Placebo urban interventions: Observing Smart City narratives in Santiago de Chile

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 004209802094342
Author(s):  
Paola Jirón ◽  
Walter A Imilán ◽  
Carlos Lange ◽  
Pablo Mansilla

The implementation of the Smart City (SC) model in Santiago, Chile has not heralded any significant interventions in terms of scale, urban impact, amount invested, technological innovation or architectural design. Instead, material interventions have been small and have had little more than a superficial impact upon the perceptions of citizens. The significance of observing ‘Smart’ interventions in Santiago involves analysing their implementation under a provincialising lens in order to observe the way local experience transforms monist ways of thinking about SCs. Based on ethnographic observation of an SC intervention (in Paseo Bandera, Santiago de Chile), four principles of intervention were identified: democratisation of the city, spatial appropriation by citizens, social and technological innovation and local and territorialised interventions. These principles help to identify the intervention as an urban placebo, which the article argues works through the fictions of effective interventions and urban image improvement that seek to participate in worlding practices whilst, in reality, very little is being improved or effectively addressed in the city. Paseo Bandera SC intervention presents a narrative of modern, sustainable and technologically advanced urban planning in the form of specific material interventions, when in fact it involves very little modernity, sustainability or technology, and is little more than a continuation and evolution of the neoliberal urban model that exists in Chile.

Author(s):  
Татьяна Анатольевна Балина ◽  
Кристина Эдуардовна Опутина ◽  
Лариса Юрьевна Чекменева

В статье рассматриваются качественные аспекты современных урбанизационных процессов в России. Подчеркивается необходимость формирования качественной городской среды как важного аспекта урбанизации. Отмечается, что создание современной городской среды подразумевает не только совершенствование управления, формирование имиджа, благоустройство и развитие инфраструктуры, но и внедрение новых технологий и различных элементов «умного города». На примере города Перми рассмотрены проблемы формирования качественной городской среды. Приведены результаты социологических исследований по вопросам оценки качества городской среды жителями Перми, который в преддверии празднования 300-летия стремится обновить свой облик. The article examines the qualitative aspects of modern urbanization processes in Russia. The need for the formation of a high-quality urban environment as an important aspect of urbanization is emphasized. It is noted that the creation of a modern urban environment implies not only the improvement of management, the formation of the image, improvement and development of infrastructure, but also the introduction of new technologies and various elements of the «smart city». The problems of forming a high-quality urban environment are considered on the example of the city of Perm. The results of sociological research on the assessment of the quality of the urban environment by residents of Perm, which, on the eve of the 300th anniversary, seeks to renew its appearance.


2022 ◽  
Vol 2022 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Dan Shi ◽  
Lixin Song

City image is the observer’s subjective impression of the city image. It is an important content of urban geography and planning research and has important guiding significance for shaping a unique urban space. Cognitive research on traditional urban imagery is mainly by means of questionnaires and image sketches. It has problems such as high cost, low update frequency, and limited data coverage, which cannot meet the needs of quantitative research on smart cities and urban economic development in the information age. With the advent of the era of big data and the development of Internet technology, there are more and more quantitative research results on smart city image cognition with the help of big data and deep learning technology. It will be a feasible way to apply it to urban image research. This article combines the development and transformation of smart cities with the transformation of urban planning and leads to an innovation in the construction of urban image cognition based on urban image, active representation data as the data source, and deep learning as the core technology. The theoretical connotation and cognitive dimension of urban imagery are expanded to establish a cognitive model of urban imagery. The city image is cognitively analyzed from three dimensions: image structure, image type, and image evaluation. Specific cities are taken as examples to verify the applicability and scientificity of the cognitive methods and models, so as to enhance the practicality and applicability of urban imagery in urban planning. At the same time, this research is used to answer the development dilemma of big data, summarize the development trend of big data, and explore the new changes that artificial intelligence brings to urban planning. The experimental results show that the model we designed efficiently evaluates the image of the city and can also effectively recognize the image of the city in the main urban area of Chongqing.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-128
Author(s):  
Jason Cohen ◽  
Judy Backhouse ◽  
Omar Ally

Young people are important to cities, bringing skills and energy and contributing to economic activity. New technologies have led to the idea of a smart city as a framework for city management. Smart cities are developed from the top-down through government programmes, but also from the bottom-up by residents as technologies facilitate participation in developing new forms of city services. Young people are uniquely positioned to contribute to bottom-up smart city projects. Few diagnostic tools exist to guide city authorities on how to prioritise city service provision. A starting point is to understand how the youth value city services. This study surveys young people in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, and conducts an importance-performance analysis to identify which city services are well regarded and where the city should focus efforts and resources. The results show that Smart city initiatives that would most increase the satisfaction of youths in Braamfontein  include wireless connectivity, tools to track public transport  and  information  on city events. These  results  identify  city services that are valued by young people, highlighting services that young people could participate in providing. The importance-performance analysis can assist the city to direct effort and scarce resources effectively.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elvira Tarsitano ◽  
Alba Giannoccaro Rosa ◽  
Cecilia Posca ◽  
Giovanni Petruzzi ◽  
Michele Mundo ◽  
...  

AbstractThe sustainable urban redevelopment project to protect biodiversity was developed to regenerate the external spaces of an ancient rural farmhouse, Villa Framarino, in the regional Natural Park of Lama Balice, a shallow erosive furrow (lama) rich in biodiversity, between two suburbs of the city of Bari (Apulia, Italy) and close to the city airport. This work includes a complex system of activities aimed not only at a spatial revaluation, necessary to relaunch the urban image, but it is accompanied by interventions of a cultural, social, economic, environmental and landscape nature, aimed at increasing the quality of life, in compliance with the principles of sustainability and social participation. One of the means to revitalize a territory subject to redevelopment is the planning of events and activities of socio-cultural value that involve the population to revive the sense of belonging to the territory and the community and at the same time to protect the biodiversity of the urban park of the protected natural area.


Smart Cities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 819-839
Author(s):  
Luís B. Elvas ◽  
Bruno Miguel Mataloto ◽  
Ana Lúcia Martins ◽  
João C. Ferreira

The smart city concept, in which data from different systems are available, contains a multitude of critical infrastructures. This data availability opens new research opportunities in the study of the interdependency between those critical infrastructures and cascading effects solutions and focuses on the smart city as a network of critical infrastructures. This paper proposes an integrated resilience system linking interconnected critical infrastructures in a smart city to improve disaster resilience. A data-driven approach is considered, using artificial intelligence and methods to minimize cascading effects and the destruction of failing critical infrastructures and their components (at a city level). The proposed approach allows rapid recovery of infrastructures’ service performance levels after disasters while keeping the coverage of the assessment of risks, prevention, detection, response, and mitigation of consequences. The proposed approach has the originality and the practical implication of providing a decision support system that handles the infrastructures that will support the city disaster management system—make the city prepare, adapt, absorb, respond, and recover from disasters by taking advantage of the interconnections between its various critical infrastructures to increase the overall resilience capacity. The city of Lisbon (Portugal) is used as a case to show the practical application of the approach.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Francesco Piccialli ◽  
Fabio Giampaolo ◽  
Edoardo Prezioso ◽  
Danilo Crisci ◽  
Salvatore Cuomo

Nowadays, a sustainable and smart city focuses on energy efficiency and the reduction of polluting emissions through smart mobility projects and initiatives to “sensitize” infrastructure. Smart parking is one of the building blocks of intelligent mobility, innovative mobility that aims to be flexible, integrated, and sustainable and consequently integrated into a Smart City. By using the Internet of Things (IoT) sensors located in the parking areas or the underground car parks in combination with a mobile application, which indicates to citizens the free places in the different areas of the city and guides them toward the chosen parking, it is possible to reduce air pollution and fluidifying noise traffic. In this article, we present and discuss an innovative Deep Learning-based ensemble technique in forecasting the parking space occupancy to reduce the search time for parking and to optimize the flow of cars in particularly congested areas, with an overall positive impact on traffic in urban centres. A genetic algorithm has also been used to optimize predictors parameters. The main goal is to design an intelligent IoT-based service that can predict, in the next few hours, the parking spaces occupancy of a street. The proposed approach has been assessed on a real IoT dataset composed by over than 15M of collected sensor records. Obtained results demonstrate that our method outperforms both single predictors and the widely used strategy of the mean providing inherently robust predictions.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110059
Author(s):  
Leslie Quitzow ◽  
Friederike Rohde

Current imaginaries of urban smart grid technologies are painting attractive pictures of the kinds of energy futures that are desirable and attainable in cities. Making claims about the future city, the socio-technical imaginaries related to smart grid developments unfold the power to guide urban energy policymaking and implementation practices. This paper analyses how urban smart grid futures are being imagined and co-produced in the city of Berlin, Germany. It explores these imaginaries to show how the politics of Berlin’s urban energy transition are being driven by techno-optimistic visions of the city’s digital modernisation and its ambitions to become a ‘smart city’. The analysis is based on a discourse analysis of relevant urban policy and other documents, as well as interviews with key stakeholders from Berlin’s energy, ICT and urban development sectors, including key experts from three urban laboratories for smart grid development and implementation in the city. It identifies three dominant imaginaries that depict urban smart grid technologies as (a) environmental solution, (b) economic imperative and (c) exciting experimental challenge. The paper concludes that dominant imaginaries of smart grid technologies in the city are grounded in a techno-optimistic approach to urban development that are foreclosing more subtle alternatives or perhaps more radical change towards low-carbon energy systems.


2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey L. Kidder

Parkour is a new, and increasingly popular, sport in which individuals athletically and artistically negotiate obstacles found in the urban environment. In this article, I position parkour as a performance of masculinity involving spatial appropriation. Through ethnographic data I show how young men involved in the sport use the city (both the built environment and the people within it) as a structural resource for the construction and maintenance of gender identities. The focus of my research highlights the performance of gender as a spatialized process.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 295-311
Author(s):  
AbuRawi Mustafa ALMARKIYAH ◽  
Fouziya Alzarqani Ipraheem FADHLULLAH

Tripoli is a city of a Mediterranean Sea climate; this has contributed with some social and religious factors to affect the architectural and urban design, which all originally has come from the Islamic content. This study argues the climatic features of Tripoli in order to show the ways followed by the Libyan Muslim architect. In other words, these ways were used to adapt with the climate and create the demanding architectural treatments, which have served the building units. This is considered as a study case that can discuss the possibility of the climatic reflection on the walls. That is to say, the walls’ thickness, the type of the used substance in building, the substance’s properties, the type of roof used in covering the building units and the architectural design of the building as treatments achieved professionally by the architect in decreasing the heat in summer and increasing the heat in winter through the mass block. Additionally, the researchers have stated that Tripoli’s building design respected the privacy of the inhabitants and their isolation from the world outside their buildings. That is because they wanted to have their own cold spaces inside which were rich of light, air and shadow. As a result of the aforementioned considerations, the architectural buildings contained the uncovered space and the broken entrance to keep the privacy from the passengers and to protect the inhabitants from wind and sand. These were regarded as final solutions for the architectural and climatic problem. Further, this study illustrates the active role of using the planning including the architectural formations and the treatments of motion path. That is according to their width, their length, their form, their guidance and their direction change in order to make shadow and isolate the front of buildings. This also contributed to give the streets the northern wind which in turn helped to keep the air moving as long as possible to tone down the climatic influences. Moreover, the planning aimed to show its turn through analytical, architectural and documentary survey for realistic examples in the archeological registrar of the potential city treatments. These architectural elements were important in making the sustainable architecture in respect to the environment and human relaxation requirements. Finally, the researchers measured the following factors temperatures, wind, rain, and ratio humidity for variety of spaces in the city. That was followed by qualitative and quantitative statistical analysis supported by graphs


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