scholarly journals Smart cities: Between worlding and provincialising

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-470
Author(s):  
Ryan Burns ◽  
Victoria Fast ◽  
Anthony Levenda ◽  
Byron Miller

We introduce key concepts that have guided the diverse case studies of this special issue on smart cities. Calling into question Global North conceptions of the smart city, nine different articles analyse smart city projects around the world, with particular attention paid to the need to provincialise our understanding of these projects as well as to consider their relationship to worlding strategies. These case studies demonstrate the diversity of what smart cities can be and the need to consider, through comparative analysis, the broader power geometries in which they are imbedded.

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 655-673
Author(s):  
Byron Miller ◽  
Kevin Ward ◽  
Ryan Burns ◽  
Victoria Fast ◽  
Anthony Levenda

The diversity of smart city case studies presented in this special issue demonstrates the need for provincialised understandings of smart cities that account for cities’ worlding strategies. Case studies drawn from North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia show that ‘the smart city’ takes very diverse forms, serves very diverse objectives, and is embedded in complex power geometries that vary from city to city. Case studies are a critical strategy for understanding phenomena in context, yet they present their own epistemological and ontological limitations. We argue for a more-than-Global-North smart city research agenda focused on the comparative analysis of smart cities, an agenda that foregrounds the conjunctural geographies of relationships and processes shaping these cities.


2021 ◽  
pp. 28-36
Author(s):  
E. A. Smirnov ◽  
V. G. Kashtanov ◽  
V. V. Denk ◽  
E. A. Khalimon

The article studies examples of the use of innovative technologies in the field of “Smart City”, which is a key factor contributing to the implementation of the concept of “Smart City”. The paper presents various approaches to the implementation of information technologies, analyses case studies on the management of smart cities of the world, which justify the change in the approach from isolated vertical management to integrated holistic management. The study also analyses various examples of the use of innovative technologies and approaches in the context of “Smart City”, identifies the trends in their development. At the end, the authors carried out the analysis of the domestic experience of applying the concept of “Smart City” and the results achieved.


2018 ◽  
pp. 60-67
Author(s):  
Henrika Pihlajaniemi ◽  
Anna Luusua ◽  
Eveliina Juntunen

This paper presents the evaluation of usersХ experiences in three intelligent lighting pilots in Finland. Two of the case studies are related to the use of intelligent lighting in different kinds of traffic areas, having emphasis on aspects of visibility, traffic and movement safety, and sense of security. The last case study presents a more complex view to the experience of intelligent lighting in smart city contexts. The evaluation methods, tailored to each pilot context, include questionnaires, an urban dashboard, in-situ interviews and observations, evaluation probes, and system data analyses. The applicability of the selected and tested methods is discussed reflecting the process and achieved results.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonidas Anthopoulos ◽  
Marijn Janssen ◽  
Vishanth Weerakkody

Smart cities have attracted an extensive and emerging interest from both science and industry with an increasing number of international examples emerging from all over the world. However, despite the significant role that smart cities can play to deal with recent urban challenges, the concept has been being criticized for not being able to realize its potential and for being a vendor hype. This paper reviews different conceptualization, benchmarks and evaluations of the smart city concept. Eight different classes of smart city conceptualization models have been discovered, which structure the unified conceptualization model and concern smart city facilities (i.e., energy, water, IoT etc.), services (i.e., health, education etc.), governance, planning and management, architecture, data and people. Benchmarking though is still ambiguous and different perspectives are followed by the researchers that measure -and recently monitor- various factors, which somehow exceed typical technological or urban characteristics. This can be attributed to the broadness of the smart city concept. This paper sheds light to parameters that can be measured and controlled in an attempt to improve smart city potential and leaves space for corresponding future research. More specifically, smart city progress, local capacity, vulnerabilities for resilience and policy impact are only some of the variants that scholars pay attention to measure and control.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Shelton ◽  
Thomas Lodato

In response to the mounting criticism of emerging ‘smart cities’ strategies around the world, a number of individuals and institutions have attempted to pivot from discussions of smart cities towards a focus on ‘smart citizens’. While the smart citizen is most often seen as a kind of foil for those more stereotypically top-down, neoliberal, and repressive visions of the smart city that have been widely critiqued within the literature, this paper argues for an attention to the ‘actually existing smart citizen’, which plays a much messier and more ambivalent role in practice. This paper proposes the dual figures of ‘the general citizen’ and ‘the absent citizen’ as a heuristic for thinking about how the lines of inclusion and exclusion are drawn for citizens, both discursively and materially, in the actual making of the smart city. These figures are meant to highlight how the universal and unspecified figure of ‘the citizen’ is discursively deployed to justify smart city policies, while at the same time, actual citizens remain largely excluded from such decision and policy-making processes. Using a case study of Atlanta, Georgia and its ongoing smart cities initiatives, we argue that while the participation of citizens is crucial to any truly democratic mode of urban governance, the emerging discourse around the promise of smart citizenship fails to capture the realities of how citizens are actually discussed and enrolled in the making of these policies.


Author(s):  
MAKSIM D. PUSHKAREV ◽  
◽  
DMITRY A. PROKOFIEV ◽  

Smart city technologies make the functioning of urban infrastructure more efficient, and the lives of citizens more comfortable and safe. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they were very popular, and this could not but affect the energy efficiency of high-tech megacities around the world. This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on smart cities, and also offers a solution to the problem of energy efficiency of smart cities.


2020 ◽  
pp. 13-24
Author(s):  
Anna Pozdniakova ◽  
Iryna Velska

The paper analyzes the key steps taken by different cities worldwide and gathered into a clear step-by-step roadmap that can be useful for emerging smart cities. The Roadmap covers three main stages as we see them during the process of development: preparation, formation and spreading stages. We reveal how this is incorporated in the Ukrainian context. Our analysis of smart city solutions from all over the world (based on the BeeSmartCity database) showed that the tech component on its own is not enough to overcome urban challenges within different domains (environment, economy, government etc.), as we see each of the solutions has a human component involved in a form of knowledge generation and sharing, different forms of co-creation and partnership etc. Thus, ICTs are a required but not a sufficient element of building successful citizen-friendly and resilient cities.


Author(s):  
Innocent Chirisa ◽  
Abraham Rajab Matamanda

The aim of this chapter is to interrogate and diagnose the concept of smart cities as it has been applied to Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in a bid to decrypt the opportunities and challenges characterizing its manifestation in space and actuality. The chapter is a product of the critical engagement of scholarly work that compares the best practices in the development and promotion of the smart city concept against those practices that are antithetical and retrogressive in light of this good cause. To crystallize the realities, the chapter makes use of case studies that speak to these contrasting experiences. Case studies in SSA reveal differential practices with South Africa emerging as a country doing very well relative to others in the region. Some cities, especially the small and intermediate ones, fail to break even in terms of the revenue collections. This is partly because they have failed to attract investment in the form of industries or retain them because of politically induced instabilities.


Author(s):  
Vrushali Gajanan Kadam ◽  
Sharvari Chandrashekhar Tamane ◽  
Vijender Kumar Solanki

The world is growing and energy conservation is a very important challenge for the engineering domain. The emergence of smart cities is one possible solution for the same, as it claims that energy and resources are saved in the smart city infrastructure. This chapter is divided into five sections. Section 1 gives the past, present, and future of the living style. It gives the representation from rural, urban, to smart city. Section 2 gives the explanations of four pillars of big data, and through grid, a big data analysis is presented in the chapter. Section 3 started with the case study on smart grid. It comprises traffic congestion and their prospective solution through big data analytics. Section 4 starts from the mobile crowd sensing. It discusses a good elaboration on crowd sensing whereas Section 5 discusses the smart city approach. Important issues like lighting, parking, and traffic were taken into consideration.


Author(s):  
Peter J. Gray

With Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate (CDIO) approach collaborating institutions and programs in many countries and regions of the world, it is essential that the International CDIO Leadership Council promulgate processes to assure internal and external stakeholders that member institutions and programs are adhering to the 12 CDIO Standards. The Standards are what make CDIO a unique initiative in that they provide a vehicle for realizing the CDIO vision to transform the culture of engineering education. Therefore, the CDIO Council has developed five quality assurance processes that begin with the application to become a CDIO Collaborator and include self-evaluation, certification, and accreditation based on the CDIO Standards. This article discusses the CDIO quality assurance processes and the other articles in this special issue provide case studies and other examples related to the use of the processes by CDIO collaborators.


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