Cloudy landscapes: On the extended geography of smart urbanism

The hypervisibility of the projects of smart urbanism in urban cores masks and obfuscates an extended geography of extraction, processing, storage, transmission, and control that underlies the ideologies, practices, and forms of smart cities. By adopting a hybrid analytical framework, assembled from recent work emerging from critical urban geography, media studies, and design, this paper argues for a spatial recontextualization of smart urbanism. Expanding the scope of urban analysis beyond cities and into the enabling geography of “the cloud,” this paper positions smart urbanism within an uneven and socio-technically constructed planetary landscape, to problematize and more effectively map the “where” of smart cities. As an initial grounding of this discussion, a typological categorization of the extended geography of smart urbanism identifies a number of conditions and avenues for further research.     

From smart cities to smart social urbanism: A framework for shaping the socio-technological ecosystems in cities

Advocated mostly by technology companies, the smart city concept promises participation, democratization and innovative urbanism. Tracking these promises and ideas, this paper explores “smart urbanism” in ten cities from all over Israel. Based on interviews with leading figures in municipalities, smart city consultants and key figures in technological companies (n = 40), the aims of this paper are to assess the efforts of cities to become smart by responding to the following questions: 1. What is guiding the decision-making process in developing technological initiatives? 2. Does context play a role in implementing technological initiatives? 3. How are the residents perceived, and what tools are being used to address residents' digital differences? The key argument of this paper is threefold: first, in the process of becoming a smart city, the roles of public and private actors are blurred, influencing the process of decision making. Second, despite contextual differences, cities adopt similar digital initiatives. Third, technological initiatives that focus on social needs and address inequality in the digital age are still at the margins. The final discussion suggests that most municipalities are still at an early stage of digitization implementation and have the ability to shape and form a vision for the cities as socio-technological ecosystems in a way that will serve their publics as a whole. The paper ends with a call for shifting the focus from the city to society in developing digital initiatives and cultivating smart social urbanism.     

Historicizing the smart cities: Genealogy as a method of critique for smart urbanism

This study explores the utility of genealogy as a method of critiquing the history of the present in the smart cities. Taking a South Korean smart city of Songdo as a point of departure, this paper offers a genealogical understanding of a smart city that situates the current technics and technologies of data-driven urban governance within the broader context of South Korean history. Given the scarcity of a historically informed understanding of a smart city in the existing literatures on smart urbanism, this paper argues that a genealogical method helps us to counter the sweeping binarism that obscures the complexity and diversity of actually existing smart cities today. Through genealogy, this study underscores the multifaceted nature of the smart city, which consists of a combination of multiple urban diagrams that grows out of distinct problems and objectives of urban management – mobility, security, environment, and futurity. This paper illustrates how a smart city emerged out of multiple strings of history and problematizations that are contingently interweaved at a given time and space in multiple and diffused forms.     

Participatory technologies in smart cities: What citizens want and how to ask them

This article deals with the process of prioritization of requirements on one selected participatory technology, which is citizen reporting on issues of public infrastructure (CRIsPI). Reporting is the activity that expresses the interest of citizens about the place they live. Traditionally, older citizens are more active in this activity, but modern technologies have the potential to motivate also young people to become active participants in public issues. There are two objectives of the article: 1) determination of which CRIsPI features would motivate young citizens to higher participation, and 2) comparative analysis of six prioritization methods to select the most appropriate method for engagement of this group of citizens. In total, 155 respondents (students) participated in the study. Results revealed that respondents require easy-to-use tools and positive feedback from the local government. Moreover, they prefer mobile solutions. The most suitable prioritization method, according to five given criteria, is adjusted cumulative voting ($100).     

Making (in) the smart city: The emergence of makerspaces

Critical approaches to the smart city concept are used to begin highlighting the promises of makerspaces, that is to say, those emerging urban sites that promote sharing practices; exercise community-based forms of governance; and utilize local manufacturing technologies. A bird’s-eye-view of the history of makerspaces is provided tracing their roots back to the hacker movement. Drawing from secondary sources, their community-building, learning and innovation potential is briefly discussed. Makerspaces, this essay argues, can serve as hubs and vehicles for citizen-driven transformation and, thus, play a key part in a more inclusive, participatory and commons-oriented vision of the smart city.     

The 21st century corporate town: The politics of planning innovation districts

High-tech corporations have established a foothold in cities through innovation districts. Across the north Atlantic, these are typically waterfront urban renewal projects that repurpose formerly industrial land contiguous to the city centre into fully master-planned sites that also include smart city developments. Our case study focuses on the governance and spatial planning of waterfront innovation districts in Boston in the United States and Dublin in Ireland. Both cases reflect a trend to create high-value clusters attracting research and development from globalised tech firms as well as fostering local enterprise. The fluidity and mobility of multinational capital attached to the tech economy leverages digital and civic investment in these districts as a means of corporate attraction and retention: the smart city becomes one for skilled, globally-mobile tech workers adjacent to, but socially and spatially partitioned from, historically working class port communities. This process is marked by the degree to which such districts can be, firstly, disconnected from city-wide planning agendas, and secondly, the degree to which they interface and share resources and amenities with surrounding neighbourhoods. Thus, we argue, there is the potential for further market capture of urban revitalisation policies by high-tech firms, leading to the creation of ‘corporate towns’ and a new era of uneven development. The politics of urban planning can both restrict the democratic process in the city, and curtail the forms of smart city, civic technologies into those primarily beneficial for high-tech corporations and their workforce.     

Digital cities of the future: Extending @home assistive technologies for the elderly and the disabled

In the digital city of the future there is the vision of seamless virtual and physical access for every home and between each home and the workplace, as well as critical city infrastructure such as the post office, the bank, hospitals, transportation systems, and other entities. This paper provides an overview of technical and other issues in extending at home (@home) assistive technologies for the elderly and the disabled. The paper starts by giving a vision of what this city is supposed to look like and how a human is to act, navigate and function in it. A framework for extending assistive technologies is proposed that considers individuals belonging to special groups of interest and locations other than their home. Technology has already reached the state of ubiquitous and pervasive sensor devices measuring everything, from temperature to human behavior. Implanting intelligence into and connecting such devices will be of immense use in preventive healthcare, security in industrial installations, greater energy efficiency, and numerous other applications. The paper reviews enabling technologies that exist and focuses on healthcare applications that support a longer and higher quality of life at home for the elderly and the disabled. It discusses intelligent platforms involving agents, context-aware and location-based services, and classification systems that enable advanced monitoring and interpretation of patient status and optimization of the environment to improve medical assessments. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges that exist in extending @home assistive technologies to @city assistive technologies.     

Potential pitfalls of smart city development: A study on parking mobile applications (apps) in Hong Kong

Smart cities are built upon information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enable a broad range of advanced services. Through a comprehensive literature review, this study identified four pitfalls brought by the pervasive application of ICT, including information insecurity, privacy leakage, information islands, and digital divide. Therefore, a questionnaire survey together with 27 interviews was conducted in Hong Kong to investigate how the public perceived these pitfalls within the context of mobile apps providing real-time parking information which form a major part of smart mobility. System insecurity and privacy leakage were found to arouse worries among the app-users while their awareness of protecting personal data was found to have room for improvement. Islands of real-time parking information occur as a result of the lack of collaboration among private carpark operators. Digital divide existed widely among the disadvantaged groups and the problem cannot be solved by mere provision of ICT facilities. Overall, technologies alone cannot make a city smart or smarter. It is the suitable way in which ICTs are used to serve all citizens that matters.