The Routledge Companion to Smart Cities

Katharine S. Willis, Alessandro Aurigi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351713207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Pianificazione e sviluppo urbano

The Routledge Companion to Smart Cities explores the question of what it means for a city to be 'smart', raises some of the tensions emerging in smart city developments and considers the implications for future ways of inhabiting and understanding the urban condition. The volume draws together a critical and cross-disciplinary overview of the emerging topic of smart cities and explores it from a range of theoretical and empirical viewpoints.

This timely book brings together key thinkers and projects from a wide range of fields and perspectives into one volume to provide a valuable resource that would enable the reader to take their own critical position within the topic. To situate the topic of the smart city for the reader and establish key concepts, the volume sets out the various interpretations and aspects of what constitutes and defines smart cities. It investigates and considers the range of factors that shape the characteristics of smart cities and draws together different disciplinary perspectives. The consideration of what shapes the smart city is explored through discussing three broad 'parts' – issues of governance, the nature of urban development and how visions are realised – and includes chapters that draw on empirical studies to frame the discussion with an understanding not just of the nature of the smart city but also how it is studied, understood and reflected upon.

The Companion will appeal to academics and advanced undergraduates and postgraduates from across many disciplines including Urban Studies, Geography, Urban Planning, Sociology and Architecture, by providing state of the art reviews of key themes by leading scholars in the field, arranged under clearly themed sections.

1

Introduction

Katharine S. Willis and Alessandro Aurigi

Introduction

Cities have always been infused by technologies; in fact the urban condition is inherently underpinned by technological processes, interactions and practices. But the relationship of the digital and technical in society and the city is both changeful and evolving (Graham, 2004). The ‘smart city’ is defined by the emergence of new ways in which material urban systems are interconnected through information and data, changes in the processes through which cities are monitored, managed and analysed and a shift in how citizens participate, interact with the city and inhabit its spaces. This raises questions as to the future governance of cities and the role of interconnected data, people, places and urban systems which makes the challenge of understanding, designing and reflecting on smart cities an important new field to be investigated. To address this challenge, the volume aims to answer the question of what it means for a city to be ‘smart’, raise some of the tensions emerging in smart city developments and consider the implications for future ways of inhabiting and understanding the urban condition.

The key feature of this volume is that it draws on perspectives from the field of urban studies, architecture, urban design and urban planning. This recognises that the smart city agenda can be seen as part of a legacy of urban studies, urban design and planning thinking as well as being informed by critical thinking from the social sciences and more development-oriented enquiry from fields like computing science and interaction design. It sits within a growing body of edited books that address the smart city from a range of critical perspectives and draw together multidisciplinary empirical research on the topic (Cardullo et al., 2019; Deakin and Wear, 2012; Karvonen et al., 2019; Kitchin et al., 2019; Marvin et al., 2016). To situate the topic of the smart city for the reader, the volume sets out the various interpretations and aspects of what constitutes and defines smart cities in order to frame the topic and establish key concepts. It investigates and considers the range of factors that shape the characteristics of smart cities and draw together different disciplinary perspectives. The consideration of what shapes the smart city will be explored through discussing three broad ‘parts’: issues of governance, the nature of urban development and how visions are realised, and includes chapters that draw on empirical studies to frame the discussion with an understanding not just of the nature of the smart city but how it is studied, understood and reflected upon. Overall the book situates the topic as capturing the landscape of the discussion by drawing together a range of disciplinary approaches and discussions and aims to provide a resource to enable readers to take their own critical position within the field of smart cities discourse.

The smart city in context

It is important to recognise that, whilst widely used, the term ‘smart cities’ is inherently ambiguous and used to describe and characterise a wide range of urban technological systems, strategies and also agendas. The label ‘smart city’ was first used in the early stages of the noughties, but it was not until around 2006 that it started to be widely accepted (Kitchin et al., 2019; Willis and Aurigi, 2017, p. 2), and is often institutionally led as part of city or industry development or investment strategies. The term smart city is used across commercial, city and academic fields to characterise cities where technology is both embedded within the city in the form of sensors and other monitoring infrastructure and also the devices and platforms that enable people and often commercial or city governments to ‘manage’ this data in a large scale and ‘real-time’ way (Cocchia, 2014; Willis and Aurigi, 2017). According to Marvin, Luque-Ayala and McFarlane, the smart city opens up ‘a new language of “smartness”’ that is reshaping debates around contemporary cities (Marvin et al., 2016, p. 2). In a smart city, computing power moves beyond wired or wireless infrastructure such as the broadband networks of the ubiquitous city, and pervades everyday objects and systems of the city, from parking sensors, to pollution monitoring to pedestrian footfall. William Mitchell, one of the authors to provide the first accessible introduction to the links between the city and technology as they emerged in the nineties (Mitchell, 1995, 2000, 2004), also provides an early overview of some core concepts and technologies that make up a smart city which sees cities ‘fast transforming into artificial ecosystems of interconnected, interdependent intelligent digital organisms’, which he argues is a ‘fundamentally new technological condition confronting architects and product designers in the twenty-first century’ (Mitchell, 2006). Mitchell captures some of the basic underlying features of what is termed smart city: a systemisation of city services and infrastructures together with an embedding of technological sensing and monitoring software and hardware into the fabric of the city. Although cities have always inherently been reflexive in nature, they are shaped by the people that inhabit them and their practices, cultures and infrastructures (Sassen 2013). The degree to which smart cities include a level of technological systemisation can be seen to shift the balance of this reflexivity (Crang and Graham, 2007; Shepard, 2011). This is where the challenge of understanding, designing and reflecting on smart cities becomes an important new field to be investigated. The terminology of smart city is still evolving, and it is expected that the term itself will soon be superseded by the new label with new agendas, interests and technological references and dependencies.

Introduction to the structure of the book

The volume is divided into three parts: governance, development and visions, each of which each is also divided into two sub-sections. The aim of the three parts of the book is to frame different perspectives to read and interpret smart urbanism. These underpin different approaches to the smart city agenda in a series of contexts and projects. Each part contributes a critical introduction to a core approaches, drawing on a key text which is introduced with a contextual commentary. The volume also draws on a broad range of different methodological approaches that are used and applied to design, study and analyse smart cities. This ranges from methods from data driven tools from the field of urban science and urban informatics to the more socially constructed, participatory approaches from the social sciences. These chapters include clearly described examples or case studies that demonstrate how the method is used in a specific context and to investigate the nature of inclusivity, diversity and participation.

Part I Smart city governance

Urban governance, data and participatory infrastructure

In the last decade the issue of governance in cities has become more complex as the nature of data flows have themselves become more integrated and city infrastructures, processes and social practices. The fundamental problem with the technocratic approach in the emergence of smart cities is that they tend to operate on a techno-deterministic logic that prioritises market-led solutions for urban development based on a promise of optimisation and efficiency of resources. Authors such as Aurigi and De Cindio (2008), Kitchin (2015; Kitchin and Perng, 2016), Marvin et al. (2016), Rose (2015) and Sassen (2012) have critiqued this approach since it not only reinforces a universalising view of urban development, but also masks the social tensions, issues and roles of its citizens in its construction and the role of the city itself. Haklay highlights how the failure of digital technologies to solve urban challenges is ‘linked to the strategy where technology is used to disenfranchise, fails to enable local knowledge, and black boxes devices and technical infrastructure’ (Haklay, 2013). The increasing role of software, data and artificial intelligence (AI) in city services and processes has implications for the governance of cities because software is embedded in often subtle and invisible ways and it produces data-driven outcomes that are not analogous with the material, physical and social life of the city. There is also the underlying issue of not only ownership of the software that ‘manages’ the city, but also consequently management and control (Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2015; Vanolo, 2013). The high complexity of such data-driven systems means that they rarely, if ever, are developed and managed through city governance mechanisms, but controlled by private sector IT companies such as IBM, Cisco and Siemens who have vested interests well beyond those of the city itself. This leads to new forms of governmentality that rely on generating and monitoring systematic information about individuals which makes the systems and apparatus of governance more panoptical in nature (Kitchin, 2011, p. 949).

Key to this is understanding the role of data within new modes of participatory governance and what Kitchin has highlighted as the multitude ethical issues in smart cities governance. Databases and data analytics are not neutral, technical means of assembling and making sense of data but instead are socio-technical in nature, shaped by philosophical ideas and technical means (2016). In fact, the proper consideration of ethical considerations within smart city projects may prove to be one of the defining points in the development of projects on the ground, as this points to significantly more participatory and open modes of governance than are currently being implemented.

Chapters in this section are as follows:

• A city is not a computer
• Bias in urban research: from tools to environments
• Urban science: a short primer
• Defining smart cities: high and low frequency cities, big data and urban theory
• Digital information and the right to the city
• Shaping participatory public data infrastructure in the smart city: open data standards and the turn to transparency.

Governing, inclusion and smart citizens

Smart cities implement new socio-technical processes that require critical reflection around what constitutes urban management and control. They lead to new thinking about how technology affects cities where one of the key factors is that the digital is not simply about technology, computers or networks or code but about how people use, interact and behave with technology. It is through inhabitation and a context in their lives that the digital becomes meaningful. This is not simply because technology can establish different patterns of social relations and ways of living but because they can act as a potential reorganisation of social relations. This also includes patterns of inclusion and exclusion that emerge through these social relations constructed through technologies, and in particular a discussion on how those that lack digital skills and access to equipment may become excluded as cities become increasingly digital (Cardullo et al., 2019). In this context, there is an increasing body of critical analysis that looks beyond celebrative and top-down approaches to include more diverse thinking about inclusion and ‘citizenship’ within smart city initiatives (Datta, 2018; Gabrys, 2014; Rabari and Storper, 2015; Vanolo, 2013). These document how smart city agendas rarely address issues of social differences in already-existing cities and March and Ribera-Fumaz (2014, p. 826) highlight the corresponding need to respond to the question of ‘whose smartness and whose cities?’ This particularly includes cases of smart city projects in the Global South, and the various ways in which new urban technologies are used, negotiated and even subverted by citizens. In this context, a number of authors have drawn on empirical evidence for how smart city projects arguably lead to the exacerbation of existing urban historical, material and social inequalities (Odendaal, 2011; Sadoway and Shekhar, 2014; Vanolo, 2016; Wiig, 2016).

These premium and highly connected networked infrastructures often ignore less-favoured and intervening places, enabling connectivity to operate ‘selectively, linking valuable segments and discarding used up, or irrelevant, locales and people’ (Castells, 1998, p. 390). Recent work has revealed that many so-called smart technologies do not empower citizens to become active players in their cities (de Lange and de Waal, 2019). This can particularly be seen in the promotion and development of private tech-led smart city initiatives, which are typically underpinned by a focus on highly connected, highly urbanised global cities with a highly skilled workforce (Hollands, 2014). But as Hollands points out, this has the potential to lead to social polarisation and ‘the smart/creative city can become not only more economically polarized, but also socially, culturally and spatially divided by the growing contrast between incoming knowledge and creative workers, and the unskilled and IT illiterate sections of the local poorer population’ (Hollands, 2008, p. 312). Therefore, the politics and power networks that underlie smart cities are important to address in order to establish how certain groups may benefit and others, often marginalised groups, may be excluded from any benefits of smart city initiatives. Vanolo highlights how this leads to patterns of exclusion since there is ‘little room for the technologically illiterate, the poor and, in general, those who are marginalised from the smart city discourse’ (2013, p. 893). Although this work is growing, Cardullo and Kitchin highlight that there is still work to do since ‘despite the re-orientation towards creating “smart citizens” to date there has been little critical conceptual scruti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• PART I: SMART CITY GOVERNANCE
• PART II: SMART CITY DEVELOPMENT
• PART III: SMART CITY VISIONS
• Index