Making sense of sensing homes: exploring ‘regimes of engagement’ in a smart urban energy context

Abstract

Visionary imaginaries of desirable ‘smart’ urban energy futures entice city governments into innovation and collaboration aimed at large-scale urbanism. As part of attending to actualizations and materializations of ‘smart’ urban imaginaries, this paper contributes to moving beyond idealized framings of smart urban publics, towards more embedded reflexive accounts of how ‘real people’ in urban contexts make sense of and reason about smart urban developments. Through a living lab intervention in Bergen, Norway, we open up a space for critical deliberation, to explore situated imaginations and geographies of smart urban futures. We analyse how people reason about their experiences with smart technological devices, expanding on existing practice-oriented urban studies by applying the pragmatic framework of ‘regimes of engagement’. We analyse shifts people make between different regimes of argumentation and justification, showing how participants pragmatically handle their (simultaneous) status as energy consumers, urban citizens, and responsible users in an urban energy grid.