Emilia Smeds

Postdoctoral Researcher, Division for Urban and Regional Studies, Department of Urban Planning and Environment

BSc Environmental Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science (2013). MSc Transport and City Planning, Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (2014). PhD Geography, Department of Science, Technology, Engineering & Public Policy, University College London (2021).

I joined KTH in August 2023 after spending more than a decade in the UK. Since 2016, alongside my doctoral studies, I worked as a researcher within four different EU-funded projects. Most recently, I was Research Fellow at the University of Westminster in London.

My research expertise centres on governing transitions towards sustainable and socially just cities, specifically with respect to land use and infrastructure systems. Empirically, my work to date has focused on transport/mobility and climate change governance. My approach is interdisciplinary and grounded in urban studies, transport geography, and sustainability transitions research. More often than not, my work relates to planning practice: I have worked briefly as a municipal transport planner in Helsinki and London, and in research collaboration with local government and civil society organisations acoss many UK and European cities. I also have a long-standing interest in Global East and South contexts, as I have worked on food security and off-grid solar energy in India and cycling cultures in China.

Research interests

My research can be grouped under three themes:

Governing urban sustainability transitions, particularly through experimentation

My research agenda centres on how transitions towards more sustainable urban systems can be governed, including dimensions of state capacity (government), state-civil society relations (governance), and policy approaches (practical tools). My PhD thesis examined "urban experimentation" in the context of transitions towards post-car cities, i.e. the use short-term pilot projects as a governance mechanism and whether they are "upscaled" to generate longer-term transformative change. This included understanding transformative experimentation in the context of austerity and projectification, as two dimensions of urban governance that I am particularly interested in. Current work is exploring the role of strategic spatial planning for city-regional transitions, as a counterweight to project-based planning.

From 2018-2023, I was the co-coordinator of the Urban Transitions and Transformations thematic group under the international Sustainability Transitions Research Network. I teach multiple transition theories at Master's level; for example, see a discussion of urban mobility transitions in my recent piece in the AAG Review of Books. I regularly peer review for the journals Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions and Urban Transformations.

Socially just mobilities and and public space

A second focus of my research is social justice and everyday practices in relation to urban mobilities and public spaces. I have explored this topic in relation to transport provision for low-income night-time workers, transformations of streets and public spaces through tactical urbanism, and travel to school in the context of suburban family mobilites. This strand of work has drawn on the new mobilities paradigm and social practice theory. I have acted as reviewer for The Journal of Transport Geography, The Journal of Urban Mobility and Mobilities.

Multi-scalar governance of urban innovation

I am also interested in how the institutions and politics anchored to the idea of "urban innovation" play out across and between multiple scales of governance, from the local to the national, supranational and global. I am particularly interested in "following the money" i.e. empirically examining the role of funding and financing flows in shaping urban innovation. In my PhD research, I examined the politics of transport innovation in UK and US contexts. I have written about the role of urban innovation facilitated by city networks as a mechanism of global climate change governance, and have a long-standing interest in how EU research & innovation policy and funding programmes shape urban initiatives.

Research projects – ongoing

The performance of strategic spatial plans at the intersection of "hard" and "soft" planning

Postdoctoral researcher. Funded by Region Stockholm, 2023-2025.

Long-term planning at a city-regional scale is crucial, as a complement to municipal planning, to ensure that the  polycentric spatial structure of metropolitan areas develop along a socially and environmentally sustainable pathway. In Sweden, like in many other European countries, regional development plans are however only advisory guidance with respect to what is built within municipal boundaries, rather than legally binding. Thus the implementation of regional plans is dependent on so-called 'soft planning' processes, where municipalities, business and other regional actors must be motivated to cooperate through continuous dialogue regarding responsibility-sharing. In this project, KTH has been commissioned by Stockholm's regional authority to investigate what kind of governance tools could be effective in supporting such cooperation, in order to realise the prioritized policy actions described in RUFS 2060 – the new regional development plan that is being developed for the Stockholm county area spanning 26 municipalities.

Experimentation and Learning about Street Space for Just Transitions to Post-Car Nordic Cities (NORD-URB-EXP)

Principal Investigator. Funded by Formas (Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development), 2025-2028.

The NORD-URB-EXP project will develop cutting-edge research on experimentation as an urban planning paradigm, with emphasis on streets and public spaces. A key challenge under UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 is reducing the social injustice and environmental externalities caused by the dominance of private car use, which from a utopian perspective includes possible transitions towards 'post-car' cities.

The project will advance debate on temporary interventions to transform public spaces that seek to provide more space for people and public life, rather than cars and traffic. The conditions under which small-scale, time-limited experiments may contribute to longer-term transformative change remains a research gap. The COVID-19 pandemic saw street space experimentation emerge as a prominent policy response, yet there is a need to unpack narratives regarding the promise of 'tactical urbanism' from the perspectives of decision-making processes, power asymmetries, and citizen participation. Interrogating these questions will be especially productive through cross-regional comparison of infrastructural experimentation in different Nordic cities, which is still limited in the literature. The aim of NORD-URB-EXP is to understand how multi-actor learning processes shape the long-term impacts of experiments and their contribution to socially just transitions towards post-car cities, using Nordic cities as reference cases.

Research projects – completed

What is the street for? Interrogating ways of seeing and the epistemic justice of reconfiguring public space

Principal Investigator. Funded by British Academy, 2022-2023.

Streets are the backbone of urbanism. The COVID-19 pandemic multiplied calls to rethink what city streets are for, beyond their current dominance by private cars, with a boom in "tactical urbanism" initiatives seeking to experimentally reallocate street space from traffic to public space. It is often taken for granted that such street transformations are politically progressive, yet behind the popular narrative of the street being ‘for people rather than cars,’ the question of ‘for what people?’ looms large. There is growing debate about the implications of tactical street transformations for social justice, including questions of social diversity with respect to participating publics, and how radical or emancipatory the politics at play really are. This project brought together scholars of spatial and transport planning to critically reflect on ongoing street transformations from the perspective of 'epistemic justice' or ‘whose knowledge counts’ in interactions between citizens and planners. You can read the resulting collection of essays Seeing Like a Citizen’: Rethinking City Street Transformations through the Lens of Epistemic Justice in Planning Theory and Practice, including my individual piece Citizen Epistemologies as the Driver of Public Plaza Equity in New York City [email me for an open-access link].

Experimenting with City Streets to Transform Urban Mobility

Postdoctoral researcher. Funded by JPI Urban Europe, 2021-2023.

Urban Mobility Transitions: Governing through Experimentation

PhD project. Funded by UK Engineeering and Physical Sciences Research Council, 2016-2021.

Transitions away from car-dominance is one of the key debates in urban research, policy and practice today. My PhD research examined how mobility in cities is governed through experiments, commonly understood as pilot projects, and whether experiments hold potential for  transitions away from automobility dominance. The research drew on a synthesis of sustainability transitions, transport studies and urban studies literature, and traced the outcomes of 108 experiments undertaken over two decades in Bristol (UK) and New York City (USA) between 1996/7 and 2016. It compared the capacity of municipal governments to use experimentation as a governance mechanism, in ways that had transformative impacts on urban mobility systems. By studying the long-term impacts of 'pilot projects' in both cities between 1996-2016, it revealed contextual governance factors that enabled upscaling of sustainable mobility innovations. The findings demonstrated that experiments can contribute to transforming the physical shape of urban mobility systems and the institutions governing them, and can even contribute to transitions, if assessed as change in commuting patterns away from car use.

The PhD thesis is free for anyone to download and so is a pre-print of the first publication Urban transport experimentation: a network or hybrid governance process?. In an early paper during my PhD journey, Networking Cities, I discussed how much of urban experimentation with low-carbon infrastructure is mediated by global city networks such as C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.