Heterogeneity of Lock-In and the Role of Strategic Technological Interventions in Urban Infrastructural Transformations

In the context of current interest in “low-carbon” interventions and “energy transitions”, this paper provides a comparative perspective across three European cities (Barcelona, London and Paris) on the role of photovoltaics (PV) technology in wider transformative processes affecting crucial sites in which the “sustainability” of the built environment is being contested: the powering, planning and construction of cities. For conceptualizing far-reaching urban infrastructural change processes, the combined innovation frameworks of “strategic niche management” (SNM) and the “multi-level perspective” (MLP) on “systems in transition” offer valuable contributions. However, some implicit assumptions of these innovation frameworks make them not unproblematic when applied to the urban. This paper proposes a way of operationalizing the SNM/MLP for urban transition studies, by drawing on contributions from actor-network theory (ANT) and ANT-inspired scholarship. From this conceptual engagement, a refined understanding of the relationship between technological novelty and the existing obduracies, or “lock-in”, is developed, which enables a fuller appreciation of the potential heterogeneity of “lock-in” and the cumulative impacts of different actors’ strategic technological interventions in reconfiguring deeply engrained patterns of obduracies in their efforts to promote a specific technology; thus providing scope to link the analysis of local processes to insights into the more general processes of transforming unsustainabilities.