Digital and Smart Cities

Katharine Willis, Alessandro Aurigi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138890374
• eBook ISBN: 9781317494980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Digital and Smart Cities presents an overview of how technologies shape our cities. There is a growing awareness in the fields of design and architecture of the need to address the way that technology affects the urban condition. This book aims to give an informative and definitive overview of the topic of digital and smart cities. It explores the topic from a range of different perspectives, both theoretical and historical, and through a range of case studies of digital cities around the world.

The approach taken by the authors is to view the city as a socially constructed set of activities, practices and organisations. This enables the discussion to open up a more holistic and citizen- centred understanding of how technology shapes urban change through the way it is imagined, used, implemented and developed in a societal context. By drawing together a range of currently quite disparate discussions, the aim is to enable the reader to take their own critical position within the topic.

The book starts out with definitions and sets out the various interpretations and aspects of what constitutes and defines digital cities. The text then investigates and considers the range of factors that shape the characteristics of digital cities and draws together different disciplinary perspectives into a coherent discussion. The consideration of the different dimensions of the digital city is backed up with a series of relevant case studies of global city contexts in order to frame the discussion with real world examples.

Part One

Overview

The first part of this book will discuss both definitions and approaches to digital and smart cities. This starts in Chapter One with a review of the various interpretations and aspects of what constitutes and defines digital cities. This is then contextualised with a historical overview of recent history in Chapter Two.

Key areas covered:

Chapter One: Definitions and approaches

•The digital and the urban

•Definitions: what is the digital/smart city?

•Key terms and definitions

•Approaches to cities and technologies

Chapter Two: Historical context

•Cities and technologies in history

•Cities and (tele)communication

•Going digital

•Virtual cities and cyberspace

•Networks and cities

•Ubiquitous and unwired cities

•Smart cities and the promise of control

1Definitions and approaches

Introduction

In this first chapter of the book we explore the concept of the digital city on a number of levels: by exploring the definition of the terms digital and smart in relation to the city and by outlining some basic theoretical underpinnings. The chapter grounds the text in a discussion of definitions and an overview of the development of the topic.

Although the relationship between technologies and the city is a long one, it is only since the 1990s that a clear set of ‘names’ or ‘definitions’ became used extensively to define both certain types of approaches to cities and technologies, with a range terms such as the e-city, electronic city, intelligent city, u-city, cyber city, media city. This timing was a consequence of the emergence of the internet and a range of other technologies that started to spill out of the domain of computing into the wider realm of society and to everyday life in the city. Information and communication networks started to have a significant effect on the social and structural life of the city and heralded new forms of civic governance and participation as well as urban experience.

It is important to start with the understanding that there is no clear or agreed definition of what a digital or a smart city is. Although a range of terms and definitions are used to describe cities and technologies, they are fairly broadly interpreted and also very changeful. Definitions might, at the most, be used for four or five years before they are superseded by the next wave of technological development and a corresponding rethink of what the implications for cities might be.

Underpinning these changing concepts of digital and smart cities is the ever changing role of the digital and technical in society and the city. It is hard to imagine everyday life without smartphones, the internet and satnavs, and these are all embedded within the workings of the city. The final stages of the chapter intend to unpack some of these relationships in terms of the different approaches to the topic and also to highlight some of the underlying challenges and issues.

Aim of the chapter

The aim of the chapter is to present an accessible introduction to the topic of digital cities and to explore it from a range of viewpoints. It will set out the various interpretations and aspects of what constitutes and defines digital cities and situate this within a chronological timeline in order to frame the topic and establish key concepts. This is important because the digital city concept and the associated effects of the rapid and ongoing developments in ICTs and other technologies on the city only emerged in the early 1990s, making it to some extent a recent topic.

Key questions

The following are some of the key questions that we will cover in this chapter:

•What is the relationship between the digital and the city?

•What can we learn from the range of definitions of digital and smart cities?

•What changes have we seen in the relationship between cities and digital and smart technologies?

•What ways are useful for us to think about digital urbanism?

The digital and the urban

We start with a question – why should anyone be concerned with ‘digital’ cities? In fact, is there such a thing at all? As this book aims to illustrate, there are many ways that cities are treated as digital or smart. Yet, digging a little deeper into the underlying phenomena in a sensible, useful and clear way is far more challenging, particularly given the complex and open nature of cities. The fact is that both urban and ‘digital’ living are clearly on the rise, and they intertwine. In fact, it is hard to deny that digital technology in all its forms, from the emergence of the personal computer in the 1980s to the more recent embedding of computation and networking into an increasing number of ‘things’ (from luggage to cars) and personal devices, has a deep influence on how we live.

The core premise of this book is that cities and the digital or smart are fundamentally linked, and that, in fact, the digital cannot be separated from the city. While it is true that the digital might redefine aspects of the urban, the reverse is also valid. Exploring and understanding the various interpretations of how this relationship has been developing is therefore crucial to approach the theme of digital and smart cities.

The digital, in relation to cities, can refer to a range of ways in which the city is affected by technologies, but some of the core aspects, or perspectives, are as follows:

•Social and spatial dimension – urban space and society (Mitchell, 1995; Sassen, 2012; Shepard, 2011)

•Infrastructural dimension – communication and information networks and globalisation (Castells, 1996; Graham & Marvin, 1996)

•Technological dimension – emergence of new technologies and technological paradigms (e.g. Ratti, 2009)

The above categorisation is by no means intended as definitive, but broadly it captures some of the different perspectives taken on the topic, particularly in academic writing. This is a topic that is difficult to characterise because it is extremely changeful. If we look at other ways of seeing the city, different perspectives form and either take hold or become peripheral over time, but some of the underlying precepts remain. With regards to the relationship of technologies and the city, the landscape is remarkably fluidchangeful; in fact, one of its core characteristics is that it is almost constantly transforming and presenting new processes and structures. For instance, the impact of the internet as a technology has been fundamental to a range of ways in which the city is understood, inhabited and managed, and yet it really only came into existence in the early 1990s. Within 20 years it has radically changed the ways people connect with each other, the ways companies do business and the networks that sustain city services. Keeping up with technological change on cities can be challenging, and what often happens is that a sense of what has gone before is lost in the relentless move forwards. In order to provide a basis for exploring the topic in the next section, we trace some of the key definitions and timeliness and draw them together to reveal their role in shaping the topic.

Definitions: what is the digital/smart city?

It would be helpful at this stage of the book to provide a simple, widely accepted definition of the topic of this volume. Unfortunately this is not possible, since there are fairly broad, ambiguous and often competing definitions to be found, in popular media and the world of academic research as well as in real-world city initiatives. The key terms started to emerge at the beginning of the 1990s, concurrent with the early stages of the personal computer and the beginnings of the internet.

As far back as the mid-90s, one of the key texts in this field, Graham and Marvin’s Telecommunications and the City – a text which will be evoked again within this book – listed what at the time had been the main labels used to frame ways in which geographical spaces and telecommunication technologies were coming together (1996). They list 20 different terms that characterised the contemporary city that had emerged within the 30-year period between 1964 and 1994, as shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1Digital characterisations of the city, 1964–1994 (Graham & Marvin, 1996, p.9)

The ‘invisible city’ 1990

The ‘informational city’ 1989

The ‘weak metropolis’ 1988

The ‘wired city’ 1987

The ‘telecity’ 1991

The ‘city in an electronic age’ 1987

The ‘information city’ 1987

The ‘knowledge-based city’ 1989

The ‘intelligent city’ 1992

The ‘virtual city’ 1978

‘Electronic communities’ 1981

‘Communities without boundaries’ 1980

‘Electronic cottage’ 1981

The city as ‘electronic spaces’ 1988

The ‘overexposed city’ 1987

The ‘flexicity’ 1993

The ‘virtual community’ 1994

The ‘non-place urban realm’ 1964

‘Teletopia’ 1991

‘Cyberville’ 1994

Since the mid-90s, a whole range of new terms and labels has emerged, mainly in parallel to or following the emergence of new technologies and infrastructural change as listed in Table 1.2 below:

Table 1.2Digital and smart characterisations of the city, 1995–2016

Cybercities (Boyer, 1995)

City of bits (Mitchell, 1995)

Digital metropolis (Widmayer, 1999)

Real time city (Townsend, 2000)

Digital places (Horan, 2000)

Network cities (Townsend, 2001)

Digital city (Ishida, 2002)

Virtual city (Hudson-Smith, Evans & Batty, 2005)

Electronic/e-city (Bucher & Finka, 2008)

Mediacity (Eckardt et al., 2008)

Smart city (Hollands, 2008)

Augmented urban spaces (Aurigi & De Cindio, 2008)

Urban informatics (Foth, 2008)

Ubiquitous/u-city (Jang & Suh, 2010)

Sentient city (Crang & Graham, 2007; Shepard, 2011)

Knowledge cities

Hybrid city (Papalexopoulos, 2013)

The city as interface (Waal, 2014)

Smart urbanism (Marvin, Luque-Ayala & Mcfarlane, 2016)

Netspaces (Willis, 2016)

Hackable city (Ampatzidou et al., 2016)

IoT city (Manchester City Council, 2015)

The terms in the table above characterise cities across a spectrum that runs from the initial explorations of computing effects on the city – from the first cybercities in 1995 (Boyer, 1995; Graham, 2004), which envisaged what would happen when information highways provided all kinds of information and communication services to businesses and households – through to the virtual city (Hudson-Smith, Evans & Batty, 2005); a city that was an online or virtual representation of the real city, and the e-city, which envisaged new forms of governance and civic participation through online forums. In the first years of the 21st century, these evolved into more city-centred terms such as the digital city (Ishida, 2002) and u-city or ubiquitous city (Jang & Suh, 2010), which developed out of the early internet networks and the possibility of the city as a platform where people could interact and access city services in a range of ways. With the rise of ‘smart’ or connected technologies of smart sensors and networks, the term ‘smart city’ was introduced in 2008 to capture these new forms of ‘smart urbanism’. These are just a selected set of terms that highlight key stages of development, but many more also exist that represent more nuanced or specific aspects of technological change and the city (a more detailed comparative description is given in the next section). It is clear from looking at the ways terms have developed over the last 30 years that, as technology continues to develop, so new terms and labels will be created to reflect the changing nature of the impact on urban space and systems.

What is important to note is that any attempt to narrowly define terms tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Index