Knowing the City: Expertise, Sustainability and Post-Political Urban Transformation

Cities are increasingly positioned as key players in addressing global sustainability challenges, taking on greater responsibility for creating sustainable urban environments. “Urban expertise” has become crucial in this endeavor, equipping city administrations with scientific and expert-based tools to control, problematize, and govern urban spaces through, for example, modelling, mapping, scenario-building, and analytical instruments. This paper examines the knowledge production underpinning the so-called “green transformation” of select cities in Sweden, focusing on local city administrations’ responses to large-scale industry projects aimed at the “green” production of steel and batteries. In order to accommodate the requirements associated with these green industries, cities are in the process of facilitating urban sustainable transformation. To this end, city administrations produce knowledge in the form of housing needs analyses, population forecasts, environmental assessments, and financial projections. In this paper, I investigate how this knowledge is produced and how it contributes to making the urban environment legible and amenable to green transformation. Drawing selectively on concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS), I develop a theoretical and methodological framework for studying the networks of support and co-production that are put in place to generate knowledge about urban environments and their sustainability challenges. This approach enables a critical scrutiny of how knowledge production contributes to the reproduction of the “postpolitical city”, where questions of sustainable city-making are depoliticized and reframed as technical problems to be solved through decontextualized and standardized expertise.