scholarly journals Toronto’s Not-So-“Smart” City: Dismantling the Tech Utopia & Building Stronger Communities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahar Raza
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Action Research ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
State Elite ◽  
Semistructured Interviews ◽  
And Control

This thesis critically analyzes the dominant discourse, actors, and technologies associated with the Sidewalk Toronto smart city project to uncover and resist the potential dangers of the unregulated smart city. Drawing from gray and scholarly literature alongside four semistructured interviews and three action research methods, this research shows that smart cities and technologies are the latest iteration of corporate power, exploitation, and control. Imbued with neoliberal, colonial, and positivistic logics, the smart city risks further eroding democracy, privacy, and equity in favour of promoting privatization, surveillance, and an increased concentration of power and wealth among corporate and state elite. While the publicized promise of the smart city may continuously shift to reflect and co-opt oppositional narratives, its logics remain static, and its beneficiaries remain few. Applying a social justice-oriented lens which connects critical theory, postmodernism, poststructuralism, intersectional feminism, and anticolonial methodologies is crucial in reconceptualizing “smartness” and prioritizing public good.

scholarly journals Toronto’s Not-So-“Smart” City: Dismantling the Tech Utopia & Building Stronger Communities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahar Raza
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Action Research ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
State Elite ◽  
Semistructured Interviews ◽  
And Control

This thesis critically analyzes the dominant discourse, actors, and technologies associated with the Sidewalk Toronto smart city project to uncover and resist the potential dangers of the unregulated smart city. Drawing from gray and scholarly literature alongside four semistructured interviews and three action research methods, this research shows that smart cities and technologies are the latest iteration of corporate power, exploitation, and control. Imbued with neoliberal, colonial, and positivistic logics, the smart city risks further eroding democracy, privacy, and equity in favour of promoting privatization, surveillance, and an increased concentration of power and wealth among corporate and state elite. While the publicized promise of the smart city may continuously shift to reflect and co-opt oppositional narratives, its logics remain static, and its beneficiaries remain few. Applying a social justice-oriented lens which connects critical theory, postmodernism, poststructuralism, intersectional feminism, and anticolonial methodologies is crucial in reconceptualizing “smartness” and prioritizing public good.

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 Accounting and smart cities: New evidence for governmentality and politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 158-170
Author(s):  
Loai Ali Alsaid ◽  
Jean Claude Mutiganda
Keyword(s):  
Enterprise Resource Planning ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Resource Planning ◽  
Distribution Networks ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Electricity Pricing ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Erp System ◽  
And Control

The concept of a smart city has attracted the attention of many scholars and policymakers in many countries worldwide. The role of accounting as a tool of governance in smart city politics, however, has so far been largely overlooked, especially in less developed countries (LDCs). This paper sets off to fill this research gap and hitherto unexplored linkages between accounting and smart cities. Drawing on the concept of governmentality, the authors conducted a case study based on document analysis, meetings observation, and 42 semi-structured interviews at a branch of a hybrid electricity company owned by New Cairo City in Egypt, during 2018. Findings show that the case company has implemented smart distribution networks of electricity in which new management accounting technology (enterprise resource planning (ERP) system) is used to trace costs, revenues, client complaints and feedback in a timely manner. The new network (of infrastructure and technologies) has represented timely accounting information as a major political power to influence accurate governance decision-making, such as smart electricity pricing and control, and to challenge governance decisions that are not sound. This paper is one of the first studies to explore the socio-political dynamics of accounting in smart city governance in the context of LDCs.

scholarly journals The «smart city» concept: fixing key concepts in the context of providing the development of a big municipality

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (8) ◽  
pp. 24-34
Author(s):  
A. O. Andriіenko
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
City Management ◽  
City Formation ◽  
Strategic Direction ◽  
Use Of Resources ◽  
Smart Community ◽  
The One ◽  
And Control

The article reveals the content and explores the conceptual-categorical apparatus of the problem of the «smart city» formation on the territory of a large municipal entity. The classification of big municipalities, aimed at their services (communal, educational, medical, public) ‘smartization’, by type, is given. It is determined that smart cities are considered by the world scientific community from two positions: on the one hand, as objects of the spontaneous socio-economic movement, which cannot always be directed in a given strategic direction; on the other hand, as a managerial category – cities that effectively use all available information for better understanding and control of their functions and optimal use of resources available, including the potential of residents. A system of factors, the development of which is aimed at forming the foundations of a smart city, is given. The basis for developing such a system is the concept of sustainable development. Accordingly, the complex of the following factors influencing the ‘smartization’ of urban development is presented: technological (determines the level of development and public availability of digital technologies in urban services); human (creates a space for creativity, learning, obtaining and generating knowledge); economic (outlines the limits of economic capacity of the city, the coordination of economic tasks with social priorities and environmental needs); institutional (forms the basis for proper management of the city’s integrated development, promotes the development of the smart community and the attraction of intellectual capital). The criteria for meeting the goals of smart city management that outline the content and determine the directions of smart administration on the basis of sustainability are given; the factors of the formation of such a city (institutional, social, economic, technological) are presented and structured; accordingly, the concept of «smart city» is defined through the prism of institutional, social, economic, technological and integrated managerial approaches.

scholarly journals Information management in the smart city

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 234-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merlin Stone ◽  
Jonathan Knapper ◽  
Geraint Evans ◽  
Eleni Aravopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Information Management ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Grey Literature ◽  
City Managers ◽  
Content Type ◽  
And Control ◽  
Structured Approach ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate information management in a smart city. It identifies the main trends in progress and how innovation in information technology is helping all those in the smart city ecosystem in terms of generating new sources of data and connecting them. It investigates how information management in the smart city may go through several phases, but contests the notion that the co-ordinated information management that is the dream of many city managers is an appropriate vision, given the tendency in the private sector for competing information platforms to develop, giving value in different ways. Design/methodology/approach This paper has been written by using a combination of academic insight and literature, extensive research of relevant grey literature (e.g. blogs and industry press) and interviews and interaction with some of the organisations involved in developing and implementing the smart city concept, including public transport organisations, other data providers, analysts and systems and sensor suppliers. Findings Smart city concepts are evolving in different ways, with divergence of views which involves centralisation and control of information by city authorities and a more democratic view in which the information is managed on different platforms between which smart city stakeholders can choose. Research limitations/implications The research method is exploratory. Validating the findings would require a more structured approach in which stakeholders of all kinds are consulted. Practical implications All organisational stakeholders in the idea and delivery of smart cities need to consider how their interests in smart city information and those of other stakeholders are evolving and to what extent they should be in partnership with other members of the ecosystem in generating and using the information. Social implications Individuals, whether workers, commuters, shoppers, tourists or others, will be greatly affected by the evolution of smart city information, and their choices about whether to be smart themselves will have an important effect on the benefits they receive from city smartening and on the viability of the smart cities. Originality/value Little research has been carried out into the different choices organisations and individuals have in terms of how they will relate to smart city information and how they can manage it. This research makes a start on this task.

scholarly journals Analyzing and Evaluating Smart Cities for IoT Based on Use Cases Using the Analytic Network Process

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Chao Huang ◽  
Shah Nazir
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Information Leakage ◽  
Analytic Network Process ◽  
Use Cases ◽  
Security And Privacy ◽  
World Population ◽  
Network Process ◽  
Iot Devices ◽  
And Control

With the passage of time, the world population is growing. Proper utilization of resources and other devices is tremendously playing an important role to easily examine, manage, and control the resources of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the smart city. Research in the field of IoT has revolutionized the services mostly in smart cities. In the smart city, the applications of IoT are utilized without human involvement. Diverse IoT devices are connected with each other and communicate for different tasks. With the existence of a huge number of IoT devices in the forthcoming years, the chances of privacy breach and information leakage are increasing. Billions of devices connected on IoT producing huge volume of data bound to cloud for processing, management, and storage. Sending of whole data to the cloud might create risk of security and privacy. Various needs of the smart city should be considered for both urgent and effective solutions to support requirements of the growing population. On the other side of rising technology, the IoT evolution has massively produced diverse research directions for the smart city. Keeping in view the use cases of the smart city, the proposed study presents the analytic network process (ANP) for evaluating smart cities. The approach of ANP works well in the situation of complexity, and vagueness exists among the available alternatives. The experimental results of the planned approach show that the approach is effective for evaluating the smart cities for IoT based on the use cases.

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

2018 ◽  
pp. 523-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonidas Anthopoulos ◽  
Marijn Janssen ◽  
Vishanth Weerakkody
Keyword(s):  
Health Education ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
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 A Unified Smart City Model (USCM) for Smart City Conceptualization and Benchmarking

2019 ◽  
pp. 247-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonidas Anthopoulos ◽  
Marijn Janssen ◽  
Vishanth Weerakkody
Keyword(s):  
Health Education ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
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 Citizenship, Justice and the Right to the Smart City

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Kitchin ◽  
Paolo Cardullo ◽  
Cesare Di Feliciantonio
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Critical Social Science ◽  
The Right

This paper provides an introduction to the smart city and engages with its idea and ideals from a critical social science perspective. After setting out in brief the emergence of smart cities and current key debates, we note a number of practical, political and normative questions relating to citizenship, justice, and the public good that warrant examination. The remainder of the paper provides an initial framing for engaging with these questions. The first section details the dominant neoliberal conception and enactment of smart cities and how this works to promote the interests of capital and state power and reshape governmentality. We then detail some of the ethical issues associated with smart city technologies and initiatives. Having set out some of the more troubling aspects of how social relations are produced within smart cities, we then examine how citizens and citizenship have been conceived and operationalised in the smart city to date. We then follow this with a discussion of social justice and the smart city. In the final section, we explore the notion of the ‘right to the smart city’ and how this might be used to recast the smart city in emancipatory and empowering ways.

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