Smart cities, sustainable cities, eco-cities, resilient cities, and so on. The rhetoric has reached Norway. A free-to-download book published last year presents Stavanger as “one of the first, and one of the leading smart sustainable cities in Europe.”
Titled "A Nordic Smart Sustainable City: Lessons from Theory and Practice", three academics at the University of Stavanger edited it: Barbara Maria Sageidet, Daniela Müller-Eie, Kristiane M.F. Lindland. Comprising 16 chapters divided among four parts, authors offer theories and practices of Stavanger as a smart, sustainable city. Aside from the alliteration, their expertise ranges from collaborations across art, science, and practice through to mobility, safety, and air quality.
This book “aims to intervene with critical input and alternative perspectives” on smart, sustainable cities with Stavanger as an example, collating evidence and seeking its use in practice. Stavanger’s importance and uniqueness is a “Nordic medium-sized smart city aiming to be climate neutral by 2030.”
The editors’ introduction clearly summarizes the book’s content. Collecting different perspectives is emphasized by explaining how nebulous the terms “smart” and “sustainable” are — and how much they are used without critique.
Advocates for smart, sustainable cities can fixate on a city’s design and construction using technology to achieve quantified efficiency without really considering people through “policy, governance, culture, and education” as well as living and livelihoods. Smart, sustainable cities including Stavanger become “test beds or living labs” which might not serve the population.
Within these excellent points from the editors, ethical aspects are raised in some chapters. It is hard to make a city livable without a full-scale experiment; that is, having a functioning city and improving it according to feedback and observations, with the inherent dangers of real-time tinkering of real lives. A few chapters discuss the ethics of open-source data from people’s lives in their smart city.
One of the book’s strengths is selecting a single location, especially with most contributors having direct links to or experience living in Stavanger. A few do not, providing complementary external perspectives.
Chapter 4 inexplicably covers Trondheim. Detailed comparisons are always welcome, adding plenty to a specific context. Why this is completed only once in the book is not convincingly explained. Trondheim has useful comparative traits with Stavanger, although, as explained, Stavanger has 11 “sister” or twin cities worldwide, which would presumably be relevant comparators — particularly those not marketing themselves as smart or sustainable.
Similarly, “climate-neutral by 2030” is never fully defined or interrogated. The idea, the phrase, and the practicalities have been extensively deconstructed. An opportunity was missed to suggest doing better for Stavanger than pursuing this populism. Not to mention a few chapters accepting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals at face value and presuming that they ought to be met, rather than explaining the goals’ evident limitations.
Conversely, the book does well in its aim of diverse critiques and perspectives regarding “smart” and “sustainable.” All the chapters offer insightful nuggets of content or method, showing the value of authors who know a place researching and writing about it. Two examples:
First, Chapter 5’s entire ethos is that any label describing a city is a never-ending process rather than a product to be achieved and finalized. This is the baseline of urban (and all human) development, bringing reality beyond the buzzwords. The chapter’s author discusses bike sharing to brilliantly describe how the city ought to examine how any initiative is developed and used, rather than simply what that initiative for creating it. These should be oft-repeated lessons for any design professional.
Second, Chapter 10 begins from the foundations of European thought in organizational change to test how well Stavanger implements the theories in practice. The chapter’s authors use their theory-practice connection to discuss stepwise how the city’s smart city office approached its work, recognizing its limitations and pursuing improvements in its operations.
This material, and much more across the other chapters, sets up the powerful concluding chapter by the editors who synthesize 11 lessons with pithy titles. The advice is sound and balanced among theory, method, and practice.
Which means that the editors are correct that, “The lessons are generalizable, transferable, and applicable in other contexts.” Other locations can emulate this book in comprehending what a “smart, sustainable city” does and does not do — and what it should and should not do.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Ilan Kelman
Dieser Artikel ist neu veröffentlicht von / This article is republished from: The Norwegian American, 28.04.2026
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