M Hodson
Biographic Data
| ID | 28270 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Hodson |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Hodson |
| SIGNATURE | HODSON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Salford |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2987-4476 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 215 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
From platform capitalism to strategic place-based platformisation
Digital platforms have pervaded a broad sweep of urban life over the last decade and more. Urban mobility platforms have been particularly prevalent, often seeking to disrupt and provide alternatives to the existing organisation of provision. In this paper we argue that there is a need to strengthen understanding of the role of urban (governing and infrastructural) context in platform urbanism. Moving from debates around platform capitalism, wher…
How have digital mobility platforms responded to Covid-19 and why does this matter for ‘the urban’
Digital mobility platforms have become increasingly pervasive over the last decade or so in a wide variety of urban contexts. Much digital mobility platform activity has focused on city centres and urban cores, where returns on investment are often seen to be greatest, where existing transport infrastructure can be thick and where there are concentrated circulations of people. The global spread of coronavirus from early 2020 resulted in widesprea…
Urban infrastructure reconfiguration and digital platforms: Who is in control
The literature on urban sustainability transitions has grown substantially over the last two decades. Recent debates have sought to position urban transition as an incremental process of reconfiguration informed by novel relationships between existing systems of provision and new infrastructural and governing arrangements. We extend these debates by exploring how digital platformisation of urban infrastructure is challenging the organisation and …
Post‐pandemic cities: An urban lexicon of accelerations/decelerations
COVID‐19 has stimulated renewed societal and academic debate about the future of cities and urban life. Future visons have veered from the ‘death of the city’ to visual renderings and limited experiments with novel 15 minute neighbourhoods. Within this context, we as a diverse group of urban scholars sought to examine the emergent ‘post’‐COVID city through the production of an urban lexicon that investigates its socio‐material contours. The urban…
Global technology companies and the politics of urban socio-technical imaginaries in the digital age: Processual proxies, Trojan horses and global beachheads
In this paper, we take the concept of 'new urban spaces' as our jumping off point to engage with the efforts of Alphabet/Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs to cultivate a new integrated digital and infrastructural urban space on the Toronto waterfront. We interrogate the process and politics of imagining this new, digital urban space as an urban socio-technical imaginary. The paper critically examines the central role of 'big tech' in producing the u…
Low carbon transitions pathways in mobility: Applying the MLP in a combined case study and simulation bridging analysis of passenger transport in the Netherlands
State-rescaling and re-designing the material city-region: Tensions of disruption and continuity in articulating the future of Greater Manchester
In a context of globalisation, the emergence of city-regions and the politics and dynamics of their constitution has been debated for almost two decades. Recent writings have extended this focus to seeing city-regions as a geopolitical project of late capitalism where the state takes a critical role in the re-design of city-regions to make them amenable to international competition and to secure strategic inward investments in the built environme…
Conditioning experimentation: The struggle for place-based discretion in shaping urban infrastructures
Re-shaping infrastructure systems and social practices within urban contexts has been promoted as a critical way to address a range of contemporary economic, environmental and social challenges. Though there are many attempts to re-imagine more sustainable urban contexts the challenge remains how to achieve such change. In this context, urban experiments have emerged as a way to stage purposive infrastructure interventions and learn what works in…
Reconfiguring Urban Sustainability Transitions, Analysing Multiplicity
Cities, and the networked infrastructures that sustain urban life, are seen as crucial sites for creating more sustainable futures. Yet, although there are many plans, the realisation of sustainable urban infrastructures on the ground is uneven. To develop better ways of understanding why this is the case, the paper makes a conceptual contribution by engaging with current understanding of urban sustainability transitions, using urban sustainable …
Cabin ecologies
This chapter explores the production, dissemination, testing and deployment of integrated urban infrastructure technoscience, and the ways in which the boundaries between the interior and exterior environments are being selectively but significantly redrawn. It provides an overview of the wider technoscientific contexts within which cabin ecologies were developed, to illustrate the ambition, scale and scope of the international effort to build en…
The mutual construction of urban retrofit and scale: Governing On, in and With in Greater Manchester
In this article, we focus on the mutually interrelated processes of constructing urban retrofit and the city-region as a scale for action. Urban retrofitting – the systematic reconfiguration of socio-technologies of energy in the existing built environment and infrastructure – is critical to the achievement of ambitious carbon reduction targets. To realise the ecological and economic benefits of retrofit cities are continually searching for a ‘fi…
The Intermediary Organisation of Low Carbon Cities: A Comparative Analysis of Transitions in Greater London and Greater Manchester
Making a low carbon economic future for the UK has been declared a key priority by both the previous Labour government and also the current coalition government. Yet there is a large gap between the symbolic representations of a low carbon future and their material manifestations in low carbon technologies and infrastructure in particular places. This paper addresses this gap through focusing on the organisation of urban low carbon transition act…
Mediating Low-Carbon Urban Transitions? Forms of Organization, Knowledge and Action
Increasingly at the scale of cities, strategies and plans to respond to the challenges of climate change and constrained resources are being developed. A range of climate change plans, low-carbon strategies, peak oil preparations and so on have been developed, often with ambitious aspirations. At the same time, new and reconstituted “intermediary” organizational forms are working between the priorities of these plans and the contexts of their “ap…
Reshaping Urban Infrastructure: Material Flow Analysis and Transitions Analysis in an Urban Context
Urban policy makers and researchers consistently recognize the challenge of more effectively reshaping the linkages between cities, urban infrastructure, ecosystem services, and natural resources. The aim of this article is to consider the potential value of developing connections between two currently disconnected approaches to resource use and cities—material flow analysis (MFA) and transitions analysis (TA). This article attempts to address th…
The politics of governing cities, infrastructures and resource flows: Spaces of reproduction or reconfiguration
This paper develops a theoretical and conceptual understanding of the role of space and politics in governing relationships between cities, critical energy, water, waste and transportation infrastructures and resource flows. It presents a view of cities as dynamic, experimental social spaces underpinned by infrastructural unevenness with variable provision of and access to resource flows. An emerging set of new pressures to the ways in which citi…
Can cities shape socio-technical transitions and how would we know if they were?
Urbanism in the anthropocene: Ecological urbanism or premium ecological enclaves
Earth scientists now argue that the current geological era should be re‐named the anthropocene to better reflect the impact of humans in reshaping planetary ecology. Urbanism encompasses the social, economic and political processes most closely linked to the rapid transformation of habitats, destruction of ecologies, over use of materials and resources, and the production of pollutants and carbon emissions that threaten planetary terracide. Conse…
Cities mediating technological transitions: Understanding visions, intermediation and consequences
Approaches to technological transitions and their management have generated considerable interest in academic and policy circles in recent years. The development of this body of work may be seen as a response to the complexities, uncertainties and problems which confront many western societies, in organising ‘sustainably’ various aspects of energy, agricultural, water, transport and health systems of production and consumption; problems which are…
Urban Ecological Security: A New Urban Paradigm
The term 'ecological security' is usually used in relation to attempts to safeguard flows of ecological resources, infrastructure and services at the national scale. But increasing concerns over 'urban ecological security' (UES) are now giving rise to strategies to reconfigure cities and their infrastructures in ways that help to secure their ecological and material reproduction. Yet cities have differing capacities and capabilities for developin…
The Contribution of Local Experiments and Negotiation Processes to Field-Level Learning in Emerging (Niche) Technologies: Meta-Analysis of 27 New Energy Projects in Europe
This article examines how local experiments and negotiation processes contribute to social and field-level learning. The analysis is framed within the niche development literature, which offers a framework for analyzing the relation between projects in local contexts and the transfer of local experiences into generally applicable rules. The authors examine 2 case studies drawn from a meta-analysis of 27 new energy projects. The case studies, both…
Old Industrial Regions, Technology, and Innovation: Tensions of Obduracy and Transformation
Work on regions and technologically informed innovation has often focused on high-tech regions as exemplars of apparent success in economic development. This paper, by contrast, focuses on understanding how regions transform themselves in respect of pervasive pressures, in relation to old industrial regions. In particular, the possible tensions between pressures for transformation and the potential obduracy of social, cultural, and institutional …
Londres et la technologie de l'hydrogène. Les villes comme médiatrices dans la transition énergétique
La décentralisation a donné un rôle majeur aux villes dans la conduite du changement, notamment technologique. Ce rôle peut être interprété dans une logique de modernisation pour tous, dans le développement d'une gouvernance locale mondialisée ; il peut-être aussi joué dans une fonction de vitrine au bénéfice des grands groupes industriels et des organisations internationales. Les deux perspectives sont présentes dans l'investissement du maire de…
Understanding the Role of the National Exemplar in Constructing 'Strategic Glurbanization
This article focuses on the tensions between economic and environmental priorities through attempts to reconfigure urban governance arrangements in a world city. We examine these tensions through the development of the hydrogen energy economy in London and through attempts to cultivate new techniques of governance in realizing this vision. Through case study material, we develop two representations of the negotiation of new forms of governance. F…
Negotiating contested visions and place-specific expectations of the hydrogen economy
This paper explores the role of the ‘hydrogen economy’ as a guiding vision encompassing multiple contested technological futures, value judgements and problem framings. Hydrogen visions draw upon six overarching and competing narrative themes: power and independence; community empowerment and democratisation; ecotopia; hydrogen as technical fix; inevitability and technical progress; and ‘staying in the race’. In other words the hydrogen economy p…
Urban Ecological Security: A New Urban Paradigm
The term 'ecological security' is usually used in relation to attempts to safeguard flows of ecological resources, infrastructure and services at the national scale. But increasing concerns over 'urban ecological security' (UES) are now giving rise to strategies to reconfigure cities and their infrastructures in ways that help to secure their ecological and material reproduction. Yet cities have differing capacities and capabilities for developin…
Urbanism in the anthropocene: Ecological urbanism or premium ecological enclaves
Earth scientists now argue that the current geological era should be re‐named the anthropocene to better reflect the impact of humans in reshaping planetary ecology. Urbanism encompasses the social, economic and political processes most closely linked to the rapid transformation of habitats, destruction of ecologies, over use of materials and resources, and the production of pollutants and carbon emissions that threaten planetary terracide. Conse…
The Intermediary Organisation of Low Carbon Cities: A Comparative Analysis of Transitions in Greater London and Greater Manchester
Making a low carbon economic future for the UK has been declared a key priority by both the previous Labour government and also the current coalition government. Yet there is a large gap between the symbolic representations of a low carbon future and their material manifestations in low carbon technologies and infrastructure in particular places. This paper addresses this gap through focusing on the organisation of urban low carbon transition act…
Post‐pandemic cities: An urban lexicon of accelerations/decelerations
COVID‐19 has stimulated renewed societal and academic debate about the future of cities and urban life. Future visons have veered from the ‘death of the city’ to visual renderings and limited experiments with novel 15 minute neighbourhoods. Within this context, we as a diverse group of urban scholars sought to examine the emergent ‘post’‐COVID city through the production of an urban lexicon that investigates its socio‐material contours. The urban…
Understanding the Role of the National Exemplar in Constructing 'Strategic Glurbanization
This article focuses on the tensions between economic and environmental priorities through attempts to reconfigure urban governance arrangements in a world city. We examine these tensions through the development of the hydrogen energy economy in London and through attempts to cultivate new techniques of governance in realizing this vision. Through case study material, we develop two representations of the negotiation of new forms of governance. F…
Conditioning experimentation: The struggle for place-based discretion in shaping urban infrastructures
Re-shaping infrastructure systems and social practices within urban contexts has been promoted as a critical way to address a range of contemporary economic, environmental and social challenges. Though there are many attempts to re-imagine more sustainable urban contexts the challenge remains how to achieve such change. In this context, urban experiments have emerged as a way to stage purposive infrastructure interventions and learn what works in…
Global technology companies and the politics of urban socio-technical imaginaries in the digital age: Processual proxies, Trojan horses and global beachheads
In this paper, we take the concept of 'new urban spaces' as our jumping off point to engage with the efforts of Alphabet/Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs to cultivate a new integrated digital and infrastructural urban space on the Toronto waterfront. We interrogate the process and politics of imagining this new, digital urban space as an urban socio-technical imaginary. The paper critically examines the central role of 'big tech' in producing the u…
State-rescaling and re-designing the material city-region: Tensions of disruption and continuity in articulating the future of Greater Manchester
In a context of globalisation, the emergence of city-regions and the politics and dynamics of their constitution has been debated for almost two decades. Recent writings have extended this focus to seeing city-regions as a geopolitical project of late capitalism where the state takes a critical role in the re-design of city-regions to make them amenable to international competition and to secure strategic inward investments in the built environme…
The mutual construction of urban retrofit and scale: Governing On, in and With in Greater Manchester
In this article, we focus on the mutually interrelated processes of constructing urban retrofit and the city-region as a scale for action. Urban retrofitting – the systematic reconfiguration of socio-technologies of energy in the existing built environment and infrastructure – is critical to the achievement of ambitious carbon reduction targets. To realise the ecological and economic benefits of retrofit cities are continually searching for a ‘fi…
Old Industrial Regions, Technology, and Innovation: Tensions of Obduracy and Transformation
Work on regions and technologically informed innovation has often focused on high-tech regions as exemplars of apparent success in economic development. This paper, by contrast, focuses on understanding how regions transform themselves in respect of pervasive pressures, in relation to old industrial regions. In particular, the possible tensions between pressures for transformation and the potential obduracy of social, cultural, and institutional …
Urban infrastructure reconfiguration and digital platforms: Who is in control
The literature on urban sustainability transitions has grown substantially over the last two decades. Recent debates have sought to position urban transition as an incremental process of reconfiguration informed by novel relationships between existing systems of provision and new infrastructural and governing arrangements. We extend these debates by exploring how digital platformisation of urban infrastructure is challenging the organisation and …
How have digital mobility platforms responded to Covid-19 and why does this matter for ‘the urban’
Digital mobility platforms have become increasingly pervasive over the last decade or so in a wide variety of urban contexts. Much digital mobility platform activity has focused on city centres and urban cores, where returns on investment are often seen to be greatest, where existing transport infrastructure can be thick and where there are concentrated circulations of people. The global spread of coronavirus from early 2020 resulted in widesprea…
From platform capitalism to strategic place-based platformisation
Digital platforms have pervaded a broad sweep of urban life over the last decade and more. Urban mobility platforms have been particularly prevalent, often seeking to disrupt and provide alternatives to the existing organisation of provision. In this paper we argue that there is a need to strengthen understanding of the role of urban (governing and infrastructural) context in platform urbanism. Moving from debates around platform capitalism, wher…
Negotiating contested visions and place-specific expectations of the hydrogen economy
This paper explores the role of the ‘hydrogen economy’ as a guiding vision encompassing multiple contested technological futures, value judgements and problem framings. Hydrogen visions draw upon six overarching and competing narrative themes: power and independence; community empowerment and democratisation; ecotopia; hydrogen as technical fix; inevitability and technical progress; and ‘staying in the race’. In other words the hydrogen economy p…
Londres et la technologie de l'hydrogène. Les villes comme médiatrices dans la transition énergétique
La décentralisation a donné un rôle majeur aux villes dans la conduite du changement, notamment technologique. Ce rôle peut être interprété dans une logique de modernisation pour tous, dans le développement d'une gouvernance locale mondialisée ; il peut-être aussi joué dans une fonction de vitrine au bénéfice des grands groupes industriels et des organisations internationales. Les deux perspectives sont présentes dans l'investissement du maire de…
Understanding the Role of the National Exemplar in Constructing 'Strategic Glurbanization
This article focuses on the tensions between economic and environmental priorities through attempts to reconfigure urban governance arrangements in a world city. We examine these tensions through the development of the hydrogen energy economy in London and through attempts to cultivate new techniques of governance in realizing this vision. Through case study material, we develop two representations of the negotiation of new forms of governance. F…
The Contribution of Local Experiments and Negotiation Processes to Field-Level Learning in Emerging (Niche) Technologies: Meta-Analysis of 27 New Energy Projects in Europe
This article examines how local experiments and negotiation processes contribute to social and field-level learning. The analysis is framed within the niche development literature, which offers a framework for analyzing the relation between projects in local contexts and the transfer of local experiences into generally applicable rules. The authors examine 2 case studies drawn from a meta-analysis of 27 new energy projects. The case studies, both…
Old Industrial Regions, Technology, and Innovation: Tensions of Obduracy and Transformation
Work on regions and technologically informed innovation has often focused on high-tech regions as exemplars of apparent success in economic development. This paper, by contrast, focuses on understanding how regions transform themselves in respect of pervasive pressures, in relation to old industrial regions. In particular, the possible tensions between pressures for transformation and the potential obduracy of social, cultural, and institutional …
Cities mediating technological transitions: Understanding visions, intermediation and consequences
Approaches to technological transitions and their management have generated considerable interest in academic and policy circles in recent years. The development of this body of work may be seen as a response to the complexities, uncertainties and problems which confront many western societies, in organising ‘sustainably’ various aspects of energy, agricultural, water, transport and health systems of production and consumption; problems which are…
Urban Ecological Security: A New Urban Paradigm
The term 'ecological security' is usually used in relation to attempts to safeguard flows of ecological resources, infrastructure and services at the national scale. But increasing concerns over 'urban ecological security' (UES) are now giving rise to strategies to reconfigure cities and their infrastructures in ways that help to secure their ecological and material reproduction. Yet cities have differing capacities and capabilities for developin…
Can cities shape socio-technical transitions and how would we know if they were?
Urbanism in the anthropocene: Ecological urbanism or premium ecological enclaves
Earth scientists now argue that the current geological era should be re‐named the anthropocene to better reflect the impact of humans in reshaping planetary ecology. Urbanism encompasses the social, economic and political processes most closely linked to the rapid transformation of habitats, destruction of ecologies, over use of materials and resources, and the production of pollutants and carbon emissions that threaten planetary terracide. Conse…
Mediating Low-Carbon Urban Transitions? Forms of Organization, Knowledge and Action
Increasingly at the scale of cities, strategies and plans to respond to the challenges of climate change and constrained resources are being developed. A range of climate change plans, low-carbon strategies, peak oil preparations and so on have been developed, often with ambitious aspirations. At the same time, new and reconstituted “intermediary” organizational forms are working between the priorities of these plans and the contexts of their “ap…
Reshaping Urban Infrastructure: Material Flow Analysis and Transitions Analysis in an Urban Context
Urban policy makers and researchers consistently recognize the challenge of more effectively reshaping the linkages between cities, urban infrastructure, ecosystem services, and natural resources. The aim of this article is to consider the potential value of developing connections between two currently disconnected approaches to resource use and cities—material flow analysis (MFA) and transitions analysis (TA). This article attempts to address th…
The politics of governing cities, infrastructures and resource flows: Spaces of reproduction or reconfiguration
This paper develops a theoretical and conceptual understanding of the role of space and politics in governing relationships between cities, critical energy, water, waste and transportation infrastructures and resource flows. It presents a view of cities as dynamic, experimental social spaces underpinned by infrastructural unevenness with variable provision of and access to resource flows. An emerging set of new pressures to the ways in which citi…
The Intermediary Organisation of Low Carbon Cities: A Comparative Analysis of Transitions in Greater London and Greater Manchester
Making a low carbon economic future for the UK has been declared a key priority by both the previous Labour government and also the current coalition government. Yet there is a large gap between the symbolic representations of a low carbon future and their material manifestations in low carbon technologies and infrastructure in particular places. This paper addresses this gap through focusing on the organisation of urban low carbon transition act…
Cabin ecologies
This chapter explores the production, dissemination, testing and deployment of integrated urban infrastructure technoscience, and the ways in which the boundaries between the interior and exterior environments are being selectively but significantly redrawn. It provides an overview of the wider technoscientific contexts within which cabin ecologies were developed, to illustrate the ambition, scale and scope of the international effort to build en…
The mutual construction of urban retrofit and scale: Governing On, in and With in Greater Manchester
In this article, we focus on the mutually interrelated processes of constructing urban retrofit and the city-region as a scale for action. Urban retrofitting – the systematic reconfiguration of socio-technologies of energy in the existing built environment and infrastructure – is critical to the achievement of ambitious carbon reduction targets. To realise the ecological and economic benefits of retrofit cities are continually searching for a ‘fi…
Reconfiguring Urban Sustainability Transitions, Analysing Multiplicity
Cities, and the networked infrastructures that sustain urban life, are seen as crucial sites for creating more sustainable futures. Yet, although there are many plans, the realisation of sustainable urban infrastructures on the ground is uneven. To develop better ways of understanding why this is the case, the paper makes a conceptual contribution by engaging with current understanding of urban sustainability transitions, using urban sustainable …
Conditioning experimentation: The struggle for place-based discretion in shaping urban infrastructures
Re-shaping infrastructure systems and social practices within urban contexts has been promoted as a critical way to address a range of contemporary economic, environmental and social challenges. Though there are many attempts to re-imagine more sustainable urban contexts the challenge remains how to achieve such change. In this context, urban experiments have emerged as a way to stage purposive infrastructure interventions and learn what works in…
Low carbon transitions pathways in mobility: Applying the MLP in a combined case study and simulation bridging analysis of passenger transport in the Netherlands
State-rescaling and re-designing the material city-region: Tensions of disruption and continuity in articulating the future of Greater Manchester
In a context of globalisation, the emergence of city-regions and the politics and dynamics of their constitution has been debated for almost two decades. Recent writings have extended this focus to seeing city-regions as a geopolitical project of late capitalism where the state takes a critical role in the re-design of city-regions to make them amenable to international competition and to secure strategic inward investments in the built environme…
Global technology companies and the politics of urban socio-technical imaginaries in the digital age: Processual proxies, Trojan horses and global beachheads
In this paper, we take the concept of 'new urban spaces' as our jumping off point to engage with the efforts of Alphabet/Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs to cultivate a new integrated digital and infrastructural urban space on the Toronto waterfront. We interrogate the process and politics of imagining this new, digital urban space as an urban socio-technical imaginary. The paper critically examines the central role of 'big tech' in producing the u…
Post‐pandemic cities: An urban lexicon of accelerations/decelerations
COVID‐19 has stimulated renewed societal and academic debate about the future of cities and urban life. Future visons have veered from the ‘death of the city’ to visual renderings and limited experiments with novel 15 minute neighbourhoods. Within this context, we as a diverse group of urban scholars sought to examine the emergent ‘post’‐COVID city through the production of an urban lexicon that investigates its socio‐material contours. The urban…
How have digital mobility platforms responded to Covid-19 and why does this matter for ‘the urban’
Digital mobility platforms have become increasingly pervasive over the last decade or so in a wide variety of urban contexts. Much digital mobility platform activity has focused on city centres and urban cores, where returns on investment are often seen to be greatest, where existing transport infrastructure can be thick and where there are concentrated circulations of people. The global spread of coronavirus from early 2020 resulted in widesprea…
Urban infrastructure reconfiguration and digital platforms: Who is in control
The literature on urban sustainability transitions has grown substantially over the last two decades. Recent debates have sought to position urban transition as an incremental process of reconfiguration informed by novel relationships between existing systems of provision and new infrastructural and governing arrangements. We extend these debates by exploring how digital platformisation of urban infrastructure is challenging the organisation and …
From platform capitalism to strategic place-based platformisation
Digital platforms have pervaded a broad sweep of urban life over the last decade and more. Urban mobility platforms have been particularly prevalent, often seeking to disrupt and provide alternatives to the existing organisation of provision. In this paper we argue that there is a need to strengthen understanding of the role of urban (governing and infrastructural) context in platform urbanism. Moving from debates around platform capitalism, wher…
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Geography (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Economics (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Business (9 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (8 works) · Corporate governance (7 works)