TRANSFORM - Governing the Smart City by Projects.

Abstract

Drawing on the experiences of the project TRANSFORM in monitoring and shaping the low-carbon transfromation strategies of six European cities, the aim of this paper is to elucidate some of the logics of strategic urban policy processes in their peculiar pathways towards the Smart City. Drawing on the experiences from the TRANSFORM cities in general and particularly from Vienna in formulating and experimenting their Smart City strategy, we would like to show how some of the tensions inherent in the role of Smart city research projects are practically addressed in the framework of the project TRANSFORM. In the first part we will provide a general theoretical background to the sociological analysis of the urban project, with particular focus on the challenges on the governance of local climate affairs. In the second part, we shall illustrate this by looking at the TRANSFORM project, first form a European perspective, then from the viewpoint of Vienna.