Grappling with Smart City Politics in an Era of Market Triumphalism

New ‘sustainable ’ urban imaginaries are increasingly taking root in cities and regions around the world. Some notable representa-tive examples of these include: new urbanism (Calthorpe, 1993), compact urban develop-ment (Urban Task Force, 2005) and smart growth (Flint, 2006). Proponents of these approaches argue that they are ostensibly built around a new consensus between the planning organisations at various scales, private develo-pers, environmentalists and other relevant non-governmental interests, such as afford-able housing advocates. In some sense, then, it might plausibly be argued that these new urban imaginaries transcend the parochial