Technology and the City

Systems, applications and implications

Tan Yigitcanlar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317575689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The interplay between smart urban technologies and city development is a relatively uncharted territory. Technology and the City aims to fill that gap, exploring the growing importance of smart technologies and systems in contemporary cities, and providing an in-depth understanding of both theoretical and practical aspects of smart urban technology adoption, and its implications for our cities.

Beginning with an elaboration of the historical significance of technologies in economic growth, social progress and urban development, Yigitcanlar introduces the most prominent smart urban information technologies. The book showcases significant smart city practices from across the globe that uses smart urban technologies and systems most effectively. It explores the role of these technologies and asks how they can be adopted into the planning, development and management processes of cities for sustainable urban futures. This pioneering volume contributes to the conceptualisation and practice of smart technology and system adoption in our cities by disseminating both conceptual and empirical research findings with real-world best practice applications.

With a multidisciplinary approach to themes of technology and urban development, this book is a key reference source for scholars, practitioners, consultants, city officials, policymakers and urban technology enthusiasts.

Part I Background

DOI: 10.4324/9781315739090-1

Part I of the book provides an overview of and background on the role of knowledge, innovation and technology in the development process of human civilisation and urbanisation. It also provides an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of both theoretical and practical aspects of technology adoption, and their implications on our cities in the course of history. Chapter 1 focuses on the theoretical and practical underpinnings that underline the interplay between technological progress and evolution of cities. The Chapter specifies the rationale, scope, aim, objectives and key research questions of the book, and offers an overview information on the rest of the Chapters and the author of the book. Chapter 2 elaborates the historical significance of knowledge, innovation and technology in economic growth, social progress and urban development, and provides evidence by focusing particularly on the following periods: (i) the pre-industrial era including Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment; (ii) the industrial era; and (iii) the post-industrial era.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315739090-2

Science is the most reliable guide in life.

(Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of Turkey)

Theoretical and practical underpinnings

The twenty-first century is recognised as the ‘century of cities’, as more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, and the importance of urban environments has become even greater in recent decades (Didsbury 2004). The beginning of the twenty-first century also marked the expansion of the knowledge economy that is becoming a global phenomenon. As Gabe et al. (2012: 1179) put it, ‘it would be an understatement to suggest that knowledge plays a key role in today’s economy; for much of the developed world, it might be more accurate to assert that knowledge is today’s economy’. In the global knowledge economy, cities are viewed as the centres of knowledge, as loci of cultures that produce and valorise knowledge, or as playing a major role in the governance of knowledge, in particular, humanising knowledge by integrating different types of knowledge and protecting values of a local and regional nature (Yigitcanlar et al. 2015). However, cities since ancient times have always been the cradle of civilisation and knowledge generation in various forms, such as analytical (science-based), synthetic (engineering-based) and symbolic (arts-based) knowledge (Carrillo et al. 2014). Marketable knowledge and its associated products and processes are generated, mostly in urban agglomerations, through the complex activities involving science, technology, arts, innovation and creativity. The intensity of these activities has increased exponentially, particularly since the invention of computers. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), completed by Presper Eckert and John Mauchly in 1945, is considered to be the first machine to incorporate the full set of traits of a modern computer (see Isaacson 2014).

The combination of the computer and distributed networks since the 1960s has led to a ‘digital revolution’ that today allows anyone to create, disseminate and access any information anywhere, anytime and from any smart device. According to Isaacson (2014), the birth of the ‘digital age’ is a result of a research ecosystem that was nurtured by government spending and military-industry-academia collaboration, along with an alliance of community organisers, communal-minded hippies, do-it-yourself hobbyists and homebrew hackers. Strictly speaking, ‘the collaborative creativity has marked the digital age by establishing collaboration between humans and machines’ (Isaacson 2014: 5). This interaction has changed the way some services are delivered. For instance, today the world’s largest taxi company, Uber, owns no vehicles; the world’s most popular media owner, Facebook, creates no content; the world’s most valuable retailer, Alibaba, has no inventory; and the world’s largest accommodation provider, Airbnb, owns no real estate. Besides, owing to rapid developments in the digital age, technology is widely seen as an effective apparatus to help us solve some of the most challenging problems the world is facing today, particularly, when the human element is strongly considered along with the technological capabilities (Stimmel 2016).

Today, without exception, all parts of the world are confronted by various environmental, social and economic crises, e.g. life threatening natural disasters, loss of biodiversity, destruction of natural ecosystems, regional disparities, socioeconomic inequity, and digital and knowledge divides that are mainly caused by rapid population increase and expansion of resource consumption, combined with industrialisation, urbanisation, mobilisation, agricultural intensification and excessive consumption-driven lifestyles (see Epstein and Buhovac 2014; Yigitcanlar and Dizdaroglu 2015; Yigitcanlar and Teriman 2015). Rapid advancement in digital technologies has given us the hope that the impacts of global scale environmental, social and economic crises can be eased with the help of appropriate technology (Yigitcanlar and Lee 2014). In particular, the application of smart urban technologies in cities can potentially produce a number of benefits. The following are among some of the prospects (Harrison and Donnelly 2011):

• reducing resource consumption, notably energy and water, hence contributing to reductions in carbon dioxide emissions;
• improving the usage of existing infrastructure capacity, hence improving quality of life and reducing the need for traditional construction projects;
• making new services available to citizens and commuters, such as real-time guidance on how best to exploit multiple transportation modalities;
• improving commercial enterprises through the publication of real-time data on the operation of city services;
• revealing how demands for energy, water and transportation peak on a city scale so that city administrators can collaborate to smooth these peaks and improve resilience.

Hollands (2008) is among the many scholars advocating that cities should reap these benefits of smart urban technologies through the application of a wide range of electronic and digital technologies to communities and cities; the use of information technologies to transform life and work within a region; and the embedding of such ICTs in the city and territorialisation of such practices in a way that brings ICTs and people together so as to enhance the innovation, learning, knowledge and problem solving that the technologies offer. Moreover, Hollands (2008) puts networked infrastructures at the core of smart urban technologies as a means to enable social, environmental, economic and cultural development, such infrastructures including mobile and landline phones, satellite TVs, computer networks, electronic commerce, and wired and wireless internet services. Currently, smart urban technologies are becoming more and more feasible for cities as a result of the rapid progress in the technology innovation domain in the twenty-first century. These innovative technology developments include (Harrison and Donnelly 2011):

• the widespread use of digital sensors and digital control systems for monitoring and management/operation of urban infrastructure. These comprise traffic sensors, building management systems, digital utility meters and so forth;
• the growing penetration of fixed and wireless networks that allow such sensors and systems to be connected to distributed processing centres, and for these centres in turn to exchange information among themselves;
• the development of information management techniques, specifically standardised semantic models, that allow the low-level information to be interpreted by the processing centres and for these processing centres to interpret each other’s information;
• the development of both computing power and new algorithms that allow these flows of information to be analysed in near real-time in order to provide operational performance improvement and other insights.

One of the world’s largest smart city technology solution companies, IBM (2010), promotes the ‘smart cities movement’ and utilisation of smart urban technologies to transform our cities’ systems to optimise the use of finite resources. Additionally, today other technology giants are also in the smart city business, such as Cisco and Samsung, along with a number of national telecommunications companies. These companies lead the promotion of smart cities by collaborating with local governments in smart city application delivery, e.g. Incheon, Tianjin, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Abu Dhabi, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Auckland, Brisbane and many others. These efforts have resulted in smart cities being claimed to provide an effective model for the cities of the twenty-first century, especially with their innovative technology applications and management capabilities, accompanied by the stimulus and location for the world’s creativity and innovation. Furthermore, they provide a high quality of life and a low impact on the environment (see Angelidou 2014; Heo et al. 2014). According to Caragliu et al. (2011), these cities are ‘smart’ when it comes to investments in human and social capital, and traditional (e.g. transport) and modern (e.g. ICT) communication infrastructure that fuel sustainable economic development and a high quality of life, because of their wise management of natural resources through participatory action and engagement.

As for Kourtit and Nijkamp (2012), smart cities encompass modern urban production factors in a common framework by utilising advanced ICTs and social and environmental capitals to form competitive cities in the information and knowledge age. In other words, they are based on a promising mix of human capital (e.g. skilled labour force), infrastructural capital (e.g. high-tech telecommunication facilities), social capital (e.g. intense and open network linkages) and entrepreneurial capital (e.g. creative and risk-taking business activities) (Yigitcanlar and Lee 2014), which make them, in theory, an ideal city model. Manville et al. (2014) define smart cities as being based on the six dimensions of smart, ‘economy, mobility, environment, people, living, and governance’. Similarly, Lombardi et al. (2012) employ smart, ‘governance, economy, human capital, living, and environment’ as the key indicators in assessing the performance of smart cities. The smart city concept is distinguished from other similar ideas, i.e. a digital or intelligent city, where it focuses on factors of human capital and education as drivers of urban growth, rather than singling out the role of ICT infrastructure (Lee et al. 2013).

Even the movement of smart cities is not that new. At present, there is not a single fully-fledged smart city erected on the surface of the planet. While the smart city concept is well and good in theory, in practice there are numerous challenges in building truly smart cities. These challenges can be grouped under the following categories: technological and technical issues (e.g. technical barriers due to the size of the city and users), economic issues (e.g. requiring massive financial investments), societal issues (e.g. smart cities becoming enclaves for urban elites), natural and built environmental issues (e.g. producing insignificant environmental sustainability outcomes), governance or management issues (e.g. limited public participation and bottom-up approach), and wider application of the smart city model (e.g. problematic nature of wide-scale retrofitting) (see Yigitcanlar 2015). While our cities and societies are being wired with technology to become smarter and more sustainable, we need to find ways to effectively address all of the abovementioned challenges. Until then, smart cities will not provide an opportunity to reshape our cities and societies to make them more sustainable and thus smart. As stated by Townsend (2013):

we don’t yet know how to build a smart city the way we built the internet. But it’s clear from what we now know about the best ways to build cities and create new technologies that we need to start the search for ways to do it.

(Townsend 2013: 111)

Underlined by Stimmel (2016), while searching ways to build truly smart cities, which is somehow the happy marriage of ‘technology and the city’, we need to adopt an approach that not only incorporates the issues of building technologically advanced and ecologically sustainable cites but also comprehends the shifts in human living within these environments.

Rationale and scope

The scope of this book focuses on investigating and revealing the interplay between smart urban technologies and city development. This is still relatively uncharted territory and thus has the potential to generate new insights and knowledge, which forms the raison d’ être of this book. There are a number of authoritative works that have influenced this book. In other words, Technology and the City is to a degree a healthy combination of Mumford’s (1961), Deakin and Al Waer’s (2012), Kaku’s (2012), Townsend’s (2013), Isaacson’s (2014), Komninos’s (2014) and Stimmel’s (2016) ideas discussed in their seminal books. The author, being an urbanist and also working in the technology space for quite some time, instinctively channelled himself to build on the pivotal works in the spheres of urban history, urban technology, urban planning and development, and sustainable urban futures. The overall aim of Technology and the City is to:

• underline the growing importance of smart technologies and systems in building cities in the twenty-first century, which is a largely uncharted territory of research;
• provide an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of both theoretical and practical aspects on smart urban technology adoption, an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• About the author
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Background
• Part II Systems
• Part III Applications
• Part IV Implications
• Afterword
• Index