Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Beyond the Smart or Resilient City: In Search of Sustainability in the Sojan Thirdspace

Version 1 : Received: 28 September 2022 / Approved: 29 September 2022 / Online: 29 September 2022 (12:22:21 CEST)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Cooke, P. Beyond the Smart or Resilient City: In Search of Sustainability in the Sojan Thirdspace . Sustainability 2023, 15, 145. Cooke, P. Beyond the Smart or Resilient City: In Search of Sustainability in the Sojan Thirdspace †. Sustainability 2023, 15, 145.

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore some of the issues to be welcomed but also warned against in general but also specified from an illustrative sample of ‘smart’ projects that caused outcomes that were neither ‘smart’ nor ‘resilient’. These give pointers to a ‘thirdspace’ as a descriptor of the most advanced application of sustainability thinking regarding relational spatial development planning. This contribution examines difficulties in delivering both ‘smart’ and ‘resilient’ responses of interest or value to citizens confronted with recurring crises that derive directly or with implications for sustainability issues. Identified are constraints and issues acting as obstacles to governance, management ‘layering’ and ‘learning’ causing failures of many weak or never-delivered projects. Critiques of static, or worse ‘magical’ thinking are increasingly invoked in consequence. In the analysis of ‘live cases’ all these problems showed up ‘in real life’. The author was pleased that his mentor, the late UCLA planning theorist Ed Soja’s application of the idea of ‘Thirdspace’ received prescient vindication from the results of this adjudication.

Keywords

Resilience; Entropy; Layering; Thirdspace; Unsmart

Subject

Social Sciences, Geography, Planning and Development

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