Modes of making smart cities: Or, practices of variegated smart urbanism

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 101449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jathan Sadowski ◽  
Sophia Maalsen
Keyword(s):  
Smart Cities ◽  
Smart Urbanism

scholarly journals A novel model for data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future: the institutional transformations required for balancing and advancing the three goals of sustainability

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Elias Bibri
Keyword(s):  
Smart Cities ◽  
Case Study Research ◽  
Development Planning ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Sustainable Cities ◽  
Sustainable Urbanism ◽  
The Future ◽  
Novel Model ◽  
Smart Urbanism

AbstractIn recent years, it has become increasingly feasible to achieve important improvements of sustainability by integrating sustainable urbanism with smart urbanism thanks to the proven role and synergic potential of data-driven technologies. Indeed, the processes and practices of both of these approaches to urban planning and development are becoming highly responsive to a form of data-driven urbanism, giving rise to a new phenomenon known as “data-driven smart sustainable urbanism.” Underlying this emerging approach is the idea of combining and integrating the strengths of sustainable cities and smart cities and harnessing the synergies of their strategies and solutions in ways that enable sustainable cities to optimize, enhance, and maintain their performance on the basis of the innovative data-driven technologies offered by smart cities. These strengths and synergies can be clearly demonstrated by combining the advantages of sustainable urbanism and smart urbanism. To enable such combination, major institutional transformations are required in terms of enhanced and new practices and competences. Based on case study research, this paper identifies, distills, and enumerates the key benefits, potentials, and opportunities of sustainable cities and smart cities with respect to the three dimensions of sustainability, as well as the key institutional transformations needed to support the balancing of these dimensions and to enable the introduction of data-driven technology and the adoption of applied data-driven solutions in city operational management and development planning. This paper is an integral part of a futures study that aims to analyze, investigate, and develop a novel model for data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future. I argue that the emerging data-driven technologies for sustainability as innovative niches are reconfiguring the socio-technical landscape of institutions, as well as providing insights to policymakers into pathways for strengthening existing institutionalized practices and competences and developing and establishing new ones. This is necessary for balancing and advancing the goals of sustainability and thus achieving a desirable future.

scholarly journals Towards a genuinely humanizing smart urbanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Kitchin
Keyword(s):  
Smart Cities ◽  
The Other ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
The Public ◽  
Alternative Future ◽  
Prejudice And Discrimination ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City ◽  
Smart Urbanism

This paper considers, following David Harvey (1973), how to produce a genuinely humanizing smart urbanism. It does so through utilising a future-orientated lens to sketch out the kinds of work required to reimagine, reframe and remake smart cities. I argue that, on the one hand, there is a need to produce an alternative ‘future present’ that shifts the anticipatory logics of smart cities to that of addressing persistent inequalities, prejudice, and discrimination, and is rooted in notions of fairness, equity, ethics and democracy. On the other hand, there is a need to disrupt the ‘present future’ of neoliberal smart urbanism, moving beyond minimal politics to enact sustained strategic, public-led interventions designed to create more-inclusive smart city initiatives. Both tactics require producing a deeply normative vision for smart cities that is rooted in ideas of citizenship, social justice, the public good, and the right to the city that needs to be developed in conjunction with citizens.

scholarly journals Bringing back the national to the study of globally circulating policy ideas: ‘Actually existing smart urbanism’ in Hungary and the Netherlands

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krisztina Varró ◽  
Damion J Bunders
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
National Scale ◽  
Policy Ideas ◽  
Policy Mobilities ◽  
Smart Urbanism ◽  
Strategy Making

Recently proliferating ‘smart city’ building efforts have lent themselves well to interpretations through the lens of the policy mobilities literature. Applying this perspective, studies have insightfully shown how policymaking centred around smart cities is at once a messy, networked process stretching across scales, while also manifesting itself in concrete practices shaped by territorial–regulatory contexts. Informed by empirical research on smart city policies in Hungary and the Netherlands, this paper argues that the policy mobilities approach tends to overemphasize the global and the local. Notwithstanding the transnational circulation of smart city ideas, the national scale continues being reproduced by these ideas as a relevant scale of urban regulation, discursive framing and strategy-making under globalization. To acknowledge this, and to move towards a more decidedly multiscalar perspective on actually existing smart urbanisms, it is suggested that we incorporate the national scale, understood as a relational set of practices and discourses, more explicitly into our analysis. Insights from the Hungarian and Dutch case studies are used to illustrate the manifold ways in which the local embedding of the globally mobile smart city concept is shaped by the national scale, as well as how the national itself is being renegotiated in this process.

scholarly journals Hackathons, entrepreneurship and the passionate making of smart cities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sung-Yueh Perng ◽  
Rob Kitchin ◽  
Darach Mac Donncha
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Digital Innovation ◽  
Start Up ◽  
Important Means ◽  
Uncertain Future ◽  
Innovation And Entrepreneurship ◽  
Smart Urbanism

Hackathons – quick prototyping events for commercial purposes – have become an important means to foster innovation, entrepreneurship and the start-up economy in smart cities. Smart and entrepreneurial cities have been critiqued with respect to the neoliberalization of governance and statecraft. We consider the passions, inventions and imitations in the assemblage of practices – alongside neoliberalizing and capitalist operations – that shape the economy and governance of smart cities. The paper examines hackathons as tech events that extend the passions for digital innovation and entrepreneurship and act as sites of social learning for the development of smart urbanism. We argue that passionate and imitative practices energize the desire and belief in entrepreneurial life and technocratic governance, and also engender precarious, ambiguous and uncertain future for participants and prototypes.

scholarly journals Smart urbanism and smart citizenship: The neoliberal logic of ‘citizen-focused’ smart cities in Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Cardullo ◽  
Rob Kitchin
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
European Level ◽  
Neoliberal Urbanism ◽  
Key Stakeholders ◽  
Political Citizenship ◽  
Policy Agendas ◽  
Smart Urbanism

This paper examines the neoliberal ideals that underpin participation and citizenship in the smart city and their replication mechanisms at European level. We examine self-proclaimed ‘citizen-focus’ projects funded by or aligned to the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC) by way of analysing policy documents and interviews with key stakeholders of smart city initiatives at European level and the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona (SCEWC 2017). We suggest that smart cities as currently conceived enact a blueprint of neoliberal urbanism and promote a form of neoliberal citizenship. Supra-national institutions like the EIP-SCC act at a multi-scalar level, connecting diverse forms of neoliberal urbanism while promoting policy agendas and projects that perform neoliberal citizenship in the spaces of the everyday. Despite attempts to recast the smart city as ‘citizen-focused’, smart urbanism remains rooted in pragmatic, instrumental and paternalistic discourses and practices rather than those of social rights, political citizenship, and the common good. In our view, if smart cities are to become truly ‘citizen-focused’ an alternative conception of smart citizenship needs to be deployed, one that enables an effective shift of power and is rooted in rights, entitlements, community, participation, commons, and ideals beyond the market.

scholarly journals Data-driven smart eco-cities and sustainable integrated districts: A best-evidence synthesis approach to an extensive literature review

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Elias Bibri
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Urban Ecology ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Evidence Synthesis ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Best Evidence Synthesis ◽  
Big Data Technologies ◽  
Smart Urbanism

AbstractAs materializations of trends toward developing and implementing urban socio-technical and enviro-economic experiments for transition, eco-cities have recently received strong government and institutional support in many countries around the world due to their ability to function as an innovative strategic niche where to test and introduce various  reforms. There are many models of the eco-city based mainly on either following the principles of urban ecology or combining the strategies of sustainable cities and the solutions of smart cities. The most prominent among these models are sustainable integrated districts and data-driven smart eco-cities. The latter model represents the unprecedented transformative changes the eco-city is currently undergoing in light of the recent paradigm shift in science and technology brought on by big data science and analytics.  This is motivated by the growing need to tackle the problematicity surrounding eco-cities in terms of their planning, development, and governance approaches and practices. Employing a combination of both best-evidence synthesis and narrative approaches, this paper provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art and thematic literature review on sustainable integrated districts and data-driven smart eco-cities. The latter new area is a significant gap in and of itself that this paper seeks to fill together with to what extent the integration of eco-urbanism and smart urbanism is addressed in the era of big data, what driving factors are behind it, and what forms and directions it takes. This study reveals that eco-city district developments are increasingly embracing compact city strategies and becoming a common expansion route for growing cities to achieve urban ecology or urban sustainability. It also shows that the new eco-city projects are increasingly capitalizing on data-driven smart technologies to implement environmental, economic, and social reforms. This is being accomplished by combining the strengths of eco-cities and smart cities and harnessing the synergies of their strategies and solutions in ways that enable eco-cities to improve their performance with respect to sustainability as to its tripartite composition. This in turn means that big data technologies will change eco-urbanism in fundamental and irreversible ways in terms of how eco-cities will be monitored, understood, analyzed, planned, designed, and governed. However, smart urbanism poses significant risks and drawbacks that need to be addressed and overcome in order to achieve the desired outcomes of ecological sustainability in its broader sense. One of the key critical questions raised in this regard pertains to the very potentiality of the technocratic governance of data-driven smart eco-cities and the associated negative implications and hidden pitfalls. In addition, by shedding light on the increasing adoption and uptake of big data technologies in eco-urbanism, this study seeks to assist policymakers and planners in assessing the pros and cons of smart urbanism when effectuating ecologically sustainable urban transformations in the era of big data, as well as to stimulate prospective research and further critical debates on this topic.

scholarly journals Spaces of visibility in the smart city: Flagship urban spaces and the smart urban imaginary

Urban Studies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (12) ◽  
pp. 2465-2479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Caprotti
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Understanding ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Naked Eye ◽  
Urban Imaginary ◽  
The Future ◽  
Smart Urbanism

Smart urbanism is a currently popular and widespread way of conceptualising the future city. At the same time, the smart city is critiqued by several scholars as difficult to define, and as being almost invisible to the naked eye. The article explores two urban spaces through which the smart city is rendered visible, in two UK cities that are prominent sites for smart urban experimentation and development. Bristol’s Data Dome and Glasgow’s Operations Centre are analysed in light of their iconic nature. The article develops a conceptual understanding of these flagship spaces of the actually existing smart cities through three interrelated conceptual lenses. Firstly, they are understood as a videological type of Leibniz’s concept of the windowless monad. Secondly, they are conceptualised as examples of banal and serialised architecture. Thirdly, these spaces and their attendant buildings are understood as totemic assemblages that point to newly emergent forms of elite urban power.

scholarly journals Reframing, reimagining and remaking smart cities

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Kitchin
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Short Paper ◽  
Working Relationships ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Conceptual Thinking ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Smart Urbanism

Over the past decade the concept and development of smart cities has unfolded rapidly, with many city administrations implementing smart city initiatives and strategies and a diverse ecology of companies and researchers producing and deploying smart city technologies. In contrast to those that seek to realise the benefits of a smart city vision, a number of critics have highlighted a number of shortcomings, challenges and risks with such endeavours. This short paper outlines a third path, one that aims to realise the benefits of smart city initiatives while recasting the thinking and ethos underpinning them and addressing their deficiencies and limitations. It argues that smart city thinking and initiatives need to be reframed, reimagined and remade in six ways. Three of these concern normative and conceptual thinking with regards to goals, cities and epistemology, and three concern more practical and political thinking and praxes with regards to management/governance, ethics and security, and stakeholders and working relationships. The paper does not seek to be definitive or comprehensive, but rather to provide conceptual and practical suggestions and stimulate debate about how to productively recast smart urbanism and the creation of smart cities.

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