Where are Smart Sustainable Cities Made? Tracing Wired Socio-Technical Relationships in, Through, Beneath, and Beyond a City

The creation of ‘smart’ sustainable cities is seen as critical for achieving net-zero ambitions. It is therefore important to ask where, when, and how such cities are made. Taking inspiration from science and technology studies (STS), we look beyond the ‘city’, adopt an oligoptic approach, and trace out socio-technical relationships and connections in order to identify four ‘hot areas’ where smart sustainable futures are contested, configured and calibrated. This specifically involves taking Manchester – a city with bold and ambitious ‘smart’ 2038 net-zero aspirations – as our first hot area and point of departure. We subsequently zoom in on a building project in the centre of the city that is synonymous with current smart sustainable design, focusing attention on the electricity connection process. We then trace wires out from the building, turning attention to the management of the electricity distribution network, before moving on again to discuss two wind farms. In each instance, we reveal socio-technical contingencies, situated both within and beyond the city, which act to mediate the speed and slow Manchester's smart sustainable transitions. In response, we offer four speculative suggestions that promise to speed up such shifts. Our central argument is that revealing and addressing hot areas that are distributed across various socio-technical networks in and beyond cities is crucial for attempts to accelerate net-zero transitions.