Inside Smart Cities
Inside Smart Cities

Author: Andrew Karvonen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-03

Total Pages: 453

ISBN-13: 1351166182

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The era of the smart city has arrived. Only a decade ago, the promise of optimising urban services through the widespread application of information and communication technologies was largely a techno-utopian fantasy. Today, smart urbanisation is occurring via urban projects, policies and visions in hundreds of cities around the globe. Inside Smart Cities provides real-world evidence on how local authorities, small and medium enterprises, corporations, utility providers and civil society groups are creating smart cities at the neighbourhood, city and regional scales. Twenty three empirically detailed case studies from the Global North and South – ranging from Cape Town, Stockholm and Abu Dhabi to Philadelphia, Hong Kong and Santiago – illustrate the multiple and diverse incarnations of smart urbanism. The contributors draw on ideas from urban studies, geography, urban planning, science and technology studies and innovation studies to go beyond the rhetoric of technological innovation and reveal the political, social and physical implications of digitalising the built environment. Collectively, the practices of smart urbanism raise fundamental questions about the sustainability, liveability and resilience of cities in the future. The findings are relevant to academics, students, practitioners and urban stakeholders who are questioning how urban innovation relates to politics and place.

Urban Innovation Systems
Urban Innovation Systems

Author: Willem van Winden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-11

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1317917456

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Why are some regions and cities so good at attracting talented people, creating high-level knowledge, and producing exciting new ideas and innovations? What are the ingredients of success? Can innovative cities be created and stimulated, or do they just flourish by mere chance? This book analyses the development and management of innovation systems in cities, in order to provide a better understanding of what makes such systems perform. The book opens by developing a conceptual model that combines insights from urban economics with economic geography, urban governance and place marketing. This highlights the relevance of path dependence, different types of proximity (and the role of clusters, networks and platforms), institutional conditions, place attractiveness and place identity in the evolution of local innovation systems. The authors then draw on this conceptual framework to structure empirical case studies in three cities with a relatively high innovation performance: Eindhoven (the Netherlands), Stockholm (Sweden) and Suzhou (China). Through these case studies they provide a detailed analysis of how successful innovation systems evolve and what makes them tick. Unique to this book is the linking of analysis to concrete policy and management responses. The book ends with a discussion on six themes in the development of successful urban innovation systems: firm-capabilities and leader firms, higher education and research, attractive environment, place branding, institutional environment and entrepreneurship. Each theme is examined fully, drawing lessons from the case studies, and from recent insights and other cases discussed in the literature. This title will be of interest to students, researchers and policymakers involved in regional innovation systems, knowledge locations and cluster development.

Uneven Innovation
Uneven Innovation

Author: Jennifer Clark

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-02-25

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 0231545789

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The city of the future, we are told, is the smart city. By seamlessly integrating information and communication technologies into the provision and management of public services, such cities will enhance opportunity and bolster civic engagement. Smarter cities will bring in new revenue while saving money. They will be more of everything that a twenty-first century urban planner, citizen, and elected official wants: more efficient, more sustainable, and more inclusive. Is this true? In Uneven Innovation, Jennifer Clark considers the potential of these emerging technologies as well as their capacity to exacerbate existing inequalities and even produce new ones. She reframes the smart city concept within the trajectory of uneven development of cities and regions, as well as the long history of technocratic solutions to urban policy challenges. Clark argues that urban change driven by the technology sector is following the patterns that have previously led to imbalanced access, opportunities, and outcomes. The tech sector needs the city, yet it exploits and maintains unequal arrangements, embedding labor flexibility and precarity in the built environment. Technology development, Uneven Innovation contends, is the easy part; understanding the city and its governance, regulation, access, participation, and representation—all of which are complex and highly localized—is the real challenge. Clark’s critique leads to policy prescriptions that present a path toward an alternative future in which smart cities result in more equitable communities.

The Innovation Complex
The Innovation Complex

Author: Sharon Zukin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0190083832

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New York is rapidly changing in response to a new economy, but startups, tech workers, and venture capital are not visible unless you know where to look for them--in old industrial neighborhoods, on the waterfront, and at events like hackathons and meetups. In The Innovation Complex, Sharon Zukin shows the people and places that shape the urban tech economy, making cities more successful for businesses yet in some ways less livable.

Social Innovations in the Urban Context
Social Innovations in the Urban Context

Author: Taco Brandsen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-05

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 3319215515

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This book addresses the practice of social innovation, which is currently very much in the public eye. New ideas and approaches are needed to tackle the severe and wicked problems with which contemporary societies are struggling. Especially in times of economic crisis, social innovation is regarded as one of the crucial elements needed to move forward. Our knowledge of its dynamics has significantly progressed, thanks to an abundance of studies on social innovation both general and sector-specific. However, despite the valuable research conducted over the past years, the systematic analysis of social innovation is still contested and incomplete. The questions asked in the book will be the following: 1. What is the nature of social innovations? 2.What patterns can be identified in social innovations emerging at the local level? 3.How is the emergence and spread of social innovations related to urban governance? More precisely, which conditions and arrangements facilitate and hinders social innovation? We explore these questions using different types of data and methods, and studying different contexts. In particular, we focus on innovations that aim at solving problems of the young unemployed, single parents and migrants. This analysis is based on original research carried out in the period 2010-2013 in the framework of a European project with a specific empirical research strategy. Research was carried out in 20 cities in 10 different European countries.

How Cities Will Save the World
How Cities Will Save the World

Author: Ray Brescia

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-06-03

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1317120884

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Cities are frequently viewed as passive participants to state and national efforts to solve the toughest urban problems. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Cities are actively devising innovative policy solutions and they have the potential to do even more. In this volume, the authors examine current threats to communities across the U.S. and the globe. They draw on first-hand experience with, and accounts of, the crises already precipitated by climate change, population shifts, and economic inequality. This volume is distinguished, however, by its central objective of traveling beyond a description of problems and a discussion of their serious implications. Each of the thirteen chapters frame specific recommendations and guidance on the range of core capacities and interventions that 21st Century cities would be prudent to consider in mapping their immediate and future responses to these critical problems. How Cities Will Save the World brings together authors with frontline experience in the fields of city redevelopment, urban infrastructure, healthcare, planning, immigration, historic preservation, and local government administration. They not only offer their ground level view of threats caused by climate change, population shifts, and economic inequality, but they provide solution-driven narratives identifying promising innovations to help cities tackle this century’s greatest adversities.

Sustainable Cities
Sustainable Cities

Author: Simon Joss

Publisher: Red Globe Press

Published: 2015-06-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1137006366

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Sustainability is a watchword of policy-makers and planners around the world, with cities providing the main focus for development. This comprehensive introduction to sustainability shows how cities are adopting sustainable practices, and considers how to achieve a public-governance approach for the urban age.

Urban Innovation Networks
Urban Innovation Networks

Author: Alexander Gutzmer

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-11-07

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 3319246240

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This book offers fresh insights into how companies can engage with, and make use of, the modern metropolis. Based on actor-network theory and the resource-based view of the firm, it demonstrates how the contemporary city can be seen – and used – as a resource for corporate innovation. The main argument is that companies have to build what the author calls “urban innovation networks.” After a theory-based outline of such networks, the author demonstrates the extent to which different institutional players – companies such as Audi, Ikea and Siemens, but also arts institutions like the Haus der Kunst in Munich – are already working to create them. The book combines management thinking with urban theory and the sociology of networks to create a unique blend of different views of capitalism and space, offering a new perspective on both the modern metropolis and globally operating companies active within our distinctly urban culture.

City Bound
City Bound

Author: Gerald E. Frug

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2013-07-02

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0801460085

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Many major American cities are defying the conventional wisdom that suburbs are the communities of the future. But as these urban centers prosper, they increasingly confront significant constraints. In City Bound, Gerald E. Frug and David J. Barron address these limits in a new way. Based on a study of the differing legal structures of Boston, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle, City Bound explores how state law determines what cities can and cannot do to raise revenue, control land use, and improve city schools. Frug and Barron show that state law can make it much easier for cities to pursue a global-city or a tourist-city agenda than to respond to the needs of middle-class residents or to pursue regional alliances. But they also explain that state law is often so outdated, and so rooted in an unjustified distrust of local decision making, that the legal process makes it hard for successful cities to develop and implement any coherent vision of their future. Their book calls not for local autonomy but for a new structure of state-local relations that would enable cities to take the lead in charting the future course of urban development. It should be of interest to everyone who cares about the future of American cities, whether political scientists, planners, architects, lawyers, or simply citizens.

Making Cities Work: The Dynamics Of Urban Innovation
Making Cities Work: The Dynamics Of Urban Innovation

Author: David Morley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-13

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 042972795X

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This book is an outcome of the conference 'Urban Innovation: Working Solutions to the Problems of Human Settlement' held in 1977. It focuses on urban innovations as working alternatives that reflect an institutional capacity to adapt complex human systems in response to basic environmental change.