Exposing smart cities and eco-cities: Frankenstein urbanism and the sustainability challenges of the experimental city

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Cugurullo
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Experimental Models ◽  
Built Environments ◽  
Sustainable City ◽  
Incompatible Elements ◽  
The World ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
Sustainability Challenges

In recent years, the world has seen the emergence of a number of urban projects which, under the banner of experimentation, have promoted alternative models of city-making capable, in theory, of creating sustainable built environments. Among these supposedly experimental models, the smart city and the eco-city stand out in terms of geographical diffusion, and are hailed by their advocates as the mark of an innovative urbanism based on a scientific approach to urban development. Through the analysis of Hong Kong and Masdar City, examples of a smart-city agenda and an eco-city project respectively, this paper questions the sustainability of so-called smart cities and eco-cities, by investigating the extent to which they are developed in a controlled and systematic manner as their developers claim. More specifically, the paper counterclaims mainstream understandings of smart and ecological urbanism, arguing that what are promoted as cohesive settlements shaped by a homogeneous vision of the sustainable city, are actually fragmented cities made of disconnected and often incongruous pieces of urban fabric. Theoretically, these claims are discussed through the concept of Frankenstein urbanism which draws upon Mary Shelley’s novel as a metaphor for unsuccessful experiments generated by the forced union of different, incompatible elements.

scholarly journals Setting up the stage for smart sustainable city: international and ukrainian context. The role of smart solutions

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-24
Author(s):  
Anna Pozdniakova ◽  
Iryna Velska
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Knowledge Generation ◽  
Sustainable City ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Steps ◽  
Human Component

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.

scholarly journals Concept of Smart City and Ict Risks

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-127
Author(s):  
L.E. Varshavsky
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Development Trends ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Information And Communication

The article briefly analyzes trends in urban development. The definitions of «smart» cities are given; the features of a number of widely used ratings are analyzed. Development trends of the market of solutions for «smart» cities both in the world and in Russia are analyzed. Risks associated with the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICT) are discussed in detail, as well as still unresolved problems, which in the future may slow down the pace of implementation of «smart» cities projects

scholarly journals GREEN SMART-CITY IN UKRAINE: HOW TO COMBINE REALITIES OF DOMESTIC ENTERPRISES AND EU STANDARDS

2020 ◽  
pp. 126-132
Author(s):  
Yu. Chortok ◽  
A. Yevdokymova ◽  
R. Nechyporenko ◽  
O. Maiboroda
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Environmental Safety ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Eu Countries ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Eu

The article defines the essence of the concept of green Smart-City. The basic principles and problems of realization of green Smart-City concept in the EU countries are considered. The incentives, benefits of cities into green Smart-City are analyzed. The main achievements of the EU in providing the concept of green Smart-City are considered. Particular examples of European green Smart-City are analyzed. It is obvious that the cities of Ukraine with their structure: transport networks, zones, nodes, with architecture and urban planning, as well as with the environment are far from foreign, which increasingly meet the requirements of "smart" cities. The urgency of solving this scientific problem is due to the need to find ways to ensure the effectiveness of the proposed measures related to the implementation of urban development projects based on the concept of "smart" city, IT development, solving of environmental problems. The purpose of this study is to form a theoretical and methodological basis for the transformation of Ukrainian cities to the requirements of green SmartCity, taking into account European standards of environmental safety and energy efficiency, demands and priorities of local entrepreneurs. The methodological tools of the study were the methods of comparative analysis, namely the experience of the EU and the USA in the formation of "smart" cities and justification on this basis the feasibility of taking into account the experience of successful examples of urban development strategies around the world. Systematization of literature sources on the areas of different approaches use showed that the cities of Ukraine have ample opportunities for development due to the standards of "smart" cities. The object of the study is the leading "smart" cities in the world, because they are an example for other cities in ensuring the well-being of their inhabitants. The article defines the concept and essence of green Smart-City. Arguments on the possibility and expediency of using the principles of Smart-City in the cities of Ukraine are also summarized. The basic principles and problems of implementation of green Smart-City concept in the EU countries are considered. The incentives, benefits and advantages of transforming ordinary cities into green Smart-City are analyzed. The main achievements of the EU in the field of providing the concept of green Smart-City are considered. Specific examples of European green Smart-City are analyzed.

scholarly journals Sustainable Smart City—Opening a Black Box

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 769
Author(s):  
Mona Treude
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Evolutionary Economics ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
Sustainable City ◽  
Smart Services ◽  
Underlying Processes

Cities are becoming digital and are aiming to be sustainable. How they are combining the two is not always apparent from the outside. What we need is a look from inside. In recent years, cities have increasingly called themselves Smart City. This can mean different things, but generally includes a look towards new digital technologies and claim that a Smart City has various advantages for its citizens, roughly in line with the demands of sustainable development. A city can be seen as smart in a narrow sense, technology wise, sustainable or smart and sustainable. Current city rankings, which often evaluate and classify cities in terms of the target dimensions “smart” and “sustainable”, certify that some cities are both. In its most established academic definitions, the Smart City also serves both to improve the quality of life of its citizens and to promote sustainable development. Some cities have obviously managed to combine the two. The question that arises is as follows: What are the underlying processes towards a sustainable Smart City and are cities really using smart tools to make themselves sustainable in the sense of the 2015 United Nations Sustainability Goal 11? This question is to be answered by a method that has not yet been applied in research on cities and smart cities: the innovation biography. Based on evolutionary economics, the innovation biography approaches the process towards a Smart City as an innovation process. It will highlight which actors are involved, how knowledge is shared among them, what form citizen participation processes take and whether the use of digital and smart services within a Smart City leads to a more sustainable city. Such a process-oriented method should show, among other things, to what extent and when sustainability-relevant motives play a role and which actors and citizens are involved in the process at all.

scholarly journals A Unified Smart City Model (USCM) for Smart City Conceptualization and Benchmarking

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonidas Anthopoulos ◽  
Marijn Janssen ◽  
Vishanth Weerakkody
Keyword(s):  
Health Education ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Policy Impact ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Management Architecture ◽  
The World ◽  
City Model ◽  
And Control ◽  
Urban Characteristics

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.

scholarly journals Actually existing smart citizens: expertise and (non)participation in the making of the smart city

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Shelton ◽  
Thomas Lodato
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The World ◽  
Number Of Individuals

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.

scholarly journals Smart City as A Tools to Achieve Sustainability City

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Helen Dian Fridayani ◽  
Rifaid Rifaid
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Open Space ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Smart Environment ◽  
Sustainable City ◽  
Co2 Gas ◽  
The Government ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Smart Government

Sustainable city is a city that designed by considering the impact on the environment, inhabited by population with a number and behavior that requires minimal support for energy, water and food from the outside, and produces less CO2, gas, air and water pollution. Moreover the national government envisions Indonesia2030which shallimplement the smart city towards sustainable development.Especially in Sleman Regency, the government is committed to make Sleman Regency as a Smart Regency in 2021. It could be shown in the vision of Sleman Regency which is The realization of a more prosperous Sleman community, Independent, Cultured and Integratede-governmentsystem to the Smart Regency in 2021”. This paper would like to analyze how the Sleman Regency implement the Smart city concept, and does the smart city concept can achive the sustainability city. The research uses the qualitative approach with in-deepth interview in examining the data, also the literature review. The result in this study reveals the following: firstly, from 2016-2019 Sleman regency has several applications to support the smart city implementation such as One Data of UMKM, Home Creative Sleman, Lapor Sleman app, Sleman Smart app, online tax app, e-patient, sleman emergency service, and Sleman smart room. Second, there are many elements in smart cities that are very important for smart government, smart life, smart economy, smart society, and smart environment. However, in supporting to support the realization of smart cities, not all aspects must be implemented properly to achieve a managed city, components related to smart environment cannot be implemented properly in Sleman Regency. There are still many problems regarding environmental problems such as the development of the construction of hotels and apartments that do not heed the environment, incrasing the populations, the limitations of green open space.

scholarly journals IMPROVING THE ENERGY EFFICIENCY OF SMART CITIES DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

2021 ◽  
Vol 229 (3) ◽  
pp. 354-364
Author(s):  
MAKSIM D. PUSHKAREV ◽  
◽  
DMITRY A. PROKOFIEV ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Energy Efficiency ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Urban Infrastructure ◽  
High Tech ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact

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.

scholarly journals Erősítik-e a társadalmi kirekesztést a smart cityk?

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
László Gere ◽  
Ráhel Czirják
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Development Policy ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
The Other ◽  
Global Competition ◽  
Development Projects ◽  
City Development ◽  
The One

A fejlesztéspolitikában ma a „smart” címkével minden vonzóbb, eladhatóbb, a kifejezés sokszor a ’környezetbarát’ vagy ’fenntartható’ szinonimájaként is használatos. A városfejlesztésben az utóbbi idők egyik legfelkapottabb paradigmája, globális szintű versengést indítva mind a városok, mind az érdekelt vállalatok között a kölcsönösen hasznosnak vélt előnyök reményében. A szerzők egyrészt annak jártak utána, miért éppen most virágzott fel a smart city mint fejlesztési paradigma, és milyen tényezők indukálták gyors előretörését. Másrészt a nemzetközi példák bemutatásán keresztül arra a kérdésre keresik a választ, milyen társadalmi hatásokkal járnak ezek a fejlesztések, milyen kihívásokkal kell szembenézni a smart city fejlesztések kapcsán, és vajon a jövőben a fejlesztési szereplők képesek lesznek-e tanulni hibáikból, és tudatosan tervezni a hatások összességével. --- Do smart cities intensify social exclusion? In development policy everything seems to be more attractive and marketable when labelled ‘smart’; the expression is often used even as a synonym for ‘environmentally-friendly’ or ‘sustainable’. Considering urban development projects, smart city development is one of the most popular paradigms, triggering global competition between cities as well as the interested companies, both expecting mutual benefits from the co-operation. The article, on the one hand, tries to reveal, why the smart city paradigm has now started to thrive, and what factors played a part in its rapid development. On the other hand, through the presentation of international practices, the authors intend to answer what social impacts these developments have had, what challenges have the smart city developments met, and whether in the future the actors could learn from their mistakes and consciously take into account the complexity of impacts.

Governance and Institutional Framework for Smart Cities in India

2018 ◽  
pp. 50-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arindam Biswas ◽  
Kranti Kumar Maurya
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
State Government ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
Institutional Framework ◽  
Governing Institutions ◽  
Union Government

Rapidly increasing urbanization in India has brought much needed focus on the urban development. City building in India is done mostly by local governments and very less by state government and union government. All three tiers of governance are involved in realizing smart city. Smart city will be built with a combined effort from various actors from three tiers of public governing institutions and several private enterprises. Smart cities will require superior planning, design, and coordination among these actors. Otherwise, it will be impossible to achieve faster, efficient, and superior quality city building and management. Historically, urban policy and its implementation in India has been tardy, thereby limiting the sustainable and planned growth of cities. The chapter will try to find the connection between governance and institutional framework for smart city building in India by taking a case of Varanasi city. Varanasi is a city in Uttar Pradesh state of India. It is one of the hundred proposed smart cities. Varanasi is a proposed city under AMRUT and HRIDAY schemes also.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document