draw on resources available to
them, and assemble these into projects that cohere with their interests and strate-
gic priorities. This does not mean that smart city projects can become anything
local actors want them to be – they must manoeuvre in relation to a limited and
constrained set of resources and capacities. Yet emphasising the strategic element
here means that we foreground the act of mobilising these resources and capaci-
ties around specific projects in concrete urban sites.
We find the vocabulary of assemblage thinking useful to open this conceptual
space, not because we adopt the framework wholesale but because it provides
some inroads to new ways of thinking about change and emergence (DeLanda
2006). It disrupts established ways of placing people and things in social sci-
ence analyses, and can therefore enable us to identify new patterns and relation-
ships (Haarstad and Wanvik 2017). The basic proposition is that a unit in society
around us is not a stable thing, but rather composed and held together by a series
of more or less temporary relationships. This may sound like philosophical nit-
picking, but it may actually help us understand smart cities, and in particular to
conceptualise them in more active and strategic ways. It provides an understand-
ing of cities as continuously created through the fluctuating relations in which
they take part. This has several consequences for how we understand smart cities.
First, ‘actually existing’ smart city projects are negotiated (assembled) us-
ing resources and materials that already exist locally. The smart city agenda is
not simply imposed from above, but makes use of pre-existing relationships,
 Lighthouse projects: Stavanger, Stockholm, Nottingham 105

institutions, infrastructures, agendas and so on. Even if ‘smart city’ is a powerful

and ubiquitous discourse, it is only by making use of these materials that it can
gain any sort of concrete existence in a city. The endurance and tenacity of these
materials shapes or determines what the smart city can become. Below, we will
see this in the case of Stavanger, where the dominant presence of the oil industry
is influencing the trajectory of the smart city agenda.
Second, the activity of organising a particular smart city project is to a large
extent done by and through negotiations between local actors. While the ‘smart
city’ discourse may seem powerful, there are many other discourses and pressures
that shape current policy in cities. A smart city project of any significance needs
to connect divergent actors and interests under a common framing and construct
some sense of common purpose. A smart city is not an end-state; it is a frame un-
der which a whole range of interests, agendas and projects are continuously ne-
gotiated. So, while an actor like IBM may enter a city with a powerful discourse
and enticing technological solutions, the company is dependent on aligning with
certain actors and interests. We should expect these processes to be messy, the
alliances created to be temporary and the overall purpose to be imprecise.
Third, within these messy and temporary processes and alliances, smart city
projects may serve as catalysts for broader change by uniting stakeholders around
a relatively coherent agenda – reassembling the urban in new ways (Haarstad
and Wanvik 2017). A smart city project, such as those funded through the EU’s
­Horizon 2020 programme, may trigger emergent capacities and disrupt the ex-
isting alliances within a city. It may create a new arena for cooperation, new
incentives to work together, new goals that unite divergent actors (in addition
to creating new battlegrounds and potential conflicts, of course). In this sense,
our primary question is not what a smart city project is, because it does not have
an existence separate from the city. Rather, the question is what the smart city
project does to the existing landscape of interests and alliances in a city. In un-
derstanding smart cities, then, we should look for catalysts, or assemblage con-
verters, that are able to forge smart city projects out of temporary alliances and
divergent interests.

The EU’s Horizon 2020 programme for smart cities

The smart city agenda in Europe is composed of a complex set of policies, ideas,
technologies and projects promoted by a diverse range of actors and networks.
­Major technology providers such as IBM, Siemens and Microsoft are important
players, but many other actors (both public and private) are also driving this
agenda. The EU is one of these key actors, and it uses a combination of ‘hard’ and
‘soft’ mechanisms to achieve its aims. Through the Horizon 2020 programme,
the EU’s European Innovation Partnership (EIP) seeks to improve quality of life
as well as the economic performance and competitive position of cities.
One way the EU is doing this is through the Smart Cities and Communi-
ties (SCC) programme. The SCC programme seeks to demonstrate ‘sustainable,
106 Håvard Haarstad and Marikken W. Wathne

cost-effective and replicable district-scale solutions at the intersection of energy

and transport enabled by ICT’ (EC 2016: 17).1 Funding from the programme
is awarded to cities that cross institutional borders and devise innovative solu-
tions to large societal challenges, which, according to the Horizon 2020 work
programme, should integrate ‘smart homes and buildings, energy efficiency
measures, very high shares of renewables, smart energy grids, energy storage,
electric vehicles and smart charging infrastructures’ (EC 2016: 105). Even though
­sustainability is often put forward as a chief priority, as we have argued earlier,
the main objectives of the SCC programme are largely focused on economic
innovation and competitiveness (Haarstad 2016).
In the SCC programme, the cities where smart city projects are funded are
labelled ‘Lighthouse’ cities – where solutions are developed, tested and imple-
mented. The explicit goal is to develop many Lighthouse cities across Europe
by 2020, varying in size, climate and economic system (EC 2016). Relevant
solutions address energy, mobility, and information and communication tech-
nologies (ICT); and common initiatives involve the retrofitting of old buildings,
developing shared big data platforms and electrifying vehicle fleets. Lighthouse
cities are provided with funding to develop for three years, and are then required
to assist ‘Follower’ cities through up-scaling and replicating smart initiatives.
As of October 2017, 12 Smart Cities and Communities projects were in oper-
ation. The first-generation projects – REMOURBAN, Triangulum and Grow
Smarter – have been running since 2014; and the newest additions to the project
family – IRIS, Match-up and Stardust – were recently announced. Thus, there
are a total of 36 Lighthouse cities and 42 Follower cities. The first-generation
Lighthouse cities have implemented their smart interventions and are starting to
measure the effects of these implementations while assisting in up-scaling and
replicating them in the Follower cities (EC 2016). This chapter focuses on ex-
periences in the first-­generation ­Lighthouse cities of Stavanger, Stockholm and
Nottingham. Here, we take a comparative perspective on smart implementations
in these three cities to explore how ‘becoming smart’ is negotiated, organised
and catalysed in different contexts.
Stavanger is a Lighthouse city under the Triangulum project, together with
Eindhoven (Netherlands) and Manchester (UK). The Stavanger region has a long
history with petroleum-related industrial activity, and today there is a strategy to
build an identity decoupled from, and beyond, the age of petroleum ­(Stavanger
Municipality 2017). As we shall see, smart city strategies play an important role
here. The Stavanger consortium consists of five partners: the Stavanger municipal-
ity; the electricity company Lyse; Rogaland Regional Authority; the U ­ niversity
of Stavanger; and Greater Stavanger (a partnership of 16 Norwegian municipali-
ties and Rogaland County Council working to promote business in the region).
The smart interventions in Stavanger are situated in two demonstration areas:
Hillevåg/Paradis, and Stavanger city centre. Triangulum has sparked the large-
scale conference initiative Nordic Edge Expo, and Stavanger municipality has
 Lighthouse projects: Stavanger, Stockholm, Nottingham 107

also framed key parts of its governance agenda around smartness by establishing
a smart city office and developing a smart city road map, among other things.
Nottingham is a Lighthouse city in the REMOURBAN project, alongside
Valladolid (Spain) and Tepebaşı (Turkey). Nottingham has great pride in its
award-winning transportation systems as well as in hosting the oldest district
heating network in the UK, and is renowned for progressive energy solutions.
These focus areas are enhanced through REMOURBAN with smart mobil-
ity and smart energy as key focus areas for the city (REMOURBAN n.d.).
In ­Nottingham, the smart solution demonstration area is the Sneinton district,
which is located in the central city and characterised by high energy poverty.
The district is also the location of several Nottingham City Council hous-
ing estates that are poorly constructed and have deficient energy performance
­( REMOURBAN n.d.). An important part of smart city activities in Notting-
ham is to renovate these houses and address environmental and social issues
simultaneously.
Stockholm is one of the three Lighthouse cities in the GrowSmarter project,
alongside Barcelona (Spain) and Cologne (Germany). Sweden’s capital city is
aspiring to be an environmentally friendly city as well as a good city for living
and working. These aspirations have informed its smart city activities. The two
Stockholm demonstration areas are located in the old industrial Slakthus area,
as well as Årsta, a rapidly growing district in the southern area of the capital
­(GrowSmarter n.d.).
A striking commonality of these smart city projects is that what is actually
being done to make the cities ‘smarter’ is quite similar. In fact, all the ­Lighthouse
projects seem relatively alike. Stavanger, Stockholm and Nottingham are all fo-
cused on improving energy efficiency of their housing stocks, especially in those
older houses where energy losses are high. Secondly, all three cities focus on
developing smart mobility solutions, where the key aim is to introduce both
private and public electric transportation. Thirdly, all cities are developing big
data platforms to create databases of large-scale, real-time data that will be ac-
cessible to the public. Such platforms are intended to spur innovation by making
data accessible to developers (preferably local ones). However, while the projects
are relatively similar in their framing and types of interventions, there are clear
differences in how the interventions are negotiated, organised and catalysed in
their specific urban contexts.

Negotiating, organising and catalysing smartness in Stavanger,

Nottingham and Stockholm
In what follows, we reflect on the experiences in Stavanger, Nottingham and
Stockholm in assembling their respective Lighthouse city activities. We specifi-
cally examine: (1) how the smart city projects are negotiated using existing local
resources and elements; (2) how local actors organise smart city projects around
108 Håvard Haarstad and Marikken W. Wathne

their existing interests; and (3) the extent to which the smart city activities and
actors catalyse broader change in their respective cities, with a particular empha-
sis on sustainable urban transitions.

Negotiating the smart Lighthouse city

Looking across the three Lighthouse cities, it is clear that their character is to a
significant extent mediated through a myriad of overlapping projects, interests,
beliefs and actors in the context where they ‘arrive’. In all three cases, the smart
city interventions were, to a significant extent, already planned prior to being
awarded EU funding. A key task for the responsible actors was to negotiate the
Horizon 2020 funding requirements to align with the existing local goals and
projects. This was achieved in a variety of ways depending on the specific con-
textual conditions.
Having existed as the epicentre of the Norwegian oil and gas sector, S­ tavanger
is highly influenced by its industrial past. Several large oil companies and sup-
ply companies are located in the region, and a large percentage of the region’s
population is employed in services directly or indirectly supported by the pe-
troleum industry. However, given the shifting global oil market, S­ tavanger
has been looking for ‘more legs to stand on’ (interview, Triangulum project
­representative). The smart city approach to urban and regional development cre-
ates ­opportunities to broaden the market for local technology industries while
­rebranding the city in a more future-oriented direction. The smart city approach
‘is especially valid in a situation where the municipality is facing challenges for
which there are no standard solutions’ (Stavanger Municipality 2016: 3). The
smart city strategy provides an opportunity for the business and knowledge
­sectors to collaborate on new solutions that open up new markets and lay the
foundation for post-petroleum industrial growth. Here, the petroleum industries
that played a highly influential role in Stavanger’s historic development continue
to play a large role. ‘The region houses a number of companies with high tech-
nology expertise, which are developing smart city technology or which have the
potential to transfer methods and solutions from the oil and gas industry to new
fields’ (Stavanger Municipality 2016: 4). Thus, in Stavanger, the smart city strat-
egy is intended to fill the gap left by the decline of the oil and gas sector.
In turn, the Triangulum initiatives in Stavanger have been dwarfed in size by
a conference that grew out of it, the Nordic Edge Expo. In this expo, the city is
using its ‘smart’ status to rebrand itself as the Nordic capital of technology and
innovation. Here, in negotiating the Triangulum project in Stavanger, resources
previously used in the oil and gas sector are repurposed and reused. Thus, the
smart city framework facilitates Stavanger’s continuous attachment to several el-
ements from the oil and gas age: cutting-edge technology, skills, knowledge and
its status as an internationally oriented city. In other words, the smart city project
is put to work to serve the city’s larger strategic interests.
 Lighthouse projects: Stavanger, Stockholm, Nottingham 109

As the above example shows, history and identity play an important part when
smart city projects are negotiated locally. This can also be seen in Nottingham.
Nottingham takes pride in being at the forefront of transportation system in-
novation in the UK, but it simultaneously struggles with issues of air pollution.
Thus, the electrification of Nottingham’s private and public transportation fleet
is an important objective for which the smart city discourse is actively negoti-
ated. Smart city funds were partly used to strengthen the electric bus service and
to electrify one of 13 vehicles in a local-owned car club. Likewise, the energy
strand of REMOURBAN is highlighted as perhaps its most important element –
which can be seen as a continuation of Nottingham’s strong reputation as a city
being progressive in its approaches to energy solutions.
However, just as existing elements in the city can be negotiated to spur smart
city development, smart city projects and resources can in turn be negotiated to
spur the desired urban development. In Nottingham, REMOURBAN funds
were applied in various projects, but they were commonly coupled with funding
from other sources. For example, investment in transportation was funded partly
through REMOURBAN funds and partly from other sources, such as Go Ultra
Low. Here, the Transportation Department of Nottingham City Council had
been granted £14 million to improve transport solutions in the city. This facili-
tated the expansion of the electric vehicle (EV) bus fleet, as well as the construc-
tion of a much larger EV charging point infrastructure than would have been
possible had the City Council only had REMOURBAN funds available. It also
provided opportunities for Nottingham to develop a citizen engagement pro-
gramme around EVs. REMOURBAN funds could thus be seen as constituting
one of the pieces comprising the Nottingham sustainable mobility puzzle. The
City Council had the overall responsibility of ensuring that the image created by
the various pieces was aligned with the desired smart city strategy.
This was somewhat confusing when examining the interventions on the
ground, as one informant admitted. While hosting a tour of Nottingham’s
new electrified buses, charging stations and water-absorbent concrete, the City
Council representative pointed to a fenced area with other electric buses, and
ironically stated: ‘The REMOURBAN funds have paid for that parking area.’
Thus, the impact of the Horizon 2020 funds was not easily distinguishable from
other funds supporting ‘smart’ initiatives. However, the combining of funding
radically improved overall service. This was perhaps most visible in the electri-
fication of one of the car club vehicles. With REMOURBAN funds alone, the
electric vehicle in the car club would run solo: there was no further ­infrastructure
planned for charging EVs in the city, and thus, as a City Council representative
argued: ‘this would be a single facility in a city that had very little on the EV
front’. With the additional funding, an extensive network of EV charging points
could be set up throughout the city, which made the infrastructure more com-
prehensive. At the same time, the piecing together of various funding sources
made planning and reporting requirements more complicated.
110 Håvard Haarstad and Marikken W. Wathne

The coupled funding for smart projects in Nottingham can arguably be seen
as shaping how the projects were communicated. While in Stavanger, smart city
projects were largely framed and communicated under the Triangulum brand, Not-
tingham largely communicated its smart initiatives as discrete interventions, without
linking them to the wider smart city commitment. Thus, rather than communicat-
ing REMOURBAN as one project, the City Council preferred to communicate
interventions such as the improved bus fleet and the car club EV with improved
charging infrastructure as separate initiatives. This reveals how the smart city funds
were negotiated to support the existing smart urban development strategy.
Similarly, the GrowSmarter project in Stockholm is a collection of pre-­
existing initiatives brought together in a common framework. At the Valla Torg
demonstration site, four older buildings were retrofitted with more energy ef-
ficient appliances and smart technologies. The site served as an arena for sup-
pliers and subcontractors to test new solutions and to install their products in a
new setting. The project coordinator noted that work on the project has, to a
large extent, involved negotiations within the municipality of Stockholm for the
proper permits and regulatory changes, and with EU project officers, residents
and sub-contractors to achieve the GrowSmarter goals.

Organising the smart city

When studying the local negotiations within smart cities, it is also important to
examine which actors are involved, who shaped the projects and how this defines
the content of the projects. These networks are largely coherent and tactical, to
varying degrees. In Nottingham, the smart city strategy was initiated by actors at
Nottingham Trent University, who contacted the City Council and other local
partners to secure a local consortium. The City Council, describing itself as open
to new initiatives such as REMOURBAN, was receptive to participation, but
the initiative stemming from outside the City Council might have impacted the
project strategy as such. Where in Stavanger and Stockholm the project was ini-
tiated by actors working within the local authorities, the project seemed to have
a more coherent expression throughout its implementation. In Nottingham, re-
sponsibility for various strands of the project was continuously shifting. For ex-
ample, with the EV enrolment, a significant amount of planning was devoted to
simply siting the charging point.
During the process, many of those in charge of the project left for employ-
ment elsewhere or to work in other Nottingham City Council departments,
resulting in repeated assessments and an incoherent planning process. As a City
Council representative stated, ‘you have got a bit of fracturing of the devel-
opment of the project’. Due to the frequent shifting of lead actors, several key
processes of the project were duplicated. As a consequence, the interventions
lacked a clear and coherent direction during their planning and implementation
phases. The transfer of responsibility from one person to another influenced the
smart city strategy in Nottingham more broadly. When asked about the reasons
 Lighthouse projects: Stavanger, Stockholm, Nottingham 111

for choosing a particular intervention, a City Council representative struggled

to identify the relevant contact person because individuals had been relocated
to other jobs or departments. ‘To be perfectly honest, we might never find the
answer to that question,’ he said. This points to the importance of having indi-
vidual ownership and responsibility to ensure that specific interventions succeed.
Local administrators feeling a sense of responsibility for the project might create
a perception of coherency.
In contrast to Nottingham, Stockholm’s network of project actors was more
coherent and strategic from the start. One project coordinator championed
the project from the beginning and ensured that the stated objectives in the
­Grow­Smarter application were implemented on the ground. Using his back-
ground in environmental protection, this key actor had a significant influence
on the project objectives, and was able to enrol others successfully. Yet he also
relied on key individuals in other parts of the municipality to act strategically
and align the city’s interests with the smart city agenda. For example, the hiring
of the new Director of ICT signalled a shift in how the municipality facilitated
cross-­sectoral cooperation. As the smart city project coordinator said:

It used to be called the IT department … they only worked on inter-

nal network systems for municipal employees, and were not interested in
broader connectivity at all. Then they got a new department head, who
changed the name of the department to Digital Development, and started
thinking completely differently.

In his words, the department started thinking of Stockholm ‘not just as a munic-
ipality’ but ‘more as a place’, which led to the contributions of many other actors
to the city’s digital development.
Similar to Stockholm, the process of becoming a smart city under ­Horizon
2020 has a coherent and well-planned appearance in Stavanger. Prior to the
call, Stavanger municipality was involved in similar projects. Triangulum was
perceived as a natural continuation of such engagements. The rationale for
­Triangulum was tightly connected to the decline of the oil industry as well
as the perceived solution to lead Stavanger out of the crisis. As a Triangulum
representative argued, the decline of the oil price led the industry in Stavanger
to reconsider its strategies: ‘Many people started to consider new options that
previously hadn’t been considered due to our deep engagement with the oil
industry. Now, people saw that they needed to think differently.’ The smart city
framing, and the new business opportunities it promised, clearly resonated with
this new reality.

Catalysing smart cities

Finally, a key question is how smart city projects and interventions may serve
as catalysts to affect broader change. It is important to note that the smart city
112 Håvard Haarstad and Marikken W. Wathne

planning objectives in Stavanger, Nottingham and Stockholm did not change

radically when they were designated as Lighthouse cities. Instead, the Horizon
2020 funds were used to enhance existing plans. At the same time, the smart
city discourse and Horizon 2020 funding had a significant impact on the specific
interventions in each city. First of all, the funding facilitated deeper collabora-
tion across sectors. The three Lighthouse cities include partners from the private,
public and higher education sectors, and this resulted in the creation of new
links between these partners. For example, the Nottingham Energy P ­ artnership
(NEP) explained that, as a direct consequence of REMOURBAN, they could
work more closely with Nottingham Trent University. ‘The project is giving
us tasks to do together,’ an NEP representative explained, adding that this led
to additional collaboration with the university beyond the REMOURBAN
activities.
The creation of cross-silo collaboration and new network connections is
a relatively well-known aspect of smart city initiatives. However, another
key influence of the Horizon 2020 projects in Stavanger, Nottingham and
­Stockholm was how it boosted the ambitions of pre-existing plans. When
asked whether the smart city initiatives would have been implemented regard-
less of the ­Horizon 2020 funding, most respondents answered that they would,
but perhaps not to the same extent. This was seen in all three Lighthouse cities.
In Nottingham, the retrofitting of houses was upgraded to a higher energy
efficiency standard as a result of the REMOURBAN project (Figure 7.1).
Similarly, in Stockholm, energy reduction targets for housing in Valla Torg
were increased from 50 per cent to 70 per cent as a result of the ­GrowSmarter
commitments. A municipal representative explained that the increased en-
ergy efficiency targets were not cost efficient; but because these targets were

Figure 7.1  he ‘2050 homes’ in Sneinton, Nottingham, before (left) and after
T
(right) retrofitting. The houses were renovated to reduce energy loss.
REMOURBAN funding allowed Nottingham City Council to secure a
higher energy efficiency standard than originally planned.
Source: REMOURBAN.
 Lighthouse projects: Stavanger, Stockholm, Nottingham 113

required by the Horizon 2020 funding, it made the intervention more ambi-
tious. A representative for the Stavanger-­based energy company Lyse AS also
explained how a project to deliver health information through televisions in
the homes of elderly residents was expanded because of the Triangulum fund-
ing. In addition, the intervention was expanded to include direct communica-
tion with health service professionals. The Lyse representative added that being
a Lighthouse city reduced risks for the companies that are developing smart
solutions, and this encouraged investment in new technologies. ‘Smart city
projects under Triangulum are refunded 70 per cent of their expenses. That
makes it possible to take risks,’ he argued.
In sum, the findings suggest that Lighthouse projects by themselves do not
result in significant change or transformation. Instead, the Horizon 2020
funding enhances existing initiatives and plans to mobilise higher levels
of ambition. The support from the EU is also a trigger to push initiatives
through, and to achieve the agreed timeframes. It facilitates new forms of
connections and collaborations, and has the potential to generate ripple ef-
fects across the pre-existing landscape of interests and alliances in the Light-
house cities.

Conclusions: assembling the smart city

‘Actually existing’ smart city projects do not resemble the tech-driven, entre-
preneurial ventures as often portrayed in the literature. Instead, we see prag-
matic and strategic manoeuvring within the relatively wide opportunity space
that the ‘smart city’ label affords. The actors involved utilise resources from
Horizon 2020 Smart Cities and Communities projects, and networks attached
to them, as well as resources in related projects and initiatives in their cities.
They do so in strategic ways, even though there are of course elements of co-
incidence and messiness involved. This suggests that smart city projects need
to be theorised as assemblages of local and trans-local resources, rather than
simply being imposed ‘from above’. This means that, even though there are
powerful trans-urban discourses surrounding the smart city agenda, concrete
interventions are mobilised by situated actors. This mobilisation and strategic
application of resources and capacities may trigger wider change across the
urban landscape through which smart city strategies may have a wider set of
intended or unintended effects.
Across our three cases, we see a significant contrast in how the Lighthouse
projects are mobilised and put to work. In Stavanger, the Lighthouse fund-
ing sparked a significant rebranding of the city as a whole, and it now strives
to be the leading smart city in the Nordic countries. The city has strategi-
cally reconfigured a range of its governance tasks under the ‘smart’ framing.
In ­Nottingham, the Lighthouse city status was treated more casually, as it was
incorporated into a range of interrelated activities and initiatives. In Stockholm,
114 Håvard Haarstad and Marikken W. Wathne

the Lighthouse project has been used to leverage more ambition in existing
interventions.
What is common in the cases, however, is that the concrete initiatives that
comprised the Lighthouse project were based on pre-existing or already planned
projects that were subsequently rebranded and made more ambitious. These in-
itiatives are relatively modest in terms of technological innovation – at least in
comparison to what is often advertised in the hype surrounding smart cities.
However, they have provided city planners and other urban actors with a pow-
erful framing to tie together ongoing activities, to connect actors and to push
initiatives through (in addition to providing funding, of course). Urban actors
are not seduced by the universalist, tech-oriented discourse; in fact, a mantra
at many smart city events calls for smart city strategies and interventions to be
centred on humans rather than technology. This is probably in part rhetorical;
but it is also a reflection of how local actors themselves are critical towards the
tech-oriented smart city discourse.
Of course, the seductive qualities of technological visions shape smart city
projects on many different levels. We do not deny that tech giants play a signifi-
cant role in shaping the hegemonic imaginaries of urban futures, as many social
scientists suggest. Nevertheless, this should not lead us to disregard how specific
urban strategies around smartness are created and put in motion by strategic and
pragmatic planners and other urban actors that use smart city framings to serve
their own agendas and purposes. This can be quite positive in many respects.
The smart city agenda can be a powerful tool for ambitious local actors con-
cerned with sustainability.
This re-conceptualisation of cities – from passive receivers of smart strate-
gies and projects to active agents assembling smartness – opens up many new
challenges and concerns. Many of these pose novel normative and practical
questions for smart city development and the research on this form of urban
development. How can practitioners take advantage of the resources and possi-
bilities the smart city discourse affords? And, as the local scale becomes more in-
fluential than previously recognised, how do we ensure that local smart agendas
actually drive cities to become more sustainable? If local politics, with its strong
and weak actors, networks and vested interests, is decisive on the translation
processes, how can it ensure that the progressive potential is not subsumed by
entrenched and regressive local interests? The critical approach to smartness is
not only one of examining the smart city as a discourse, but also one of exam-
ining the processes through which cities are enacting and rolling out their smart
city agendas.

Note
1 The European Commission (EC) is the executive arm of the European Union. See Or-
ganisational structure. [Online]. Available: https://ec.europa.eu/info/about-european-
commission/organisational-structure_en [Last accessed 15 January 2018].
 Lighthouse projects: Stavanger, Stockholm, Nottingham 115

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