In recent years, the Smart City has become a very popular concept amongst policy makers and urban planners. In a nutshell, the Smart City refers to projects and planning strategies that aim to join up new forms of inclusive and lowcarbon economic growth based on the knowledge economy through the deployment of information and communication technologies. However, at the same time as new urban Smart interventions are being designed and applied, insufficient attention has been paid to how these strategies are inserted into the wider political economy and, in particular, the political ecology of urban transformation. Therefore, in this paper we critically explore the implementation of the Smart City, tracing how the 'environment' and environmental concerns have become an organising principle in Barcelona's Smart City strategy. Through an urban political ecology prism we aim to critically reflect upon the contradictions of the actually existing Smart City in Barcelona and how Smart discourses and practices might be intentionally or unintentionally mobilised in ways that serve to depoliticise urban redevelopment and environmental management. The paper stresses the need to repoliticise the debates on the Smart City and put citizens back at the centre of the urban debate.

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The turn towards the knowledge-based economy and creative strategies to enhance urban competitiveness within it has been well documented. Yet too little has been said to date about the transformation of land use for new productive activities, and the contradictions inherent to this process. Our case study is Barcelona, an erstwhile 'model' for urban regeneration which has sought to transform itself into a global knowledge city since 2000. Through the lens of Marxian value theory, and Harvey's writing on urban monopoly rents especially, we show how the 22@Barcelona projectconceived with received wisdom about the determinants of urban knowledge-based competitiveness in mind -amounted to an exercise in the capture of monopoly rents, driven by the compulsion of public sector institutions, financiers and developers to pursue rental profit-maximizing opportunities through the mobilization of land as a financial asset.

This article examines the evolution of the ‘Barcelona Model’ of urban transformation through the lenses of worlding and provincialising urbanism. We trace this evolution from an especially dogmatic worlding vision of the smart city, under a centre-right city council, to its radical repurposing under the auspices of a municipal government led, after May 2015, by the citizens’ platform Barcelona en Comú. We pay particular attention to the new council’s objectives to harness digital platform technologies to enhance participative democracy, and its agenda to secure technological sovereignty and digital rights for its citizens. While stressing the progressive intent of these aims, we also acknowledge the challenge of going beyond the repurposing of smart technologies so as to engender new and radical forms of subjectivity among citizens themselves; a necessary basis for any urban revolution.

This paper looks at the variegated impact of the 2008 global financial crisis and the different ways in which local strategic actors imagined and responded to it through a comparative study of Barcelona, Brussels, Leeds and Turin. Drawing on Cultural Political Economy, we see crisis moments as fertile territory for the analysis of variegation in urban neoliberalisation processes as they can break path-dependencies and open up alternatives. Inspired by the comparative turn in critical urban studies, our case studies are not offered as representative samples but as dense sites to explore the various interpretations and uses of the crisis, particularly at the elite level. This analysis suggests considerable variegation in how the crisis was both felt and interpreted locally across the four cities. The local elites did not regard this as a crisis of or in their own urban growth models but as something external. However, as the global financial crisis morphed into national sovereign debt crises and austerity programmes, the experience in each city has been relatively similar. The paper concludes by emphasising the continuity function of specific local actors through the processes of meaning-making they engage in, something that existing work on variegated neoliberalisation has so far overlooked.