Social innovation in smart city ecosystems

2019 ◽  
pp. 173-195
Author(s):  
Nicos Komninos
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Social Innovation

Smart Cities Governance

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 724-739 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Castelnovo ◽  
Gianluca Misuraca ◽  
Alberto Savoldelli
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Public Value ◽  
The Public ◽  
Policy Decision Making ◽  
Evaluation Approaches

Most of the definitions of a “smart city” make a direct or indirect reference to improving performance as one of the main objectives of initiatives to make cities “smarter”. Several evaluation approaches and models have been put forward in literature and practice to measure smart cities. However, they are often normative or limited to certain aspects of cities’ “smartness”, and a more comprehensive and holistic approach seems to be lacking. Thus, building on a review of the literature and practice in the field, this paper aims to discuss the importance of adopting a holistic approach to the assessment of smart city governance and policy decision making. It also proposes a performance assessment framework that overcomes the limitations of existing approaches and contributes to filling the current gap in the knowledge base in this domain. One of the innovative elements of the proposed framework is its holistic approach to policy evaluation. It is designed to address a smart city’s specificities and can benefit from the active participation of citizens in assessing the public value of policy decisions and their sustainability over time. We focus our attention on the performance measurement of codesign and coproduction by stakeholders and social innovation processes related to public value generation. More specifically, we are interested in the assessment of both the citizen centricity of smart city decision making and the processes by which public decisions are implemented, monitored, and evaluated as regards their capability to develop truly “blended” value services—that is, simultaneously socially inclusive, environmentally friendly, and economically sustainable.

scholarly journals Digital Social Innovation and the Adoption of #PlanTech: The Case of Coventry City Council

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciaran Devlin
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
City Council ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Town Planning ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Vast Number ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Uk

The smart city trend has generated considerable interest in using digital technology to transform urban planning and governance, and in the UK the government funded Connected Places Catapult has been given the remit of stimulating innovation in cities. One of its focuses is urban planning and technology (#PlanTech) which has garnered attention from the Royal Town Planning Institute, a vast number of the UK local authorities, academia and technology companies. #PlanTech aims to revolutionise the urban planning industry across public, private and not for profit sectors in an era where fiscal austerity has catalysed a drive for using advanced technologies to improve the efficiency of operations and decision making. Technological innovation is being promoted to enable local authorities to deliver services with significantly reduced financial resources while simultaneously creating a modernised and more efficient public sector. Within this context, this article uses a detailed ethnographic study of planning functions in Coventry City Council, UK, to analyse how they have adapted so far in response to both austerity and the drive for digital innovation. The article concludes by examining how #PlanTech and digital social innovation may help deliver the broader smart city strategy.

scholarly journals Digital social innovation in support of spatial planning. An investigation through nine initiatives in three smart city programmes

Spatium ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 7-16
Author(s):  
Margarita Angelidou ◽  
Artemis Psaltoglou
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Spatial Planning ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Social Challenges ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
The World ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Distinctive Role

This paper examines how technologically-enabled social innovation can support spatial planning. Social innovation is a long-standing practice; however, in recent years its popularity, importance and applications have increased due to both the financial and social challenges that cities face, and due to important technological advances. Digital Social Innovation (DSI), more specifically, is increasingly penetrating smart city programmes and strategies throughout the world. Through research into nine DSI initiatives in the context of three smart city programmes (Amsterdam, Barcelona, New York), we point out the functions and benefits of incorporating DSI in spatial planning and trace its different levels and characteristics. The conclusions suggest that: online and offline means are equally important in DSI for spatial planning; the mix and degree of involvement of different sectors varies significantly across DSI initiatives; spatial planning and place making experts and professionals have a distinctive role within these initiatives; and particular attention should be paid to scaling and uptake issues.

Smart City Implementation Through Shared Vision of Social Innovation for Environmental Sustainability

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 757-773 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akemi Takeoka Chatfield ◽  
Christopher G. Reddick
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Resource Dependence ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Shared Vision ◽  
Antecedent Conditions ◽  
Social Governance ◽  
Smart Community

Environmental sustainability is a critical global issue that requires comprehensive intervention policies. Viewed as localized intervention policy implementations, smart cities leverage information infrastructures and distributed renewable energy smart micro-grids, smart meters, and home/building energy management systems to reduce city-wide carbon emissions. However, theory-driven smart city implementation research is critically lacking. This theory-building case study identifies antecedent conditions necessary for implementing smart cities. We integrated resource dependence, social embeddedness, and citizen-centric e-governance theories to develop a citizen-centric social governance framework. We apply the framework to a field-based case study of Japan’s Kitakyushu smart community project to examine the validity and utility of the framework’s antecedent conditions: resource-dependent leadership network, cross-sector collaboration based on social ties, and citizen-centric e-governance. We conclude that complex smart community implementation processes require shared vision of social innovation owned by diverse stakeholders with conflicting values and adaptive use of informal social governance mechanisms for effective smart city implementation.

scholarly journals When Design Fiction Meets Geospatial Sciences to Create a More Inclusive Smart City

Smart Cities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 1334-1352
Author(s):  
Andrée-Anne Blacutt ◽  
Stéphane Roche
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Spatial Skills ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Gender Culture ◽  
Use Of Technology ◽  
The People ◽  
Design Fiction

Smart cities are especially suited for improving urban inclusion by combining digital transition and social innovation. To be smart, a city has to provide every citizen with urban spaces, public services, and common goods that are effectively affordable, whatever the citizen’s gender, culture, origin, race, or impairment. Based on two design workshops, the “Vibropod” and the “Pointe-aux-Lièvres”, this paper aims at highlighting the contributions of design fiction to the improvement of the spatial capability of hearing impaired people. This research draws its originality from both its conceptual framework, built on an interdisciplinary and intersectoral composition of arts and sciences, and its operational approach, based on the use of the DeafSpace markers and the TRIZ theory (Russian acronym for Inventive Problem Solving Theory) principles. The two design fiction workshops demonstrate that considering the singularity of the human being as an actual acoustic material constitutes an innovative opportunity to improve the role of universal design in a smart city project. By reversing the classic posture, and defining disability by looking at characteristics of the environment rather than as limits of the people themselves (their bodies or their senses), this research proposes an innovative way of addressing smart city inclusivity issues. This paper shows how increasing spatial enablement and having better control of spatial skills can offer deaf people new skills to improve the use of technology in support of urban mobility, as well as give them tools for feeling safer in urban environments.

scholarly journals The social innovation–(re)politicisation nexus: Unlocking the political in actually existing smart city campaigns? The case of SmartCity Cologne, Germany

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 894-915 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Leitheiser ◽  
Alexander Follmann
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The Social ◽  
Governance Practices ◽  
Urban Futures ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Urban Commons

As a prominent and performative discourse, The Smart City has the potential to shape urban futures. Yet, its mostly top-down implementation and dominantly technocratic definition of problems raises critiques of The Smart City as the latest version of a series of post-political and neoliberal visions of urban governance. However, as smart cities are implemented into ‘actually existing’ strategies locally, they are always negotiated and translated into place-specific contexts. Beyond critiquing the powerful discourse of The Smart City, the social innovation–(re)politicisation nexus (SIRN) spells out a framework for contesting and co-producing radically transformative smart city visions and politics as they take shape on the ground. Linking the empirical case study of the ‘top-down’ implementation of SmartCity Cologne, Germany, to current ‘bottom-up’ discourses on reclaiming the urban commons, we show how ‘true’ and ‘real’ social innovation must go hand-in-hand with a re-politicisation of hegemonic logics and discursive framings. In doing so, this paper makes theoretical and empirical contributions to public and academic discourse on which governance practices, methods and policies could contribute to radical transformations towards a ‘truly’ smart and sustainable urban future.

scholarly journals Smart City: The Concept and its Adaptation to the Russian Context

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 102-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nataliia A. Kolodii ◽  
Vera S. Ivanova ◽  
Natalia A. Goncharova
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Technologies ◽  
Expert Assessments ◽  
Technical Solutions ◽  
The City

The article investigates the concept of a smart city mainly focused around people. At the same time, a “smart city” is understood to be an innovative city which implements a set of technical solutions and organizational measures aimed at achieving the highest possible quality of human life, an adequate resource management and service delivery system, in order to create sustainable favorable living conditions, as well as the prosperity and business activity of current and future generations. The general and specific (for Russia) factors that determined the transition from “smart cities” to “human-centered smart cities” are highlighted. Human-centered smart cities are cities in which governments attract citizens by being open to partnership with citizens, supporting the collaborative design of technical and social innovation processes through mutual relationships based on mutual trust and cooperation. A system of expert assessments is analyzed, which indicates the possibilities for transitioning to the digitalization of the economy and the city, the possibilities for developing breakthrough information and social technologies that would ensure movement towards Human Smart cites.

scholarly journals Because people act, cities can be smart: Promoting social innovation in smart-city design-tools in the Mediterranean.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Navarro Escudero ◽  
Carolina Mateo Cecilia ◽  
Begoña Serrano Lanzarote ◽  
Vera Valero Escribano
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Design Tool ◽  
Urban Systems ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
Mediterranean Countries ◽  
Efficiency And Effectiveness ◽  
Organizational Empowerment ◽  
City Design

Smart city is an innovative paradigm tackling a range of emerging problems associated with urbanization, massively understood from a technology-driven approach. Much of the focus of the smart city movement to date – city authorities and other organizations deploying sensors, networks, decision support tools and data analytics to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of urban systems (like transport, utilities, etc.) – is only half the story. In occasions, citizens struggle with a top-down managing city system that should help public administrators, service providers and citizens, but reports instead on personal frustration. To avoid this, an attempt to promote social innovation processes to the smart city paradigm is now taking place. In this paper, we analyze reactions to a smart city design-tool for energy strategy plans’ definition and implementation, in the three EU most populated Mediterranean countries (Spain, France, Italy). The research is based on the ACCENT study case. Interviews show common challenges with regard to ACCENT smartness, as the needs and dangers of sharing real energy consumption data of buildings, the low willingness of some energy suppliers to offer information, the user-unfriendly interfaces for citizens, the lack of linkage among public bodies, the dispersion of data, the requirement of disseminating mechanisms to make citizens aware of the benefits of the energy renovation, or the inaccessibility to existing information on the state of buildings. These challenges resulting from ACCENT study give rise to three recommendations to foster social innovation in further Mediterranean smart city design-tools: co-responsibility, hand-in-hand co-creation and citizens’ organizational empowerment.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document