Smart Cities and Connected Intelligence

Platforms, Ecosystems and Network Effects

Nicos Komninos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032083360
• eBook ISBN: 9781000740448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Internet and World Wide Web platforms, big data analytics, software, social media and civic technologies allow for the creation of smart ecosystems in which connected intelligence emerges and disruptive social and eco-innovation flourishes.

This book focuses on three grand challenges that matter for any territory, no matter where it is located: (i) smart growth, a path that more and more cities, regions and countries are adopting having realised the unlimited potential of growth that is based on knowledge, innovation and digital technologies; (ii) safety and security, which is a pre-requisite for quality of life in a world of intense social, natural and technological threats; and (iii) sustainability, use of renewable energy, protection of living ecosystems, addressing climate change and global warming in a period of rapid urbanisation that makes established sustainability models and planning patterns quickly obsolete.

The core argument of the book is that problem-solving and novel solutions to these grand challenges emerge in smart ecosystems through connected intelligence. It is the broadest form of intelligence that combines capabilities from heterogeneous actors (humans, organisations, machines) and propel problem-solving through externalities and resource agglomeration, user engagement and collaboration, awareness and behaviour change. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of urban and regional studies, innovation studies, economic geography and urban planning, as well as urban policy makers.

Part I
Grand challenges, smart everything and smart cities

1 Grand challenges of the 21st century and the smart everything paradigm

1.1 Grand challenges of the 21st century

The dawn of the 21st century has been marked by new challenges and expectations that can be addressed by research, innovation and efficient government. The rise of a new multipolar world system, the strong production capacity and competitiveness of China and other Asian countries, the slowdown of globalisation, the contribution of Internet technologies to collaboration and management across time zones, the substitution of fossil energy by renewable sources, all these trends are contributing both to new challenges and drivers for change.

At a global scale, the UN Millennium Development Goals initiative completed its historical cycle and the United Nations announced the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets, which sets a new universal agenda and a plan of action for the next 15 years (United Nations, 2015a). At the top of the 2030 Agenda is the fight to end poverty and hunger, reduce inequality within and among countries, and ensure healthy lives and inclusive education. Then come the goals of inclusive economic growth, resilient infrastructure, industrialisation and innovation. Cities and human settlements should be made safe, sustainable and resilient, ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water, sanitation for all, and access to affordable and sustainable energy. Not least are the goals to combat climate change, to promote sustainable use of seas and oceans, to protect terrestrial ecosystems and forests, and to halt land degradation and loss of biodiversity.

However, the projections about the increase in the global urban population do not leave much room for optimism about these goals being achieved. Continued population growth until 2050 is almost inevitable, even with a decline in fertility rates. With an 80% degree of probability, the world’s population will be between 8.4 and 8.6 billion in 2030 and between 9.4 and 10 billion in 2050 (United Nations, 2014). The world’s urban population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion people by 2050 and two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in cities by the same year. About 90% of this increase is expected to take place in Asia and Africa, in countries with limited resources to accommodate this influx of new settlers and their needs for housing, sanitation, energy, water, education and employment. Sustainable development challenges will be increasingly concentrated in cities, particularly in the lower-middle-income countries where urbanisation is fastest (United Nations, 2015b). Most probable is a new expansion of illegal and informal settlements without planning and proper infrastructure, very poor urban conditions, deprived of quality and the basics for decent human conditions. Even in developing countries that are rich in natural resources, oil and minerals, inequality will leave a large part of the population below the poverty line, with no access to clean water and electricity, and people depending on wood, crop residues and animal manure for cooking.

In the developed world, major challenges revolve around similar topics of growth and sustainability, but with a lower level of intensity and better baseline conditions. In Europe, the EU 2020 strategy has outlined smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth as core challenges and significant financial resources have been mobilised to address them. At the research and innovation level, the current R&D programme, Horizon 2020, has focused on societal challenges, such as health, demographic change and wellbeing; food security and sustainable use of biological resources; secure and clean energy; smart, green transport; climate change, environment and resource efficiency; and inclusive, innovative and reflective societies. But much of the prosperity in Europe depends on the conditions in cities, and cities have to deal with growth and employment, CO₂ emissions and the environment, transport, and social cohesion. The EU Urban Agenda, which started under the Dutch Presidency in 2015 and was then agreed in May 2016 in Amsterdam, has set out 12 priority areas for action dealing with urban poverty and the inclusion of migrants and refugees; the circular economy and the creation of jobs and skills; sustainable use of land and nature-based solutions, air quality, climate adaptation, energy transition, urban mobility; the digital transition and public procurement (European Commission, 2016).

The goals and priorities put forward by international organisations, such as the United Nations, the European Commission and Council of the European Union, show that both in the developed and developing world, 21st century societies apparently face parallel challenges, which can be placed under the nexus of growth, environmental sustainability, cohesion, safety and security.

Growth, employment and poverty form a complex nexus which changes with geography and population size. One size does not fit all, and growth challenges are not the same across countries and regions. Some countries in the developing world, such as China, India, Thailand and Vietnam, are growing faster and converging with the developed world. In other areas of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa growth has slowed down. While growth in developed countries is linked to the increase of productivity, in developing countries growth comes with diversification from traditional to higher value products and services (Hausmann, 2015). The same is true at sub-national level. National growth is not reflected uniformly at regional and local level. The cities and regions of a country do not follow the same development path, nor do they exhibit the same growth rates.

Growth is not linear. Periods of prosperity are followed by periods of crisis, decline, and restructuring. Drivers and growth patterns change across long waves of growth (or Kondratiev cycles) and cycles of innovation and technological change (Gottdiener and Komninos, 1989; Jessop, 1989). Due to diversification and the decline of industries, growth challenges become challenges of employment, as the labour force moves from one industrial sector to another. Productivity differences turn growth challenges into income inequality challenges across industries, cities, regions, and countries.

The landscape becomes more complex if the metrics of growth are not limited to GDP, and instead other factors are also considered, such as life expectancy, literacy and education, quality of life, and living standards. In this case, models using economic variables only, such as demand and supply, capital and labour, productivity and income, cannot represent the complex relationships and the role of institutions that address underdevelopment and poverty. In general, growth challenges have all the features of wicked problems, as defined by Rittel and Webber (1973), in which formalisation and modelling are just a starting point and with each attempt to create a solution the understanding of the problem changes (Conklin, 2005). Monitoring and scoreboards, evidence based-policies, experimentation with pilots and scale-ups of successful projects are permanent companions of strategies to address the challenges of growth.

Sustainability forms another nexus of challenges with a wide range of areas for attention, including the preservation of natural habitat and living ecosystems, sustainable use of land and nature-based solutions, management of sea and ocean ecosystems, air quality, CO₂ emissions, climate adaptation, energy savings and the transition to renewable energy, sanitation, water management and reuse, recycling of materials, and the circular economy. As the world continues to urbanise, these sustainable development challenges are increasingly concentrated in cities, particularly in those cities where urbanisation is very rapid. Spatial planning must radically change, disrupt the patterns of consumption and land use of the 20th century and seek more efficient models of urban development and resource management. Urban policies, on the other hand, should provide a better environment, access to public transportation, affordable housing, electricity, water and sanitation, and an optimum use of available resources. According to the United Nations (2014), sustainable urbanisation requires competent, responsive and accountable governments charged with the management of cities and urban expansion, as well appropriate use of information and communication technologies for more efficient management and delivery of city services and infrastructure. But, in parallel with smart technology, urban sustainability requires strong institutional capacity and integrated approaches to attain its objectives. Smart cities, the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems should be placed at the heart of the sustainable management agenda.

Cities, regions and countries today also face many safety and security challenges emerging from man-made or natural threats, such as crime, terrorism, attacks on infrastructure and vandalism, natural catastrophes, urban accidents and other types of emergencies, such as environmental hazards (Smith, 2013), disasters and security (Brauch et al., 2011). Although the general trend in the total number of crimes recorded in the EU28 has steadily decreased since 2003 (by about 12%), the picture is somewhat mixed among EU countries. For example, in the period 2007–2012 violent crime rose by 38% in Luxembourg, by 26% in Hungary and by 23% in Denmark (European Commission, 2012). It is estimated that the economic cost of crime in most EU member states ranges between 3–7% of GDP (Heaton, 2010), although the true impact goes far beyond monetary values. These threats not only affect citizens, but also the whole spectrum of economic and social life in the urban space and leave their mark on the character of cities and local communities.

Urban safety and security is a vital asset in the global competition of cities for investors and citizens who value quality of life standards. The cost of crime is much higher than the cost of preventing it and authorities worldwide are increasingly adopting non-traditional strategies for reducing crime and violence through mechanisms of effective prevention. Solutions for tackling crime and aggressive acts include, but are not limited to, policing, neighbourhood watch, effective urban planning, and increasingly involving citizens and voluntary organisations. Smart technologies and social media offer additional ways to address safety issues, enable interaction with citizens, improve the engagement of groups, enhance investigation and evidence collection, speeding up information transmission and emergency response (Accenture, 2013). Cities also have to deal with large- or small-scale natural hazards (earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes eruption, floods, landslides, fires) which affect daily life and cause extensive economic and social losses if they occur. Representative examples of such disasters include the devastating earthquakes and tsunamis of Tohoku in Japan (2011), the earthquakes in Haiti (2010), in Sichuan, China (2008) and L’Aquila (2009) in Italy, with tremendous effects on the monumental heritage, hurricane Katrina in the US (August 2005), the typhoons and massive flooding in Thailand (2011), the droughts in Russia (2010), the fires in the Peloponnese and Athens, Greece (2007 and 2017) and those in Portugal (2003), just to mention some of the most known ones. These events have caused extensive losses in terms of fatalities, injuries, and wreaked damage, brought disruption and created huge economic losses.

1.2 Smart everything: an emerging interdisciplinary paradigm

In tandem with growth, sustainability and safety and security challenges, a new understanding has gradually been forming about how to address challenges with smart technologies, user-driven and participatory systems of innovation.

The ‘smart everything paradigm’, a term coined by Norbert Streitz (2017), refers to trends in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) combined in applications for smart homes, smart cities, autonomous driving or other smart environments. In the smart everything paradigm, physical objects and infrastructure of everyday life are equipped with sensing and communication capabilities, can perceive their state and interact with other objects and the environment. The processing power embedded into smart objects enables new control functions, such as scheduling and status updates, switch on and off operations with respect to changing conditions, as well as alerts in cases of events. Devices can exchange data and make autonomous decisions based on present conditions. Smart objects and machines interact with other objects, but also with the environment and humans. Using networking capabilities, smart objects can address economic, environmental and societal challenges, and are increasingly used in many sectors of manufacturing, logistics, energy, transportation, healthcare, as well as safety and security.

Streitz discusses also the risks of this approach, stemming from the trend to remove humans as operators – and thus from positions of control – and to replace them with algorithmic decision-making and AI based problem-solving. He proposes an alternative/complementary approach for redefining the “smart everything, everywhere and every time” paradigm by “keeping the human in the loop” and promoting “People-Oriented, Empowering Smartness” rather than “System-Oriented, Importunate Smartness” (Streitz, 2017, p. 10).

The background to people-oriented smartness is a stack of networking technologies, strategies and solutions based on the Internet, World Wide Web, crowdsourcing data and online analytics. These collaborative technologies pave the way to a wider array of technologies, such as cloud computing, sensor networks, cyber-physical systems, artificial intelligence and augmented reality. Altogether, they push human collaboration and user-driven innovation to higher levels of scale and efficiency and pave the way towards collaborative innovation strategies and multiple forms of digital disruption. These include, among others, global information flows and ease of collaboration across continents and time zones; large-scale user engagement in various domains of activity via crowdsourcing platforms; participatory data creation, big datasets and analytics; global innovation supply chains; the rise of a sharing economy; and few forms of production, such as demand-driven production, distributed collaborative production, customer co-production, and various other forms of network-based work and exchange.

A reflection on the balance between technology and the contribution of users has been developed in the ‘Ambient Intelligence’ approach, which emphasises user-oriented design, the interaction of humans with technology, and the social context of data and communication. As Streitz (2017, p. 2) points out:

Ambient Intelligence represents a vision of the (not too far) future where ‘intelligent’ or ‘smart’ environments and systems react in an attentive, adaptive, and active (sometimes even proactive) way to the presence and activities of humans and objects in order to provide intelligent/ smart services to the inhabitants of these environments. Ambient Intelligence technologies integrate sensing capabilities, processing power, reasoning mechanisms, networking facilities, applications and services, digital content, and actuating capabilities distributed in the surrounding environment. While a wide variety of different technologies is involved, the goal of Ambient Intelligence is to either hide their presence from users, by providing implicit, unobtrusive interaction paradigms. People and their social situations, ranging from individuals to groups, be them work groups, families or friends and their corresponding environments (office buildings, homes, public spaces, etc.) are at the center of the design considerations.

The impact of the smart everything paradigm is very wide. It crosses the field of technology and enters a wide range of social and management domains. Over the last few years a group of new concepts have attempted to capture the dynamics and policies of development in Europe, the US, and elsewhere: smart growth, a core component of the EU 2020 strategy; smart specialisation, the current and near future European research and innovation strategy; smart communities, the European Innovation Partnership that brings together cities, industry and citizens for collaboration; smart cities, one of the nine areas of strategic opportunity in the New Strategy for American Innovation (White House, 2015), and a practice widely applied by cities all over the world for new solutions in urban governance and growth by using data, sensors, and collaboration with citizens in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Grand challenges, smart everything and smart cities
• Part II Platforms, smart ecosystems and connected intelligence
• Part III Smart growth: externality platforms and disruptive innovation
• Part IV Safety and security: engagement platforms and social innovation
• Part V Sustainability: awareness platforms and eco-innovation
• Index