Breakdown in the Smart City: Exploring Workarounds with Urban-sensing Practices and Technologies

Smart cities are now an established area of technological development and theoretical inquiry. Research on smart cities spans from investigations into its technological infrastructures and design scenarios, to critiques of its proposals for citizenship and sustainability. This article builds on this growing field, while at the same time accounting for expanded urban-sensing practices that take hold through citizen-sensing technologies. Detailing practice-based and participatory research that developed urban-sensing technologies for use in Southeast London, this article considers how the smart city as a large-scale and monolithic version of urban systems breaks down in practice to reveal much different concretizations of sensors, cities, and people. By working through the specific instances where sensor technologies required inventive workarounds to be setup and continue to operate, as well as moments of breakdown and maintenance where sensors required fixes or adjustments, this article argues that urban sensing can produce much different encounters with urban technologies through lived experiences. Rather than propose a “grassroots” approach to the smart city, however, this article instead suggests that the smart city as a figure for urban development be contested and even surpassed by attending to workarounds that account more fully for digital urban practices and technologies as they are formed and situated within urban projects and community initiatives.

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Vehicular Crowdsourcing for Congestion Support in Smart Cities

Smart Cities ◽

10.3390/smartcities4020034 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 4 (2) ◽

pp. 662-685

Author(s):

Stephan Olariu

Keyword(s):

Smart City ◽

Large Scale ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Traffic Signal Control ◽

Signal Timing ◽

Adaptive Traffic Signal Control ◽

Traffic Conditions ◽

Direct Benefits ◽

Traffic Signal Control Systems ◽

Computational Resources

Under present-day practices, the vehicles on our roadways and city streets are mere spectators that witness traffic-related events without being able to participate in the mitigation of their effect. This paper lays the theoretical foundations of a framework for harnessing the on-board computational resources in vehicles stuck in urban congestion in order to assist transportation agencies with preventing or dissipating congestion through large-scale signal re-timing. Our framework is called VACCS: Vehicular Crowdsourcing for Congestion Support in Smart Cities. What makes this framework unique is that we suggest that in such situations the vehicles have the potential to cooperate with various transportation authorities to solve problems that otherwise would either take an inordinate amount of time to solve or cannot be solved for lack for adequate municipal resources. VACCS offers direct benefits to both the driving public and the Smart City. By developing timing plans that respond to current traffic conditions, overall traffic flow will improve, carbon emissions will be reduced, and economic impacts of congestion on citizens and businesses will be lessened. It is expected that drivers will be willing to donate under-utilized on-board computing resources in their vehicles to develop improved signal timing plans in return for the direct benefits of time savings and reduced fuel consumption costs. VACCS allows the Smart City to dynamically respond to traffic conditions while simultaneously reducing investments in the computational resources that would be required for traditional adaptive traffic signal control systems.

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Smart cities and robotic technologies for a model of integrated growth

Revista Eviterna ◽

10.24310/eviternare.vi9.11459 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 237-252

Author(s):

Elena Laudante

Keyword(s):

Quality Of Life ◽

Smart City ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Urban Systems ◽

Use Of Resources ◽

Human Scale ◽

The Future ◽

New Challenges ◽

The City

The paper focuses on the importance of robotics and artificial intelligence inside of the new urban contexts in which it is possible to consider and enhance the different dimensions of quality of life such as safety and health, environmental quality, social connection and civic participation. Smart technologies help cities to meet the new challenges of society, thus making them more livable, attractive and responsive in order to plan and to improve the city of the future. In accordance with the Agenda 2030 Program for sustainable development that intends the inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable city, the direction of growth and prosperity of urban environments is pursued by optimizing the use of resources and respecting the environment. In the current society, robotic technology is proposed as a tool for innovation and evolution in urban as well as industrial and domestic contexts. On the one hand the users-citizens who participate dynamically in the activities and on the other the new technological systems integrated in the urban fabric. Existing urban systems that are “amplified” of artificial and digital intelligence and give life to smart cities, physical places that allow new forms of coexistence between humans and robots in order to implement the level of quality of life and define “human centered” innovative solutions and services thus responding to the particular needs of people in an effective and dynamic way. The current city goes beyond the definition of smart city. In fact, as said by Carlo Ratti, it becomes a "senseable city", a city capable of feeling but also sensitive and capable of responding to citizens who define the overall performance of the city. The multidisciplinary approach through the dialogue between designers, architects, engineers and urban planners will allow to face the new challenges through the dynamics of robot integration in the urban landscape. The cities of the future, in fact, will be pervaded by autonomous driving vehicles, robotized delivery systems and light transport solutions, in response to the new concept of smart mobility, on a human scale, shared and connected mobility in order to improve management and control of the digitized and smart city. Automation at constant rates as the keystone for urban futures and new models of innovative society. Through the identification of representative case studies in the field of innovative systems it will be possible to highlight the connections between design, smart city and "urban" robotics that will synergically highlight the main "desirable" qualities of life in the city as a place of experimentation and radical transformations. In particular, parallel to the new robotic solutions and human-robot interactions, the design discipline will be responsible for designing the total experience of the user who lives in synergy with the robots, thus changing the socio-economic dynamics of the city.

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Community-Centered Urban Sensing

International Journal of E-Planning Research ◽

10.4018/ijepr.2019100101 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 8 (4) ◽

pp. 1-16 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Andrew Mondschein ◽

Zihao Zhang ◽

Mona El Khafif

Keyword(s):

Data Collection ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Urban Systems ◽

University Of Virginia ◽

Planning And Design ◽

Data Collection And Analysis ◽

Urban Planning And Design ◽

Urban Sensing ◽

The University ◽

Urban Data

The authors examine the problem of integrating urban sensing into engaged planning. The authors ask whether enhanced urban data and analysis can enhance resident engagement in planning and design, rather than hinder it, even when current urban planning and design practices are dysfunctional. The authors assess the outcomes of a planning and design effort in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. Community-Centered Urban Sensing is a participatory urban sensing initiative developed by urban planners and designers, architects, landscape architects, and technologists at the University of Virginia to address the need for actionable information on the urban environment through community-engaged urban data collection and analysis. These findings address how technological urbanism moves from data to action, as well as its potential for marginalization. Finally, the authors discuss a conceptualization of smart and engaged planning that accounts for urban dysfunction. The smart cities paradigm should encompass modes and methods that function even when local urban systems are dysfunctional.

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CitySpeed: A Crowdsensing-Based Integrated Platform for General-Purpose Monitoring of Vehicular Speeds in Smart Cities

Smart Cities ◽

10.3390/smartcities2010004 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

pp. 46-65 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Daniel Costa ◽

Adson Damasceno ◽

Ivanovitch Silva

Keyword(s):

Smart City ◽

Urban Areas ◽

Large Scale ◽

Smart Cities ◽

General Purpose ◽

Software Application ◽

Management Actions ◽

Modern Cities ◽

Time Period ◽

Search Filters

The development of crowdsensing-based technologies has allowed for the use of smartphones in large-scale data collection for different scopes of applications, mostly in a transparent and ubiquitous way. When concerning urban areas and smart city initiatives, the collection and further analysis of information about the highest number of vehicles is of paramount importance, potentially supporting more efficient mobility planning and management actions in modern cities. In this context, this article proposes a public general-purpose platform for acquisition and visualization of vehicular speeds, which can then be exploited by any additional application. For that, a crowdsensing-based mobile software application was developed to collect instantaneous speeds provided by smartphone GPS, formatting and distributing this information to a database system. Such historical data can then be exported or visualized through a web-based comprehensive interface, which provides valuable data when planning traffic mobility in cities; for example, indicating areas with heavier traffic over a certain time period. Therefore, allowing the use of many different search filters and supporting data delivery in the JSON format, the CitySpeed platform can provide services not supported by popular applications, such as Waze and Google Maps, and potentially assist smart city initiatives in this area.

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Smart City as a Model for Sustainable Development of Territories

SHS Web of Conferences ◽

10.1051/shsconf/202111005003 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 110 ◽

pp. 05003

Author(s):

Konstantin Semyachkov

Keyword(s):

Sustainable Development ◽

Urban Environment ◽

Smart City ◽

Large Scale ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Digital Technologies ◽

Economic Systems ◽

The Sustainable Development ◽

City Model ◽

The Impact

The article examines the impact of digital technologies on the sustainable development of ecological and economic systems. The main aspects that make the development of digital technologies especially relevant for environmental modernization and sustainable development are analyzed. It is shown that the large-scale use of digital technologies contributes to the development of new tools, models and methods of urban management. One of the promising areas for the development of the urban environment in these conditions is the concept of a smart city. Based on the analysis of research on the topic of smart cities, the effects of the use of the smart city model for the formation of the foundations of sustainable development of territories are noted.

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Proposal of the concept of smart cities development strategy in Montenegro

Tehnika ◽

10.5937/tehnika2005646b ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 75 (6) ◽

pp. 646-653

Author(s):

Ivana Buzdovan ◽

Marko Asanović ◽

Nataša Gospić

Keyword(s):

Development Strategy ◽

Smart City ◽

Technological Development ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Local Level ◽

Advantages And Disadvantages ◽

Economic Sustainable Development

This study elaborates the elements which are important in the development of the smart city strategy, both at national and local level. They should provide a good foundation for the development of a longterm sustainable and comprehensive smart city concept. When developing the strategy itself, it is necessary to follow the examples of the smart cities in Europe, Region and based on their experience, to identify advantages and disadvantages in order to form clear goals and vision. This study also gives the proposal for defining the elements necessary for establishing the smart cities development strategy as a solution for improving the quality of life in cities, and therewith overall social and economic sustainable development of a country. Montenegro and the city of Budva have been developed as a case study. Montenegro is keeping pace with technological development and therewith the need to define a development strategy for its smart cities. This study emphasizes the role of state bodies, institutions and citizens themselves in that process.

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Smart Cities of the Future as Cyber Physical Systems: Challenges and Enabling Technologies

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s21103349 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (10) ◽

pp. 3349

Author(s):

Antonio Puliafito ◽

Giuseppe Tricomi ◽

Anastasios Zafeiropoulos ◽

Symeon Papavassiliou

Keyword(s):

Quality Of Life ◽

Social Services ◽

Smart City ◽

Large Scale ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Social Systems ◽

Sustainable Growth ◽

Information And Communications Technology ◽

Urban Issues

A smart city represents an improvement of today’s cities, both functionally and structurally, that strategically utilizes several smart factors, capitalizing on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to increase the city’s sustainable growth and strengthen the city’s functions, while ensuring the citizens’ enhanced quality of life and health. Cities can be viewed as a microcosm of interconnected “objects” with which citizens interact daily, which represents an extremely interesting example of a cyber physical system (CPS), where the continuous monitoring of a city’s status occurs through sensors and processors applied within the real-world infrastructure. Each object in a city can be both the collector and distributor of information regarding mobility, energy consumption, air pollution as well as potentially offering cultural and tourist information. As a consequence, the cyber and real worlds are strongly linked and interdependent in a smart city. New services can be deployed when needed, and evaluation mechanisms can be set up to assess the health and success of a smart city. In particular, the objectives of creating ICT-enabled smart city environments target (but are not limited to) improved city services; optimized decision-making; the creation of smart urban infrastructures; the orchestration of cyber and physical resources; addressing challenging urban issues, such as environmental pollution, transportation management, energy usage and public health; the optimization of the use and benefits of next generation (5G and beyond) communication; the capitalization of social networks and their analysis; support for tactile internet applications; and the inspiration of urban citizens to improve their quality of life. However, the large scale deployment of cyber-physical-social systems faces a series of challenges and issues (e.g., energy efficiency requirements, architecture, protocol stack design, implementation, and security), which requires more smart sensing and computing methods as well as advanced networking and communications technologies to provide more pervasive cyber-physical-social services. In this paper, we discuss the challenges, the state-of-the-art, and the solutions to a set of currently unresolved key questions related to CPSs and smart cities.

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Can Smart City Policy Facilitate the Low-Carbon Economy in China? A Quasi-Natural Experiment Based on Pilot City

Complexity ◽

10.1155/2021/9963404 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 2021 ◽

pp. 1-15

Author(s):

Shuangshuang Fan ◽

Shengnan Peng ◽

Xiaoxue Liu

Keyword(s):

Smart City ◽

Large Scale ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Dynamic Effect ◽

Data Envelopment ◽

Low Carbon ◽

Low Carbon Economy ◽

City Policy ◽

The Impact ◽

Carbon Economy

This paper studies the impact of the implementation of smart city policy (SCP) on the development of low-carbon economy (LCE) in China. For this purpose, we developed a nonconvex meta-frontier data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to measure LCE and used the differences-in-difference (DID) analysis method in the econometric model to empirically analyze the impact of SCP on LCE, using the dataset of 230 cities from 2005 to 2018. The results show that the implementation of SCP can significantly improve the LCE of cities, and the dynamic effect test presents that the promotion of smart cities to low-carbon economy increases with time. In addition, SCP promotes the development of LCE by optimizing government functions and improving the efficiency of governance and the degree of implementation openness. But there is heterogeneity between different cities as follows: the implementation of SCP has a more significant effect on the promotion of LCE in central and western regions in China and large-scale cities and cities without strict environmental protection planning. Finally, the robustness test verifies the reliability of the experimental data again and puts forward conclusions and policy recommendations.

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Scalable and Secure Gradient Smart Dempster Shafer Reputation for Development of Smart Cities

10.21203/rs.3.rs-397726/v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Senthilselvi Ayothi ◽

Shiny Duela Johnson ◽

Ramesh Sekaran ◽

Senthil Pandi Sankareshwaran ◽

Manikandan Ramachandran ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Smart City ◽

Large Scale ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Future Generation ◽

Payment System ◽

Payment Method ◽

Privacy Issue ◽

Reputation Model ◽

Gradient Function ◽

Load Balancer

Abstract Over the last decade, blockchain has been considered an encouraging solution to secure distributed ledgers. Moreover, with the introduction of a pseudonymous payment method without a centralized database or authoritative person, blockchain has also evolved as the future generation for online payment system. However, with the eruption of a large scale database, scalability has also become a demanding issue. In addition to the obstacle mentioned above, challenges like security and scalability stop accelerated adjustments for the development of smart cities. Without directing this essential scalability and privacy issue, such an encouraging method may not help develop smart cities. This paper bestows a measure to analyze both scalability and security aspects of existing blockchain methods with applications of smart city networks. The proposed method is known as Gradient Smart Load Balancer and Blockchain Dempster Shafer Reputation (GSLB-BDSR). Gradient Smart Load Balancer is designed so that even though with the increase in the number of participating sensors, the load is said to balance by applying gradient function, therefore ensuring scalability. Next, to cover the security aspect, with the aid of scalable blocks in the blockchain network, a Blockchain Dempster Shafer Reputation model is proposed. Evaluation outcomes of proposed security solutions outperform conventional solutions.

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Smart city development projects in the Republic of Korea

R-Economy ◽

10.15826/recon.2020.6.1.004 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

pp. 40-49

Author(s):

Young-Sang Choi ◽

Keyword(s):

South Korea ◽

Smart City ◽

Large Scale ◽

Smart Cities ◽

The Other ◽

Evolutionary Analysis ◽

City Development ◽

The Government ◽

The One ◽

Japan And China

Research relevance. The article discusses the experience of South Korea in the sphere of smart city projects. The study's relevance is determined, on the one hand, by the role smart cities play in the creation of the new urban living space, in enhancement of urban economy and, on the other, by the need to analyze and systematize the best practices of smart city development. Research aim. The study describes the development of the 'smart city' concept in South Korea. Smart city is understood as a complex eco-system, which, on the one hand, comprises a range of technological and socio-economic processes and, on the other, involves such actors as government, corporations, research organizations and urban communities. Data and methodology. The study relies on methods of comparative and evolutionary analysis to analyze the concept of smart city and its structure by focusing on the case of South Korea, the world's renowned ICT leader. The study also provides cross-national comparisons of the experience of other developed Asian countries (Japan and China), which, like South Korea, are actively supporting building of smart cities on the state level. Results. The study describes the main stages in the development of the smart city concept in South Korea as well as the main types of smart city projects (pilot projects, research validation projects, and city restoration projects). The study identifies problems of planning, design and implementation of smart city projects and compares the relevant experience of South Korea, Japan and China. It is shown that although smart city projects in these countries were launched in approximately the same period, each of these countries has its own approach to smart cities and ways of their development. Conclusions. The key to Korea's success in smart city development lies in large-scale direct state support, public trust in the government and the application of an integrated approach to smart city development. At the current stage, smart city services not only provide enhanced comfort to city dwellers but also create more opportunities for their personal growth.

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