The Age of Intelligent Cities

Smart Environments and Innovation-for-all Strategies

Nicos Komninos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317669159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book concludes a trilogy that began with Intelligent Cities: Innovation, Knowledge Systems and digital spaces (Routledge 2002) and Intelligent Cities and Globalisation of Innovation Networks (Routledge 2008). Together these books examine intelligent cities as environments of innovation and collaborative problem-solving. In this final book, the focus is on planning, strategy and governance of intelligent cities.

Divided into three parts, each section elaborates upon complementary aspects of intelligent city strategy and planning. Part I is about the drivers and architectures of the spatial intelligence of cities, while Part II turns to planning processes and discusses top-down and bottom-up planning for intelligent cities. Cities such as Amsterdam, Manchester, Stockholm and Helsinki are examples of cities that have used bottom-up planning through the gradual implementation of successive initiatives for regeneration. On the other hand, Living PlanIT, Neapolis in Cyprus, and Saudi Arabia intelligent cities have started with the top-down approach, setting up urban operating systems and common central platforms. Part III focuses on intelligent city strategies; how cities should manage the drivers of spatial intelligence, create smart environments, mobilise communities, and offer new solutions to address city problems.

Main findings of the book are related to a series of models which capture fundamental aspects of intelligent cities making and operation. These models consider structure, function, planning, strategies toward intelligent environments and a model of governance based on mobilisation of communities, knowledge architectures, and innovation cycles.

Part I
What makes cities intelligent?

Drivers of spatial intelligence of cities

1
Intelligent cities – smart cities

The landscape

1. The rise of a new planning paradigm

A short article by Haya El Nasser (2011) in USA TODAY titled “Will ‘intelligent cities’ put an end to suburban sprawl?” received considerable attention on the Internet, resulting in hundreds of references to it on social media. The argument made by El Nasser is that ‘smart growth’ is near the end of its shelf-life, concluding a 20-year cycle as a major urban planning paradigm, and now ‘intelligent cities’ has become the new “darling lingo of planners” as it captures the essence of twenty-first-century technology that can help track how people use cities and live within them. This does not mean, El Nasser argues, that the sustainability principles of Smart Growth and New Urbanism – the design movement driving sustainable growth with compact cities, multiple transport choices, natural ecosystem preservation, passive architecture, and green energy solutions – has become obsolete, but rather that intelligent cities as a new planning paradigm can more efficiently drive urban renewal towards sustainability. Connecting the concept of intelligent cities with urban renewal opens up a new path that allows us to view every city and city-district from a new perspective and consider how intelligent city planning principles and strategies can sustain urban regeneration in terms of competitiveness, as well as social and environmental sustainability.

The new planning paradigm of intelligent cities (although ‘smart cities’ is the term mostly used in Europe) has been forged by academic research and experimental city projects. A series of publications that has appeared since 2000 reflects the evolution in thinking in this field and discusses the contribution of information technologies and the Internet to city development and planning, the city and the digital space, and the role of virtual spaces and digital ecosystems in enhancing innovation within twenty-first-century cities. This literature clearly shows how open digital platforms are used to empower citizens, enterprises, and organisations in developing innovative, open, and collaborative solutions to make cities more efficient and sustainable.

Among the first publications that opened up this new field was the book by Ishida and Isbister (2000) on technologies, experiences, and future prospects of digital cities, which focused on the way in which the information society, the Internet, and mobile computing were creating a virtual space over cities. This was a book devoted to digital cities and contained experimental city projects that were using platforms for communication, city representation, and city management. Based on the proceedings of an international symposium in Kyoto, Japan, this collection of papers made clear the interdisciplinary perspective that is needed for making digital cities. The digital cities symposium series provided material for another two publications with similar titles, Digital Cities II (Tanabe et al., 2005), and Digital Cities III (Van den Besselaar and Koizumi, 2005), which discussed the concept of the digital city, politics, knowledge and data modelling, design, monitoring and evaluation, and technologies and architectures, while presenting case studies and city experiments. The social, class, power, gender, and ethnicity impact of information and communication technologies on cities and how new media in cities shape societies, economies, and cultures was the focus of another influential publication on digital city spaces. The Cybercities Reader (Graham, 2003) contained case studies from all over the world such as Amsterdam, Lima, Jamaica, and Melbourne, and highlighted different ways in which the digital space affected all aspects of city life, economy, commerce, (tele)working, community, urban surveillance, and control. Digital cities were also discussed in Aurigi (2005), which focused on economic regeneration and place promotion strategies sustained by electronically distributed services and participatory decision-making. Case studies of European cities were presented, where urban processes were interwoven with front-end information sites, digital spaces, and digital networks. Laguerre (2006) explored the digitisation of the American city, and how information technology practices in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco metropolitan area were re-organising social relations, global interactions, and workplace environments.

However, the creation of digital spaces was not the only driver of current developments in the field. Another set of processes, equally important, fed urban change and new planning concepts. At the turn of the century, some cities and regions in Europe, Japan, and the USA displayed an exceptional capacity for developing new knowledge and innovation. They offered a favourable environment for research, technology, and innovation based on proximity, knowledge spillovers, institutions for learning, social capital, and digital collaborative spaces. Intelligent Cities: Innovation, Knowledge Systems and Digital Spaces (Komninos, 2002) analysed three different spatial models for creating environments of innovation, based on spatial proximity and knowledge spillovers (industrial districts and clusters), learning institutions (innovating regions), and physical-digital innovation ecosystems (intelligent cities). A follow-up publication (Komninos, 2008) explained the rise of intelligent cities with respect to the spread of global information and technology supply networks and user-driven innovation processes. The distinctive characteristic of intelligent cities was attributed to the integration of three types of intelligence: human intelligence of the population, collective intelligence of institutions for collaboration, and machine intelligence of digital networks and applications. The book also described the building blocks of intelligent cities with respect to collaborative physical-digital platforms sustaining networks for strategic intelligence, technology learning and acquisition, innovation, and product marketing and promotion. The same concerns were reflected in Broadband Economies (Bell et al., 2008), which looked at how city information and communication infrastructure and digital services sustain the innovation economy of cities. Based on experiences from the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), the authors told the story of ‘intelligent communities’ around the world: cities that deployed broadband networks to build local prosperity, improve global competitiveness, and promote social inclusion. The work of Yigitcanlar, Velibeyoglu, and Baum (2008) also explored similar initiatives for sustaining knowledge cities and processes for the successful integration of information technologies and urban knowledge-based development. Within the same strand of works, publications on the “knowledge city” (Carillo, 2006; Edvinsson, 2008) outlined the contribution of learning institutions and knowledge-based networks to the wealth of cities.

Another strand of publications looked towards a more extended digital space, which is being created by wireless broadband networks, mobile devices, open platforms, and systems embedded into the physical space of cities. Aurigi and De Cindio (2008) discussed augmented urban spaces created by ubiquitous computing, mobile devices, and wireless connectivity. This new intersection of physical and digital environments is reshaping cities and has implications for the public sphere, community empowerment, and people-led urban planning. Leach (2009) looked at computer-aided techniques for experimental use of generative design tools and parametric design, and how cities might gain insights from digital platforms like the iPhone and offer open-innovation environments to citizens and organisations.

More recent publications revisit smart cities from a novel perspective. Deakin (2013) and Deakin and Al Waer (2012) see a transition from intelligent to smart cities, and reinterpreted W. Mitchell’s (2007) analysis from the city of bits to e-topia as transition from intelligent to smart cities. Hatzelhoffer et al. (2012) looked at the practical issues of smart cities and the ingredients for converting innovative ideas into reality. Townsend (2013) wrote about the great challenges of urbanisation, the need for thinking cities and technologies used in future cities in the long rather than the short term, and the “birth of a new civic movement as the smartphone becomes a platform for reinventing cities from the bottom-up.” Greenfield and Kim’s (2013) Against the Smart City presents a critical account of top-down ambitious projects such New Songdo, Masdar City, and PlanIT Valley, “interventions of incremental enhancement-of off-the-shelf products acquired through existing procurement channels, services via conventional contracts, tacked onto spatial and institutional arrangements that already exist” (Greenfield and Kim, 2013, n.p.). Another strand of literature evolving in parallel discuss sentient or sensing cities, urban informatics and ubiquitous computing, city infrastructures, and technologies embedded into a continuum of places that are seemingly coherent (Wood, 2009) that support citizen engagement (Foth et al., 2011; Shepard, 2011) with real-time data (Capelli, 2013).

This cited literature (though very selective and referring only to some of the major books out of a large number of publications) offers a summary account of the evolving thinking about intelligent cities. It is clear that a new paradigm of city planning and development has emerged from the convergence of globalisation, user-driven innovation, information technologies and the Internet, the widespread use of social media, and the collective intelligence of the Web. A radical turn towards the intelligent city paradigm is taking place as information and communication technologies meet with innovation-led urban and regional economies. Intelligent cities are part of the efforts being made to create environments that improve our cognitive skills, as well as our ability to learn, foresee, innovate, and produce more with less. They achieve it by creating smart environments that enable the engagement of citizens with innovation, while also promoting the integration of skills and competences scattered spatially on a global scale. In such territories, local systems of innovation are placed into digital collaboration spaces, interactive tools are offered, and sensors and systems feed the system with real-time data. The latent and explicit promise of the intelligent city paradigm is to set out the conditions conditions for more effectively addressing the great contemporary challenges of urbanisation, growth, sustainability, and inclusion.

2. Movements shaping the intelligent city paradigm

Major contributions that shape the paradigm of intelligent cities have come from academic research, city planning initiatives, policies of international organisations, and solutions offered by large multinational companies.

Academic research has been very active in defining the overall landscape. The first academic paper on intelligent cities appeared in 1990 (Batty, 1990), and the first academic paper on smart cities was published in 1992 (Gibson et al., 1992). These forerunner publications were not related to the World Wide Web that was still being set up at that time, and which a few years later would become the main driver of intelligent city thinking. A good number of university research labs in the EU and the USA focus exclusively on this field, including the pioneering lab of William Mitchell at the MIT Smart Cities Research Group; the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at UCL; URENIO Research at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; MIT Senseable City Lab; the Centre of Regional Science at the Vienna University of Technology; and the Centre for Learning Communities at Edinburgh Napier University. However, high-level research is being carried out by individual researchers or groups in laboratories active in related fields, such as collective intelligence, intelligent environments, living labs, environment and energy optimisation, intelligent transportation systems, innovation management, knowledge management, and e-government.

City planning initiatives in Europe, the USA, and Asia contributed enormously in scaling up the discourse and practice of intelligent city planning, by undertaking initiatives and implementing pilot projects. Well-known cases include Smart Amsterdam with a large number of digital spaces for green mobility, environmental protection, and energy savings; Smart Santander, with thousands of sensors embedded into the city and experimental applications related to the environment, noise, traffic, and parking; Barcelona’s innovation clusters, innohubs, open Wi-Fi, and open data initiatives; Zaragoza’s Milla Digital; Manchester’s IT-based urban regeneration; Stockholm’s public fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband network and e-services for education, social care, and inclusion; Singapore’s iN2015 Masterplan to sustain information and communications technologies (ICT) and innovation in every economic sector of the city (logistics, health, banking, tourism, manufacturing, education); Malaysia Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC Malaysia); Seoul Digital Media City (DMC); New Songdo in Korea; New Economic Cities of Saudi Arabia; New York City’s digital city (NYC Digital) with 311 government information and non-emergency service; and many others.

An extremely valuable source of information about local experimentation in the field is to be found in the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) and in the cities that have received awards from the ICF since 2001, either as Smart21, Top7, or intelligent communities of the year. Many cities and regions appear on this list, covering a variety of sizes and roles: small cities such as Pirai, Brazil, with 23,000 residents to multi-million-population cities like Tianjin, China, with a population of 11 million; a global metropolis like New York City and small rural communities like Bario, Malaysia; and industrial cities and city suburbs. Among them, awards for the most advanced intelligent communities were given to LaGrange, USA (2000); New York, USA (2001); Calgary, Canada (2002); Glasgow, UK (2004) Mitaka, Japan (2005); Taipei, Taiwan (2006); Waterloo, Ontario, Canada (2007); Gangnam District-Seoul, South Korea (2008); Stockholm, Sweden (2009); Suwon, South Korea (2010); Eindhoven, the Netherlands (2011); Riverside, California, USA (2012); and Taichung City, Taiwan (2013). These cities were deemed to be the most intelligent communities with respect to five criteria of excellence in ICT, knowledge, and innovation, which capture efforts in broadband infrastructure and the local capacity for digital communication, knowledge workforce and the capability of the population for qualified work in knowledge-intensive activities, innovation and innovation-friendly environment that attracts creative people and businesses, digital democracy and policies to bridge digital divides, and marketing to strengthen the attractiveness of communities with respect to other cities and regions.

International organisations, such as the EU, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the US National Building Museum, also gave an important push to the intelligent city agenda. Most relevant is EU research from the 7th Frame Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7), the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP), and now the EU Horizon 2020 programme, which aim at stimulating a wider uptake of innovative ICT-based services f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Introduction: the age of intelligent cities
• PART I What makes cities intelligent? drivers of spatial intelligence of cities
• PART II Planning for intelligent cities: connecting bottom-up and top-down perspectives
• PART III Strategies and governance: innovation-for-all into smart environments
• Index