This book looks at what makes a city smart by describing, challenging, and offering democratic alternatives to the view that the answer begins and ends with technology. Drawing on worldwide case studies documenting the redevelopment of old and the creation of new cities, it provides an essential guide to the future of urban life in a digital world.
Key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts for understanding smart cities, along with discussions of both drawbacks and benefits of this approach to urban problems. Over the past ten years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Emerging smart cities have become both crucibles and showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the integration of big data into everyday life. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally networked solutions to urban problems? Or are they neoliberal, corporate-controlled, undemocratic non-places? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise introduction to smart cities, presenting key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts, along with discussions of both the drawbacks and the benefits of this approach to urban life. After reviewing current terminology and justifications employed by technology designers, journalists, and researchers, the book describes three models for smart city development—smart-from-the-start cities, retrofitted cities, and social cities—and offers examples of each. It covers technologies and methods, including sensors, public wi-fi, big data, and smartphone apps, and discusses how developers conceive of interactions among the built environment, technological and urban infrastructures, citizens, and citizen engagement. Throughout, the author—who has studied smart cities around the world—argues that smart city developers should work more closely with local communities, recognizing their preexisting relationship to urban place and realizing the limits of technological fixes. Smartness is a means to an end: improving the quality of urban life.
Edited by thought leaders in the fields of urban informatics and urban interaction design, this book brings together case studies and examples from around the world to discuss the role that urban interfaces, citizen action, and city making play in the quest to create and maintain not only secure and resilient, but productive, sustainable and viable urban environments. The book debates the impact of these trends on theory, policy and practice. The individual chapters are based on blind peer reviewed contributions by leading researchers working at the intersection of the social / cultural, technical / digital, and physical / spatial domains of urbanism scholarship. The book will appeal not only to researchers and students, but also to a vast number of practitioners in the private and public sector interested in accessible content that clearly and rigorously analyses the potential offered by urban interfaces, mobile technology, and location-based services in the context of engaging people with open, smart and participatory urban environments.
Why technology is not an end in itself, and how cities can be “smart enough,” using technology to promote democracy and equity. Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself. In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to technology: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.
In the contemporary city, the physical infrastructure and sensorial experiences of two millennia are now interwoven within an invisible digital matrix. This matrix alters human perceptions of the city, informs our behavior, and increasingly influences the urban designs we ultimately inhabit. Digital Futures and the City of Today cuts through these issues to analyze the work of architects, designers, media specialists, and a growing number of community activists, laying out a multifaceted view of the complex integrated phenomenon of the contemporary city. Split into three relevant sections, the book interrogates the concept of the "smart" city, examines innovative digital projects from around the world, documents experimental visions for the future, and describes projects that engage local communities in the design process.
Digital and Smart Cities presents an overview of how technologies shape our cities. There is a growing awareness in the fields of design and architecture of the need to address the way that technology affects the urban condition. This book aims to give an informative and definitive overview of the topic of digital and smart cities. It explores the topic from a range of different perspectives, both theoretical and historical, and through a range of case studies of digital cities around the world. The approach taken by the authors is to view the city as a socially constructed set of activities, practices and organisations. This enables the discussion to open up a more holistic and citizen- centred understanding of how technology shapes urban change through the way it is imagined, used, implemented and developed in a societal context. By drawing together a range of currently quite disparate discussions, the aim is to enable the reader to take their own critical position within the topic. The book starts out with definitions and sets out the various interpretations and aspects of what constitutes and defines digital cities. The text then investigates and considers the range of factors that shape the characteristics of digital cities and draws together different disciplinary perspectives into a coherent discussion. The consideration of the different dimensions of the digital city is backed up with a series of relevant case studies of global city contexts in order to frame the discussion with real world examples.
This book presents a comprehensive overview of the various aspects for the development of smart cities from a European perspective. It presents both theoretical concepts as well as empirical studies and cases of smart city programs and their capacity to create value for citizens. The contributions in this book are a result of an increasing interest for this topic, supported by both national governments and international institutions. The book offers a large panorama of the most important aspects of smart cities evolution and implementation. It compares European best practices and analyzes how smart projects and programs in cities could help to improve the quality of life in the urban space and to promote cultural and economic development.
Since the late 1990s, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been hailed as a potentially revolutionary feature of the planning and management of Western cities. Economic regeneration and place promotion strategies have exploited these new technologies; city management has experimented with electronically distributed services, and participation in public life and democratic decision-making processes can be made more flexible by the use of ICTs. All of these technological initiatives have often been presented and accessed via an urban front-end information site known as 'digital city' or 'city network.' Illustrated by a range of European case studies, this volume examines the social, political and management issues and potential problems in the establishment of an electronic layer of information and services in cities. The book provides a better understanding of the direction European cities are going towards in the implementation of ICTs...
This book explores the emergence and development of data in cities. It exposes how Information Communication Technology (ICT) corporations seeking to capitalize on cities developing needs for urban technologies have contributed to many of the issues we are faced with today, including urbanization, centralization of wealth and climate change. Using several case studies, the book provides examples of the, in part, detrimental effects ICT driven ‘Smart City’ solutions have had and will have on the human characteristics that contribute to the identity and sense of belonging innate to many of our cities. The rise in Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and technologies like social media, has changed how people interact with and in cities, and Allam discusses of how these changes require planners, engineers and other urban professionals to adjust their approach. The main question the book seeks to address is ‘how can we use emerging technologies to recalibrate our cities and ensure increased livability, whilst also effectively dealing with their associate challenges?’ This is an ongoing conversation, but one that requires extensive thought as it has extensive consequences. This book will be of interest to students, academics, professionals and policy makers across a broad range of subjects including urban studies, architecture and STS, geography and social policy.
In a series of essays, this book describes and analyzes the concept and theory of the recent smart city phenomenon from a global perspective, with a focus on its implementation around the world. After defining the concept it then elaborates on the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as an enabler for smart cities, and the role of ICT in the interplay with smart mobility. A separate chapter develops the concept of an urban smart dashboard for stakeholders to measure performance as well as the economic and public value. It offers examples of smart cities around the globe, and two detailed case studies on Genoa and Amsterdam exemplify the book’s theoretical and empirical findings, helping readers understand and evaluate the effectiveness and capability of new smart city programs.
