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To achieve the “well below 2 degrees” targets, a new ecosystem needs to be defined where citizens become more active, co-managing with relevant stakeholders, the government, and third parties. This means moving from the traditional concept of citizens-as-consumers towards energy citizenship. Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) will be the test-bed area where this transformation will take place through social, technological, and governance innovation. This paper focuses on benefits and barriers towards energy citizenships and gathers a diverse set of experiences for the definition of PEDs and Local Energy Markets from the Horizon2020 Smart Cities and Communities projects: Making City, Pocityf, and Atelier.

Technology-drivenexperiments-techno-experiments-havebecome a central mode of spatial intervention in a paradigm of smart growth. They are often considered a manifestation of a techno-managerial approach to governance, built upon the increasing influence of IT corporations on urban politics. Yet, there is little evidence indicating how these interests articulate techno-experiments and shape their legacies over the long run. This paper questions the varied politics of techno-experiments by comparing four projects in Stockholm and Amsterdam: two smart energy grid pilots and two online community-based platforms. Mobilizing the notion of the "social appraisal of technology," it argues that techno-experiments can take different forms depending on how the role of digital technology is defined and negotiated by actors throughout the process of experimentation. The paper empirically shows that experiments can evolve in two main ways, defined as "whirlpools" and "mosaics." As whirlpools, they upscale self-referentially; as mosaics, they instead extend into a set of scattered spin-offs. The key factors producing such outcomes, these cases show, are the form of partnership established at the outset of techno-experiments, and the ability of research funding and governmental agencies to steer projects as they develop.

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It is commonly assumed by the projects demonstrating concepts for positive energy districts in cities across Europe that citizens want and need to be involved in the development of these concepts as an essential condition for positive energy districts to be deployed successfully and to achieve the expected societal goals. Six different research and innovation projects are investigating the different forms of energy citizenship in positive energy districts and their impacts. They aim to apply a transdisciplinary approach to collaborative research and to impact assessment. The interim results are described, and preliminary conclusions on impact are drawn. The projects each used different approaches to engaging citizens, while differentiating between different groups. Progress is monitored but only fragmentary evidence on the impact has been gathered. Transdisciplinary approaches are being developed but are still immature.