Governing Hybrid Urban Infrastructure - The Co-Production of Decentralized, Nature-Based and Localized Solutions

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Background

With the progression of climate change, urbanization, and sustainability challenges, urban practitioners are increasingly aware of the need to change the trajectory of urban infrastructure towards more sustainable configurations that build on decentralized, localized, or nature-based solutions, producing hybrid infrastructure landscapes. However, many cities find it challenging to break away from centralized infrastructure systems. Hybrid decentralized infrastructures remain in city visions and policies while implementation is mostly characterized by ad-hoc pilots. Their governance is ambiguous and continues to be a challenge for cities in the Global North and South.

Cities in the North currently are currently seeking pathways to resilience through hybrid infrastructure configurations at scale. Meanwhile, infrastructures in the urban Global South are already heterogeneous due to continuing deficits resulting in islands of conventional piped/grid services surrounded by legally ambiguous, user-driven decentralized infrastructure arrangements. In both contexts, knowledge from hybrid decentralized projects remains scattered, tacit, and lacking systematic approaches.

This Research Topic aims to enhance our understanding of the governance of urban infrastructures hybridized with decentralized, nature-based, and off-grid solutions. While much work focuses on the technical feasibility of decentralized water and energy infrastructures, few studies engage with the lived realities of implementing and governing sustainability agendas such as the hybridization of urban infrastructures in various contexts. One approach proposes a top-down and centralized management of hybrid decentralized solutions, and their integration into centralized water, waste or energy systems. Other approaches propose a bottom-up view wherein the involvement of multiple stakeholders is key to the extension of access to urban services in equitable ways.

In many cities, urban infrastructure provision is viewed as the domain of the State, i.e., the city government. However, it is often highly compartmentalized with limited resources for understanding, experimenting, and supporting hybrid infrastructures. Furthermore, where hybrid decentralized infrastructures do exist e.g., in the Global South, formal planning and management systems struggle to engage and support user-driven hybrid infrastructure solutions. As such, explorations of innovative governance solutions are needed to enable collaboration between urban practitioners and other stakeholders to optimize the use of resources, but to also enhance multifunctionality and adaptation to local contexts.

We welcome contributions from cities in various geographic and developmental contexts that focus on the following:

• The governance of decentralized solutions and hybrid infrastructure landscapes, e.g. Nature-based Solutions for urban water; energy; waste; etc.
• Empirical work on the realities, roles, and agendas of different institutions and actors such as public service providers, civil society and end-users in policy planning, design, operation, and management processes of hybrid decentralized systems.
• Exploring the role and potential of smart technologies in the governance of hybrid infrastructure systems.
• Exploring the conditions for and opportunities of enabling successful hybrid infrastructure configurations as well as constraints thereof.
• Exploring the social and environmental justice as well as political implications of the hybridization of urban infrastructures in different contexts.
• The interface between centralized infrastructure, formal public management, decentralized solutions, and other stakeholders by examining the extent to which decentralized solutions are integrated with the existing urban governance system, and what factors are important for various governance set-ups (co-production, centralized management, and autonomous).
• How cities and/ or other stakeholders govern or co-manage varying mosaics of local solutions, and what challenges and possibilities emerge.
• Conceptual and methodological contributions unpacking the phenomenon of hybrid decentralized infrastructures and their governance e.g. critical geographies, capabilities approach, sustainability transitions, gender studies, historical approaches, social practices.

Keywords: Urban Governance, Hybrid and Decentralized Urban Infrastructures, Water Infrastructure Systems, Energy Infrastructure Systems, Off-Grid Solutions, Nature-Based Solutions, Sustainability Transitions, Resilience, Co-Production

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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