This article studies local enactments of “smart” in and through visions of six smart district development projects. We show that smart cities’ framings of the future are inevitably diverse, emerging from local assemblages consisting of a wide array of heterogeneous elements that translate global imaginaries of the smart city to meet local specificities, needs and agendas. We demonstrate that visions may describe the process of district planning and design, the materiality of the envisioned district and the governance of the district; and that smart visions may play three distinct roles–they may act as mobilizers, instrumentally (i.e. as tools to achieve specific sociotechnical goals) and to exclude alternatives. Knowledge forms a key constituent of smart visions, and acts to include some while excluding others. We therefore suggest that further research should focus on the political and controversial construction and use of knowledge in visioning processes.

Platform innovations like Uber and Airbnb allow peers to transact outside established market institutions. From an institutional perspective, platform companies follow a reverse innovation process compared to innovation within traditional regulatory systems: they first launch their online platform and ask for government permission only later. We analyze the emergence of Uber as an institutional entrepreneur in The Netherlands and the strategies it employed in a failed attempt to get its UberPop service legalized through changes in Dutch taxi law. We conclude that Uber's failure to change the Dutch taxi law stemmed from the difficulty to leverage pragmatic legitimacy among users into favorable regulatory changes in a highly institutionalized regime, because Uber's institutional work strategies were not aligned.