Paper by Yusuf Bozkurt, Alexander Rossmann, Zeeshan Pervez, and Naeem Ramzan: “Smart cities aim to improve residents’ quality of life by implementing effective services, infrastructure, and processes through information and communication technologies. However, without robust smart city data governance, much of the urban data potential remains underexploited, resulting in inefficiencies and missed opportunities for city administrations. This study addresses these challenges by establishing specific, actionable requirements for smart city data governance models, derived from expert interviews with representatives of 27 European cities. From these interviews, recurring themes emerged, such as the need for standardized data formats, clear data access guidelines, and stronger cross-departmental collaboration mechanisms. These requirements emphasize technology independence, flexibility to adapt across different urban contexts, and promoting a data-driven culture. By benchmarking existing data governance models against these newly established urban requirements, the study uncovers significant variations in their ability to address the complex, dynamic nature of smart city data systems. This study thus enhances the theoretical understanding of data governance in smart cities and provides municipal decision-makers with actionable insights for improving data governance strategies. In doing so, it directly supports the broader goals of sustainable urban development by helping improve the efficiency and effectiveness of smart city initiatives…(More)”.
Measuring the Shade Coverage of Trees and Buildings in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Paper by Amirhosein Shabrang, Mehdi Pourpeikari Heris, and Travis Flohr: “We investigated the spatial shade patterns of trees and buildings on sidewalks and bike lanes in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We used Lidar data and 3D modeling to analyze the spatial and temporal shade distribution across the City. Our analysis shows significant shade variations throughout the City. Western city areas receive more shade from trees, and the eastern regions receive more shade from buildings. The City’s northern areas lack shade, but natural and built sources of shade can improve shade coverage integration. This study’s findings help identify shade coverage gaps, which have implications for urban planning and design for more heat-resilient cities…(More)”
Smart Cities to Smart Societies: Moving Beyond Technology
Book edited by Esmat Zaidan, Imad Antoine Ibrahim, and Elie Azar: “…explores the governance of smart cities from a holistic approach, arguing that the creation of smart cities must consider the specific circumstances of each country to improve the preservation, revitalisation, liveability, and sustainability of urban areas. The recent push for smart cities is part of an effort to reshape urban development through megaprojects, centralised master planning, and approaches that convey modernism and global affluence. However, moving towards a citywide smart transition is a major undertaking, and complexities are expected to grow exponentially. This book argues that a comprehensive approach is necessary to consider all relevant aspects. The chapters seek to identify the potential and pitfalls of the smart transformation of urban communities and its role in sustainability goals; share state-of-the-art practices concerning technology, policy, and social science dimensions in smart cities and communities; and develop opportunities for cooperation and partnership in wider and larger research and development programmes. Divided into three parts, the first part of the book highlights the significance of various societal elements and factors in facilitating a successful smart transition, with a particular emphasis on the role of human capital. The second part delves into the challenges associated with technology and its integration into smart city initiatives. The final part of the book examines the current state of regulations and policies governing smart cities. The book will be an important asset for students and researchers studying law, engineering, political science, international relations, geopolitics, economics, and engineering…(More)”.
Smart cities: the data to decisions process
Paper by Eve Tsybina et al: “Smart cities improve citizen services by converting data into data-driven decisions. This conversion is not coincidental and depends on the underlying movement of information through four layers: devices, data communication and handling, operations, and planning and economics. Here we examine how this flow of information enables smartness in five major infrastructure sectors: transportation, energy, health, governance and municipal utilities. We show how success or failure within and between layers results in disparities in city smartness across different regions and sectors. Regions such as Europe and Asia exhibit higher levels of smartness compared to Africa and the USA. Furthermore, within one region, such as the USA or the Middle East, smarter cities manage the flow of information more efficiently. Sectors such as transportation and municipal utilities, characterized by extensive data, strong analytics and efficient information flow, tend to be smarter than healthcare and energy. The flow of information, however, generates risks associated with data collection and artificial intelligence deployment at each layer. We underscore the importance of seamless data transformation in achieving cost-effective and sustainable urban improvements and identify both supportive and impeding factors in the journey towards smarter cities…(More)”.
Digital surveillance capitalism and cities: data, democracy and activism
Paper by Ashish Makanadar: “The rapid convergence of urbanization and digital technologies is fundamentally reshaping city governance through data-driven systems. This transformation, however, is largely controlled by surveillance capitalist entities, raising profound concerns for democratic values and citizen rights. As private interests extract behavioral data from public spaces without adequate oversight, the principles of transparency and civic participation are increasingly threatened. This erosion of data sovereignty represents a critical juncture in urban development, demanding urgent interdisciplinary attention. This comment proposes a paradigm shift in urban data governance, advocating for the reclamation of data sovereignty to prioritize community interests over corporate profit motives. The paper explores socio-technical pathways to achieve this goal, focusing on grassroots approaches that assert ‘data dignity’ through privacy-enhancing technologies and digital anonymity tools. It argues for the creation of distributed digital commons as viable alternatives to proprietary data silos, thereby democratizing access to and control over urban data. The discussion extends to long-term strategies, examining the potential of blockchain technologies and decentralized autonomous organizations in enabling self-sovereign data economies. These emerging models offer a vision of ‘crypto-cities’ liberated from extractive data practices, fostering environments where residents retain autonomy over their digital footprints. By critically evaluating these approaches, the paper aims to catalyze a reimagining of smart city technologies aligned with principles of equity, shared prosperity, and citizen empowerment. This realignment is essential for preserving democratic values in an increasingly digitized urban landscape…(More)”.
Using AI to Map Urban Change
Brief by Tianyuan Huang, Zejia Wu, Jiajun Wu, Jackelyn Hwang, Ram Rajagopal: “Cities are constantly evolving, and better understanding those changes facilitates better urban planning and infrastructure assessments and leads to more sustainable social and environmental interventions. Researchers currently use data such as satellite imagery to study changing urban environments and what those changes mean for public policy and urban design. But flaws in the current approaches, such as inadequately granular data, limit their scalability and their potential to inform public policy across social, political, economic, and environmental issues.
Street-level images offer an alternative source of insights. These images are frequently updated and high-resolution. They also directly capture what’s happening on a street level in a neighborhood or across a city. Analyzing street-level images has already proven useful to researchers studying socioeconomic attributes and neighborhood gentrification, both of which are essential pieces of information in urban design, sustainability efforts, and public policy decision-making for cities. Yet, much like other data sources, street-level images present challenges: accessibility limits, shadow and lighting issues, and difficulties scaling up analysis.
To address these challenges, our paper “CityPulse: Fine-Grained Assessment of Urban Change with Street View Time Series” introduces a multicity dataset of labeled street-view images and proposes a novel artificial intelligence (AI) model to detect urban changes such as gentrification. We demonstrate the change-detection model’s effectiveness by testing it on images from Seattle, Washington, and show that it can provide important insights into urban changes over time and at scale. Our data-driven approach has the potential to allow researchers and public policy analysts to automate and scale up their analysis of neighborhood and citywide socioeconomic change…(More)”.
The City as a License: Design, Rights and Civics in a Blockchain Society
Special Issue by Martijn de Waal et al: “Building upon critical work on smart cities, platform urbanism and algorithmic governance, this special issue proposes the ‘generative metaphor’ of the City as a License as a lens to analyze the digitally enhanced management of urban resources and infrastructures from a perspective of rights and agency. Such a perspective has become especially urgent with the rise of new data practices around the emergence of distributed ledger technologies, as they may introduce additional layers of complexity to the ‘algorithmic governance’ of cities. This is particularly due to their tokenization of resources, identities, and rights and automatic administration of access to urban resources. Contributions in this special issue investigate the affordances of distributed ledger technologies with regards to civic agency in the governance of collective urban resources. Could these newly emerging management systems for energy production and consumption or property rights contribute to pro-social and sustainable ways of governing and managing communities and their resources, according to the logic of the commons? The lens of the City as a License not only allows for such an analysis of potentialities, but also for a critical view on these techno-social systems, such as the way in which they may repeat the inequities and obfuscations of existing systems, produce unintended consequences through complex processes, and complicate accountability…(More)”.
Open data ecosystems: what models to co-create service innovations in smart cities?
Paper by Arthur Sarazin: “While smart cities are recently providing open data, how to organise the collective creation of data, knowledge and related products and services produced from this collective resource, still remains to be thought. This paper aims at gathering the literature review on open data ecosystems to tackle the following research question: what models can be imagined to stimulate the collective co-creation of services between smart cities’ stakeholders acting as providers and users of open data? Such issue is currently at stake in many municipalities such as Lisbon which decided to position itself as a platform (O’Reilly, 2010) in the local digital ecosystem. With the implementation of its City Operation Center (COI), Lisbon’s municipality provides an Information Infrastructure (Bowker et al., 2009) to many different types of actors such as telecom companies, municipalities, energy utilities or transport companies. Through this infrastructure, Lisbon encourages such actors to gather, integrate and release heterogeneous datasets and tries to orchestrate synergies among them so data-driven solution to urban problems can emerge (Carvalho and Vale, 2018). The remaining question being: what models for the municipalities such as Lisbon to lean on so as to drive this cutting-edge type of service innovation?…(More)”.
Managing smart city governance – A playbook for local and regional governments
Report by UN Habitat” “This playbook and its recommendations are primarily aimed at municipal governments and their political leaders, local administrators, and public officials who are involved in smart city initiatives. The recommendations, which are delineated in the subsequent sections of this playbook, are intended to help develop more effective, inclusive, and sustainable governance practices for urban digital transformations. The guidance offered on these pages could also be useful for national agencies, private companies, non-governmental organizations, and all stakeholders committed to promoting the sustainable development of urban communities through the implementation of smart city initiatives…(More)”.
Social approach to the transition to smart cities
Report by the European Parliamentary Research Services (EPRS): “This study explores the main impacts of the smart city transition on our cities and, in particular, on citizens and territories. In our research, we start from an analysis of smart city use cases to identify a set of key challenges, and elaborate on the main accelerating factors that may amplify or contain their impact on particular groups and territories. We then present an account of best practices that can help mitigate or prevent such challenges, and make some general observations on their scalability and replicability. Finally, based on an analysis of EU regulatory frameworks and a mapping of current or upcoming initiatives in the domain of smart city innovation, capacity-building and knowledge capitalisation, we propose six policy options to inform future policy-making at EU level to support a more inclusive smart city transition…(More)”.