Smart Cities

Governing, Modelling and Analysing the Transition

Mark Deakin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135124137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

Smart city development has emerged a major issue over the past 5 years. Since the launch of IBM's Smart Planet and CISCO's Smart Cities and Communities programmes, their potential to deliver on global sustainable development targets have captured the public's attention. However, despite this growing interest in the development of smart cities, little has as yet been published that either sets out the state-of-the-art, or which offers a less than subjective, arm's length and dispassionate account of their potential contribution.

This book brings together cutting edge research and the findings from technical development projects from leading authorities within the field to capture the transition to smart cities. It explores what is understood about smart cities, playing particular attention on the governance, modelling and analysis of the transition that smart cities seek to represent. In paving the way for such a representation, the book begins to account for the social capital of smart communities and begins the task of modelling their embedded intelligence through an analysis of what the "embedded intelligence of smart cities" contributes to the sustainability of urban development.

This innovative book offers an interdisciplinary perspective and shall be of interest to researchers, policy analysts and technical experts involved in and responsible for the planning, development and design of smart cities. It will also be of particular value to final year undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in Geography, Architecture and Planning.

1 Introduction (to smart cities)

Mark Deakin

In a recent article, Hollands (2008) asks the question: ‘Will the real smart city stand up?’ For according to Hollands, cities all too often claim to be smart, but do so without defining what this means, or offering any evidence to support such proclamations. The all too often ‘self-congratulatory’ tone cities strike when making such claims does not seem to sit well with Hollands (2008). For while images of the digital city, intelligent city, high-tech district and neighbourhoods of smart communities abound, they all fail to convey what it means to be smart and why it is important for cities to be defined in such terms.

In Hollands' (2008) opinion, the validity of any city's claim to be smart has to be based on something more than their use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Hollands asks this question because cities all over the world are beginning to do just this and use such technologies as a means of branding themselves smart. Such smart city forerunners as San Diego, San Francisco, Ottawa, Brisbane, Amsterdam, Kyoto and Bangalore are all now setting a trend for others to follow. The other cities keen to follow in their wake and become smart include: Southampton, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Edmonton, Vancouver and Montreal. It appears the rush to become a smart city has begun to gather apace and, as a consequence, pressure is now growing for cities to become even smarter.

Taking Hollands' (2008) paper on the transition from intelligent to smart cities as its point of departure, this book takes the opportunity to reflect upon the anxieties currently surrounding the governance, models and analysis of such developments.

In this aim, Chapter 2 reflects upon some of the anxieties surrounding the transition from intelligent to smart cities drawn attention to by Hollands (2008). In particular, the anxiety that it has more to do with cities meeting the needs of the market than the intelligence that is required for them to be smart. Working on the assumption that any attempt to overcome such an anxiety means shifting attention away from the needs of the market and towards the intelligence which is required for cities to be smart, this chapter begins to set out a less presumptuous, more critically aware and insightful understanding of the transition from intelligent to smart cities. For the representation of smart cities this chapter advances is founded on the realisation that it is the legacy of work undertaken on the informational basis of communications embedded in the very notion of intelligence, which is critical to understanding what it means for cities to be smart.

What follows goes on to capture the information-rich and highly communicative qualities of the technical, social, wider environmental and cultural intelligence currently surrounding the transition to smart cities. In particular the acute methodological issues they pose and critically insightful role which the networks of innovation and creative partnerships underlying these developments play in the learning, knowledge transfer and capacity-building exercises that service the transition to smart cities. This is what the chapter suggests Hollands' (2008) account of smart cities misses and goes some way to explain why he asks ‘the real smart city to please stand up!’ For in cutting across the legacy of the transition from the informational, to the intelligent and now smart city, Hollands' (2008) account of this transformation is not as well grounded in the informational and communicative qualities of the embedded intelligence they are built on and stand for.

This, the chapter suggests, is a critical insight of some note, for only in giving such a well-grounded account of the embedded intelligence drawn attention to, is it possible to do what Hollands (2008) asks of the transition. That is, ‘under-gird’ the social capital, which is not only critical in underpinning the informational and communicative qualities of the embedded intelligence that smart cities stand on, but pivotal in gaining a fuller insight into their wider environmental and cultural significance. In particular, in gaining a fuller insight into the wider environmental and cultural significance their networks of innovation and creative partnerships take on in embedding the intelligence of such an informatics-based and community-led transition to smart cities.

The chapter goes on to suggest this insight is equally significant for the reason it takes Hollands' (2008) thinking full circle. That is to say, by offering an alternative to the very ‘top-down’ entrepreneurial based business logic which is called for. Something which this chapter in turn realises by turning the top-down entrepreneurial based business logic of existing accounts on their head and grounding the information-rich and highly communicative qualities of such environmental and cultural developments on the community-led logic that is emerging to support the transition. That logic which in real time is aligned with, not against, the cybernetics of the social capital underlying the environmental and cultural significance of smart communities and what their founding networks of innovation and creative partnerships embed as the intelligence of this transition. Those developments in the cybernetics of social capital whose emergent environmental and cultural qualities are currently in the process of being institutionalised in the learning, knowledge transfer and capacity-building exercises which are intelligent in embedding the informatics of this community-led transition to smart cities.

Chapter 3 examines how electronic governance (e-governance) can assist in helping cities make better decisions and become more competitive, as well as engage with citizens in democratic activities and decision-making processes. This chapter suggests that e-governance may provide a new vehicle for the emerging smart city. It assesses the conceptual landscape for city e-governance, and focuses on how cities can foster collaborative digital environments to enable local competitiveness and prosperity through knowledge networks and partnerships, integrated e-services and e-participation. Drawing from the literature and the results of a comprehensive survey study in 12 European cities, it puts forward a series of propositions on the future of e-city governance in Europe and the implications for strategic policy innovations to foster smart cities.

While Chapters 2 and 3 review the debate on governing the transition to smart cities, Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 examine the transition from intelligent cities to smart cities. In this respect, Chapter 4 develops the notion of an intelligent city as the provider of electronically enhanced services. It identifies how this growing interest in the notion of intelligent cities has led universities to explore the possibilities of using communities of practice (CoPs) as a means of drawing upon the industrial knowledge base such organisations offer to develop integrated models of e-government (eGov) services. It reports on the attempts made by a consortium of leading European cities (led by Manchester) to use the intelligence that CoPs generate as the environmental and cultural means by which to work smarter in developing integrated models of eGov service provision.

Made up of researchers, computer engineers, informational managers and public sector service providers, the IntelCities CoP has worked to develop an integrated model of eGov services and support the actions taken by cities to host them on platforms with sufficient intelligence to meet the e-learning needs, knowledge transfer requirements and capacity building commitments of their socially inclusive and participatory urban regeneration programmes.

As an exercise in CoP development, this organisation is particularly successful for the reason the intelligence it has sought to embed in cities and integrate within their platforms of eGov services is inter-organisational, networked, virtual and managed as part of a highly distributed web-based learning environment. Made up of both open source software groups, experts and lay people, the CoP is culturally unique in the sense its network provides an example of a virtual organisation set up to manage the learning needs and knowledge requirements of a technological platform. As such it:

• offers the means to meet the learning needs, knowledge transfer requirements and capacity building commitments of the organisation;

• co-designs them as a set of services that are socially inclusive and participatory and which allow users to learn about the availability of such services, how to access them and the opportunities they offer everyone to become engaged with and get involved in meeting the knowledge transfer requirements and capacity building commitments of their urban regeneration programmes;

• allows for the monitoring and evaluation of such actions.

As the chapter establishes, it is the e-learning platform that makes it possible for the online services under development to be integrated with the knowledge transfer and capacity-building technologies which are needed for this CoP to work as a shared enterprise. That is as an enterprise which allows such organisations to collaborate and build consensus on the competencies, skills and training that are needed to service the required online developments.

Together, the networks, innovation and creativity of the partnerships responsible for organising the development of these technologies, skills and training exercises make it possible to engage citizens and show how the active participation of communities is not only intelligent, but smart. This turns attention to what is termed the eTopia demonstrator, developed to illustrate the functionality of the semantically rich eGov services in question. This term is borrowed from the account of intelligent cities as e-topias and as organisations that are SMART, lean, mean, green software systems, driven by networked communities which are virtual. Organisational characteristics that are themselves built on the learning needs, knowledge management requirements and digital libraries of the electronically enhanced services that are made available on the eCity platform as a pool of integrated eGov services.

Chapter 5 goes on to examine the spatial intelligence of cities, the use of digital technologies and the institutional settings of those innovation systems seen as smart enough to radically transform cities. The starting point for this chapter are two related observations about the increased use of terms like intelligent and smart in contemporary urban planning and development. The first concerns the somewhat over-simplistic way cities tend to use the terms ‘intelligent’ or ‘smart’. The second relates to the diverse range of strategies cities are currently assembling in laying claim to such a status. The observation here being that such a diverse range of strategies tends to say more about the ambiguity of the relationship digital technologies have to the developments under examination, than what it means for them to be ether intelligent or smart. This is because for Komninos, the strategies in question are seen as being insufficiently developed for their digital technologies to embed the intelligence cities need to be smart and therefore require to claim such a status.

As a counterpoise to these observations, this chapter lays down some of the ‘fundamentals of spatial intelligence’, whose strategies and applications can be seen as being smart. It argues that despite the great diversity of strategies and applications, the logistics of spatial intelligence teach us that smart cities rest on a few knowledge-based trajectories. In particular, those knowledgebased trajectories that are embedded in the transitions of Bletchley Park, Hong Kong and Amsterdam and which the paper suggests are still only partially understood.

Taking Komninos' idea that cities are still stuck in the digital, rather than embedded in the intelligence of what is smart, as the ‘third’ observation on the transition, Chapter 6 examines the thesis on the ‘embedded intelligence of smart cities’. For, as the chapter points out, while Mitchell (1995) sets out a vision of urban life literally done to bits, left fragmented and in danger of coming unstuck, ‘e-topia’ offers a counter-point to this and image of the city no longer left in bits, but a place ‘where it all comes together’.

Dwelling on the reconciliatory nature of these symbolic statements, this chapter suggests that while this thesis on the ‘coming together’ of the virtual and physical and dissolution of the boundaries between ‘cyber and meat space’ is compelling, there are a number of concerns surrounding the technical, social and environmental status of the embedded intelligence that is currently available for urban planners and developers to make cities smart. While problematic in itself, the chapter also suggests that if the difficulties experienced over the transition from intelligent to smart cities were only methodological they may perhaps be manageable, but the problem is they run deeper than this and relate to more substantive issues which surround the cultural trajectory of the thesis.

This, the chapter suggests, is a critical insight of social and environmental significance because if the cultural trajectory of the thesis is not in the direction of either the embedded intelligence of smart cities, or the ICTs of what is referred to as ‘digitally inclusive regeneration platforms’, then the question arises as to whether the whole notion of e-topia can be seen as a progressive force for change, or merely a way for the embedded intelligence of smart cities to reproduce the status quo.

This unfortunate scenario is what Graham and Marvin (2001) refer to not as e-topia but as splintering urbanism, because, under this thesis, the citizenship underlying the informatics of these communities is no longer able to carry the sheer weight of the material that such a cybernetic-based networking of intelligence is supposed to support. This, the chapter suggests, is important because such a representation of the transition offers what can only be referred to as the antithesis to e-topia. An antithesis that, it might well be added, goes some length to search out, uncover and expose the other side of this cybernetic-based intelligence and reveal what currently lies hidden in the debate that is currently taking place about the transition to smart cities.

From this perspective, the chapter suggests that it is evident that the problems with e-topia are as much substantive as methodological, the former holding the key to the latter. In substantive terms the chapter offers another twist on the question of what the transition from intelligent to smart cities means and in doing so goes very much against the grain, arguing that our current understanding of embedded intelligence, smart cities and the ICTs of digitally inclusive regeneration puts us on the verge of a new environmental determinism. An environmental determinism that this time around is cybernetic, in that it is founded on the embedded intelligence of knowledge-based agents underpinning the networking of smart cities and the digitally inclusive regeneration platforms they support.

To avoid repeating this mistake (yet) again, attention is drawn to the spaces that their radical democratic, i.e. egalitarian and ecologically integral, account of the transition opens up for a much more emancipatory view of the intelligence embedded in those knowledge-based agents understood as being smart enough to meet these requirements. Those knowledge-based agents, it should perhaps be added, understood as being smart enough to meet these requirements by way of and through their exploitation of the social capital that underlies the very communities that give rise to the environmental and cultural norms, rules and values of such developments. In particular, the social capital that underlies the embedded intelligence of smart cities and that their communities of knowledge-based agents (architects, planners, engineers and surveyors) in turn support by hosting them as environmental and cultural services found on digitally inclusive regeneration platforms.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction (to smart cities)
• Part I Governing the transition
• Part II Modelling the transition
• Part III Analysing the transition
• Index