Untangling Smart Cities

From Utopian Dreams to Innovation Systems for a Technology-Enabled Urban Sustainability

Luca Mora, Mark Deakin

• Publisher: Elsevier
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780128154786
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Networking
• Index: Computer Science

Untangling Smart Cities: From Utopian Dreams to Innovation Systems for a Technology-Enabled Urban Sustainability helps all key stakeholders understand the complex and often conflicting nature of smart city research, offering valuable insights for designing and implementing strategies to improve the smart city decision-making processes. The book drives the reader to a better theoretical and practical comprehension of smart city development, beginning with a thorough and systematic analysis of the research literature published to date. It addition, it provides an in-depth understanding of the entire smart city knowledge domain, revealing a deeply rooted division in its cognitive-epistemological structure as identified by bibliometric insights.

Users will find a book that fills the knowledge gap between theory and practice using case study research and empirical evidence drawn from cities considered leaders in innovative smart city practices.

• Provides clarity on smart city concepts and strategies
• Presents a systematic literature analysis on the state-of-the-art of smart cities' research using bibliometrics combined with practical applications
• Offers a comprehensive and systematic analysis of smart cities research produced during its first three decades
• Generates a strong connection between theory and practice by providing the scientific knowledge necessary to approach the complex nature of smart cities
• Documents five main development pathways for smart cities development, serving the needs of city managers and policymakers with concrete advice and guidance

Chapter 1

Moving beyond the smart city utopia

Abstract

This chapter sets out to introduce the purpose of this book, its structure and the research methodology adopted to meet the expected outcome, that is, to demonstrate that the smart city concept has the potential to develop into something meaningful, which cities all over the world can benefit from, rather than get tangled up in the context of utopian urbanism. In order to achieve this aim, evidence shall be provided of the potential that smart cities have to overcome the utopian discourse they are currently embroiled in and develop into innovation systems that set the stage for a technology-enabled approach to urban sustainability. This evidence will be sourced from a review of the expanding literature on smart cities that has been published over the past 30 years, and the deployment of a mixed-method research strategy in which bibliometric techniques and case study research are combined.

Keywords

Broadacre city; Chandigarh; Garden city; Modernism; Modern city planning; Radiant city; Smart city; Smart city development; Sustainable urban development; Urban innovation; Urban sustainability; Utopian discourse; Utopian thinking; Utopian urbanism; Urban utopia

Chapter Outline

• 1.1 Utopian urbanism
• 1.2 Smart cities and the new utopia
• 1.3 Making sense of smart cities: Aim and structure of this book
• References

1.1 Utopian urbanism

Dreaming about the future of cities and conceiving new visionary schemes for improving the sustainability of urban development has a long tradition. In these schemes, the deficiencies of the present translate into stimuli for shaping alternative urban systems in which a new set of rules and standards, that society is expected to adhere to, become the assurance of an improved sustainability. However, despite being built on a genuine intent to improve the human condition, some of these alternative solutions have resulted in urban utopias: unrealistically perfect spatial imaginaries whose highly symbolic rendering of the future is flawed due to the tendency for the visions that they embody to be based on stereotypical ideas misrepresenting reality.

One of the first utopias was created in Ancient Greece, when Plato introduced his totalitarian philosophy of the city. Plato images cities as economic independent and self-sufficient entities in which the community is divided into three classes. For Plato, discipline, perfect obedience, and control over each single member of community are the key components of a perfect society, and they can be secured by combining stringent authority and coercion. As Mumford explains in his analysis of historical utopias, this Greek utopia stands on principles that relate to an historical era whereby survival is based on the capacity that society has to be prepared for war (Mumford, 1922, 1965).

Following Plato’s urban imaginary, a significant amount of utopian thinking has emerged in which the stringent authority and coercion have been replaced with less militaristic set of principles. For example, Thomas More’s Utopia, a fictional island society in the New World, represents one of the most famous spatial imaginaries produced so far. Conceived in the framework of the urban challenges affecting England in the early 16th century, Utopia manifests itself as a future state of affairs that stands in opposition to war, oppression, and injustice, by proposing a new social structure based on common ownership (Goodey, 1970; Wilde, 2017). Utopia’s ambition to end social inequalities is also shared by Edward Bellamy and the blueprint of the perfect society that he introduces in Looking Backward: 2000–1887. In his vision, which is conceived 300 years after Utopia, Bellamy portrays the stresses of the 19th century industrial society of the United States, that is, violent class conflicts, the end of the frontier and antiimmigrant xenophobia, the labor movement, poor working conditions, poverty, and hunger. The solution that Bellamy offers is for society to replace the competitive economic system with a utopia that promotes universal employment and total equality (Bellamy, 1888).

Utopian visions of the future city can also be found into the work of some of the most influential modern architects and planners, who provided an invaluable contribution to urban development theory and practice. For example, the English town planner Ebenezer Howard is known for initiating the garden city movement. Shaped in the idea of progress and as a reaction to the overpopulation, inequalities, and pollution of industrial cities, garden cities were intended as new compact towns surrounded by rolling green belts and populated by self-contained and self-sufficient communities. These new towns were expected to grow outside large metropolitan agglomerations, on large areas of agricultural land, and to combine the desirable features of both the city and the countryside. Howard believed this connection between urban and rural would have set the ground for a new civilization and more sustainable urban planning policies and improved living arrangements capable of ending urban poverty (Howard, 1898).

Howard’s utopian thinking was greatly influenced by Looking Backward, and his work represents an attempt to put forward a practical approach for testing Bellamy’s utopian conceptions of future cities in a real-world setting (Howard, 1965; MacFadyen, 1970). However, the garden city experiments failed to meet the expectations. Research by Sharifi (2016) and Hügel (2017) demonstrates that garden cities have proved unsuccessful in building self-sufficient communities and addressing the needs of low-wage workers. In addition, their financial model, which was unsuitable to attract the investments of the banking sector, forced Howard to accept the trade-off between equitable development on the one hand and market support on the other hand (Williamson et al., 2002; Gillette, 2010; Edwards, 1914; Falk, 2017).

Despite its limitations, the essence of the garden city movement has maintained an enduring influence and produced long-lasting effects that still resonate in urban development studies (Hardy, 1992). The principles embedded in the garden city idea have become an inspirational source for colonial planning in sub-Saharan Africa and new residential areas in Brazil (Bigon, 2013; Rego, 2014). Yeo (2019) describes the cross agency initiatives that are contributing to introduce the garden city idea into the high-density urban context of Singapore, whose environmental policy exposes its ambition to become a model green city (Han, 2017). Hou (2018) reports on the outcomes of the “Garden City Initiative” that the city government of Taipei has launched to expand urban gardens, exposing the connection between the garden city movement and urban planning practice in Taiwan. The garden city movement has also influenced the Scottish housing reform and town planning practice of the 20th century, leading to significant changes in the approach to construction of working-class housing developments (Rosenburg, 2016). In addition, there is also evidence of a new garden city idea whose functionality has been recently tested out in York and Oxford. This 21st century version of the garden city builds on Howard’s ideology and is proposed as a possible solution to the housing crisis affecting the United Kingdom (Falk, 2017).

The deep preoccupation for the future of cities and civilization that stimulates Howard’s utopian thinking is also shared by Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. As Fishman (1977: 12) states in his presentation of the ideal cities pictured by these three visionary urban planners, all of them “hated the cities of their time with an overwhelming passion” and the urban environments in which they were living represented “the hell that inspired their heavens.” The unrealized masterplan of the Ville Radiouse (Radiant City), designed by Le Corbusier in the 1920s, enc...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Foreword: The landscape of smart cities
• Chapter 1: Moving beyond the smart city utopia
• Chapter 2: Smart city development as an ICT-driven approach to urban sustainability
• Chapter 3: The first two decades of research on smart city development
• Chapter 4: Revealing the main development paths of smart cities
• Chapter 5: Smart city development in Europe
• Chapter 6: Smart city development in North America
• Chapter 7: The social shaping of smart cities
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Index