The increasing threat of climate change has created a pressing need for cities to lower their carbon footprints. Urban laboratories are emerging in numerous cities around the world as a strategy for local governments to partner with public and private property owners to reduce carbon emissions, while simultaneously stimulating economic growth. In this article, we use insights from laboratory studies to analyse the notion of urban laboratories as they relate to experimental governance, the carbonization agenda and the transition to low‐carbon economies. We present a case study of the Oxford Road corridor in Manchester in the UK that is emerging as a low‐carbon urban laboratory, with important policy implications for the city's future. The corridor is a bounded space where a public‐private partnership comprised of the City Council, two universities and other large property owners is redeveloping the physical infrastructure and installing monitoring equipment to create a recursive feedback loop intended to facilitate adaptive learning. This low‐carbon urban laboratory represents a classic sustainable development formula for coupling environmental protection with economic growth, using innovation and partnership as principal drivers. However, it also has significant implications in reworking the interplay of knowledge production and local governance, while reinforcing spatial differentiation and uneven participation in urban development.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as an impactful feature of the life, planning and governance of 21st-century cities. Once confined to the realm of science fiction and small-scale technological experiments, AI is now all around us, in the shape of urban artificial intelligences including autonomous cars, robots, city brains and urban software agents. The aim of this article is to critically examine the nature of urbanism in the emergent age of AI. More specifically, we shed light on how urban AI is impacting the development of cities, and argue that an urbanism influenced by AI, which we term AI urbanism, differs in theory and practice from smart urbanism. In the future, the rise of a post-smart urbanism driven by AI has the potential to form autonomous cities that transcend, theoretically and empirically, traditional smart cities. The article compares common practices and understandings of smart urbanism with emerging forms of urban living, urban governance and urban planning influenced by AI. It critically discusses the limitations and potential pitfalls of AI urbanism and offers conceptual tools and a vocabulary to understand the urbanity of AI and its impact on present and future cities.

The UK housing stock will play an important role in achieving the 2050 national carbon reduction targets. Upgrading the energy performance of the existing housing stock is a significant challenge because retrofit activities are shaped by a wide range of fragmented policies, programmes and actors. Existing approaches to housing retrofit focus on regulations, financial incentives and information provision, but it is argued these are insufficient to realize large-scale, deep changes in energy consumption. An agenda is proposed for systemic domestic retrofit to realize radical changes in the housing stock through community-based partnerships. These programmes are based on a social practices approach that promotes social innovation. Wide-ranging energy-efficiency upgrades can be achieved through the development and realization of customized solutions to local groups of houses through facilitated engagement between occupants, housing providers, community groups, local authorities and construction professionals. Community-based domestic retrofit programmes serve to reframe the governance of household energy performance and suggest alternative routes for realizing significant reductions in energy demand through changes in the socio-technical configuration of materials, competences and images of domestic energy practices. Le parc de logements actuel jouera un rôle important dans la réalisation des objectifs nationaux de réduction des émissions de carbone pour 2050. L'amélioration des performances énergétiques du parc de logements existant est un défi important, car les activités de rénovation sont modelées par un large éventail d'acteurs, de politiques et de programmes éclatés. Les approches existantes de la rénovation dans le logement mettent l'accent sur les réglementations, les incitations financières et la fourniture d'informations, mais il est soutenu que celles-ci sont insuffisantes pour réaliser des changements en profondeur et à grande échelle dans la consommation d'énergie. Il est proposé un programme pour la rénovation résidentielle systémique de façon à réaliser des changements radicaux dans le parc de logements grâce à des partenariats communautaires. Ces programmes sont basés sur une approche des pratiques sociales qui promeut l'innovation sociale. Des améliorations de grande envergure visant à augmenter l'efficacité énergétique peuvent être réalisées par l'élaboration et la mise en œuvre de solutions sur mesure destinées à des groupes locaux de maisons grâce à un engagement facilité entre les occupants, les fournisseurs de logements, les groupes communautaires, les autorités locales et les professionnels de la construction. Les programmes communautaires de rénovation résidentielle servent à recadrer la gouvernance des performances énergétiques résidentielles et suggèrent des voies alternatives pour réaliser des réductions significatives de la demande d'énergie par des changements dans la compréhension et les pratiques sociales (habitudes, perceptions et motivations) des parties prenantes lorsque cela s'accompagne d'interventions physiques. Mots clés: efficacité énergétique, logement, rénovation, pratiques sociales, sociotechnique, consommation durable