Smart city planning must work for both private business and public citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Neil Britto; Suparno Banerjee and Constanza Movsichoff: “The challenges associated with the design, development and maintenance of digital urban infrastructure are substantial and have to balance the needs and incentives of both public and private stakeholders. While proofs of concepts and test-beds have been tried and are often successful, scaling these to city scale has been challenging for a number of reasons:

  • Scope. There is too often a focus on solutions that address narrow aspects of the city’s needs.
  • Capital requirements. Many cities do not have adequate capital for deploying solutions at scale and might struggle to attract investment from the private sector.
  • Procurement. Procurement models favor vendor-buyer relationships as opposed to multi-year, multi-enterprise, complex partnerships.
  • Time scales. Some of the most pressing challenges that cities face will need multiple years to address. These complex journeys need partnerships that can withstand the pressures of time, budgets and expectations.
  • Data. A nuanced understanding of public concern over data sourcing and use can be critical for a successful public-private collaboration. These dynamics contribute to the unique challenges and opportunities for smart city public-private collaborations that range from intelligent street lighting to broadband access.

In recognition of these challenges, the World Economic Forum’s G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance assembled a taskforce to look for best practices and model policies in the area of public-private collaborations in 2021. That taskforce, comprised of experts and officers from cities, companies and institutions deeply involved in smart city projects, compiled case studies, insights and feedback from across the sector. As members of that taskforce, we are happy to provide a distillation of these resources in the form of our new Primer for Smart City Public Private Collaborations…(More)”.

Global Review of Smart City Governance Practices

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Report by UN Habitat: “Through smart city initiatives, digital technologies are increasingly applied in cities to modernize city operations and transform service delivery. The ongoing digital transformation provides new opportunities but also creates challenges, and it is increasingly apparent that delivering effective urban digital services is a complex task. Nowadays, smart city projects are typically driven by technology and little attention is given to governance dynamics. In addition, the novelty and complexity of many smart city initiatives make it difficult for public sector organizations to fully grasp how to effectively manage digital transformation processes.

As many cities and public sector organizations across the world have been experimenting with smart city initiatives, their actions have generated a data-rich environment from which to learn. As such, this report features findings from a systematic literature review and a global online survey completed by approximately 300 respondents, who have reported on the smart city governance practices of more than 250 municipalities in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America.

With the objective to support both urban managers and practitioners, the report highlights several dimensions for effective smart city governance and ways to foster a people-centered approach to smart cities. It serves as a knowledge resource to present best practices, gaps in smart city governance mechanisms, and the various elements to consider when governing the planning and implementation of smart city initiatives.

The report is part of UN-Habitat’s strategy to promote a people-centered approach to digital transformation supporting local governments in establishing the right capacities, regulatory frameworks, collaborations and arrangements for using technology to advance human developments and show commitment to human rights, both in online and offline environments…(More)”.

Smart cities: reviewing the debate about their ethical implications

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper from Marta Ziosi, Benjamin Hewitt, Prathm Juneja, Mariarosaria Taddeo & Luciano Floridi: “This paper considers a host of definitions and labels attached to the concept of smart cities to identify four dimensions that ground a review of ethical concerns emerging from the current debate. These are: (1) network infrastructure, with the corresponding concerns of control, surveillance, and data privacy and ownership; (2) post-political governance, embodied in the tensions between public and private decision-making and cities as post-political entities; (3) social inclusion, expressed in the aspects of citizen participation and inclusion, and inequality and discrimination; and (4) sustainability, with a specific focus on the environment as an element to protect but also as a strategic element for the future. Given the persisting disagreements around the definition of a smart city, the article identifies in these four dimensions a more stable reference framework within which ethical concerns can be clustered and discussed. Identifying these dimensions makes possible a review of the ethical implications of smart cities that is transversal to their different types and resilient towards the unsettled debate over their definition…(More)”.

Breakthroughs in Smart City Implementation

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Book edited by Leo P. Ligthart and Ramjee Prasad: “Breakthroughs in Smart City Implementation should give answers on a wide variety of present social, political and technological problems. Green and long-lasting solutions are needed in coming 10 years and beyond on areas as green and long lasting solutions for improving air quality, quality of life of residents in cities, traffic congestions and many more.Two Conasense branches, established in China and in India, report in six book chapters on initiatives needed to overcome the obvious shortcomings at present. Three more chapters complete this fifth Conasense book: an introductory chapter concerning Smart City from Conasense perspective, a chapter showing that not technology but the people in the cities are most important and a chapter on recent results and prospects of “Human in the Loop” in smart vehicular systems…(More)”.

Smart Streetlights are Casting a Long Shadow Over Our Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Zhile Xie: “This is not a surveillance system—nobody is watching it 24 hours a day,” said Erik Caldwell, director of economic development in San Diego, in an interview where he was asked if the wide deployment of “smart” streetlights had turned San Diego into a surveillance city. Innocuous at first glance, this statement demonstrates the pernicious impact of artificial intelligence on new “smart” streetlight systems. As Caldwell suggests, a central human vision is important for the streetlight to function as a surveillance instrument. However, the lack of human supervision only suggests its enhanced capacity. Smart sensors are able to process and communicate environmental information that does not present itself in a visual format and does not rely on human interpretation. On the one hand, they reinforce streetlights’ function as a surveillance instrument, historically associated with light and visibility. On the other hand, in tandem with a wide range of sensors embedded in our everyday environment, they also enable for-profit data extraction on a vast scale,  under the auspices of a partnership between local governments and tech corporations. 

The streetlight was originally designed as a surveillance device and has been refined to that end ever since then. Its association with surveillance and security can be found as early as 400 BC. Citizens of Ancient Rome started to install an oil lamp in front of every villa to prevent tripping or thefts, and an enslaved person would be designated to watch the lamp—lighting was already paired with the notion of control through slavery. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch has detailed in his book Disenchanted Light, street lighting also emerged in medieval European cities alongside practices of policing. Only designated watchmen who carried a torch and a weapon were allowed to be out on the street. This ancient connection between security and visibility has been the basis of the wide deployment of streetlights in modern cities. Moreover, as Edwin Heathcote has explained in a recent article for the Architectural Review, gas streetlights were first introduced to Paris during Baron Haussmann’s restructuring of the city between 1853 and 1870, which was designed in part to prevent revolutionary uprisings. The invention of electric light bulbs in the late nineteenth century in Europe triggered new fears and imaginations around the use of streetlights for social control. For instance, in his 1894 dystopian novel The Land of the Changing Sun, W.N. Harben envisions an electric-optical device that makes possible 24-hour surveillance over the entire population of an isolated country, Alpha. The telescopic system is aided by an artificial “sun” that lights up the atmosphere all year round, along with networked observatories across the land that capture images of their surroundings, which are transmitted to a “throne room” for inspection by the king and police…(More)”.

Why Japan is building smart cities from scratch

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Article by Tim Hornyak: “By 2050, nearly 7 out of 10 people in the world will live in cities, up from just over half in 2020. Urbanization is nothing new, but an effort is under way across many high-income countries to make their cities smarter, using data, instrumentation and more efficient resource management. In most of these nations, the vast majority of smart-city projects involve upgrades to existing infrastructure. Japan stands out for its willingness to build smart communities from scratch as it grapples with a rapidly ageing population and a shrinking workforce, meaning that there are fewer people of working age to support older people.

In 2021, the proportion of Japan’s population aged 65 and over hit 29.1%, the highest in the world. By 2036 it will be 33%. Regional cities, especially, face a long, slow economic decline.

As a resource-poor, disaster-prone country, Japan has also had to pursue energy efficiency and resilience following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the tsunamis it triggered. The resulting meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant initially encouraged a shift away from nuclear power, which accounted for less than 4% of Japan’s energy use in 2020. However, there are growing calls, led by Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, for some reactors to be reopened to provide energy security and tackle rising fuel prices…(More)”.

We need smarter cities, not “smart cities”

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Article by Riad Meddebarchive and Calum Handforth: “This more expansive concept of what a smart city is encompasses a wide range of urban innovations. Singapore, which is exploring high-tech approaches such as drone deliveries and virtual-reality modeling, is one type of smart city. Curitiba, Brazil—a pioneer of the bus rapid transit system—is another. Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, with its passively cooled shopping center designed in 1996, is a smart city, as are the “sponge cities” across China that use nature-based solutions to manage rainfall and floodwater.

Where technology can play a role, it must be applied thoughtfully and holistically—taking into account the needs, realities, and aspirations of city residents. Guatemala City, in collaboration with our country office team at the UN Development Programme, is using this approach to improve how city infrastructure—including parks and lighting—is managed. The city is standardizing materials and designs to reduce costs and labor,  and streamlining approval and allocation processes to increase the speed and quality of repairs and maintenance. Everything is driven by the needs of its citizens. Elsewhere in Latin America, cities are going beyond quantitative variables to take into account well-being and other nuanced outcomes. 

In her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, the pioneering American urbanist, discussed the importance of sidewalks. In the context of the city, they are conduits for adventure, social interaction, and unexpected encounters—what Jacobs termed the “sidewalk ballet.” Just as literal sidewalks are crucial to the urban experience, so is the larger idea of connection between elements.

Truly smart cities recognize the ambiguity of lives and livelihoods, and they are driven by outcomes beyond the implementation of “solutions.”

However, too often we see “smart cities” focus on discrete deployments of technology rather than this connective tissue. We end up with cities defined by “use cases” or “platforms.” Practically speaking, the vision of a tech-centric city is conceptually, financially, and logistically out of reach for many places. This can lead officials and innovators to dismiss the city’s real and substantial potential to reduce poverty while enhancing inclusion and sustainability.

In our work at the UN Development Programme, we focus on the interplay between different components of a truly smart city—the community, the local government, and the private sector. We also explore the different assets made available by this broader definition: high-tech innovations, yes, but also low-cost, low-tech innovations and nature-based solutions. Big data, but also the qualitative, richer detail behind the data points. The connections and “sidewalks”—not just the use cases or pilot programs. We see our work as an attempt to start redefining smart cities and increasing the size, scope, and usefulness of our urban development tool kit…(More)”.

From the smart city to urban justice in a digital age

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Paper by Marit Rosol & Gwendolyn Blue: “The smart city is the most emblematic contemporary expression of the fusion of urbanism and digital technologies. Critical urban scholars are now increasingly likely to highlight the injustices that are created and exacerbated by emerging smart city initiatives and to diagnose the way that these projects remake urban space and urban policy in unjust ways. Despite this, there has not yet been a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the concept of justice in the smart city literature. To fill this gap and strengthen the smart city critique, we draw on the tripartite approach to justice developed by philosopher Nancy Fraser, which is focused on redistribution, recognition, and representation. We use this framework to outline key themes and identify gaps in existing critiques of the smart city, and to emphasize the importance of transformational approaches to justice that take shifts in governance seriously. In reformulating and expanding the existing critiques of the smart city, we argue for shifting the discussion away from the smart city as such. Rather than searching for an alternative smart city, we argue that critical scholars should focus on broader questions of urban justice in a digital age…(More)”.

Barcelona bets on ‘digital twin’ as future of city planning

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Article by Aitor Hernández-Morales: “In five years’ time, the structure of Europe’s cities won’t be decided in local town halls but inside a quiet 19th-century chapel in a leafy neighborhood of Barcelona.

Housed in the deconsecrated Torre Girona chapel, the MareNostrum supercomputer — one of the world’s most powerful data processors — is already busily analyzing how to improve city planning in Barcelona.

Barcelona is using data to track access to primary health care centers throughout the city | BSC

“We’re using the supercomputer to make sure the urban planning process isn’t just based on clever ideas and good intentions, but on data that allows us to anticipate its impacts and avoid the negative ones,” said Barcelona Deputy Mayor Laia Bonet, who is in charge of the city’s digital transition, climate goals and international partnerships.

As part of a pilot project launched with the Italian city of Bologna earlier this year, Barcelona has created a data-based replica of itself — a digital twin — where it can trial run potential city planning projects.

“Instead of implementing flawed policies and then have to go back and correct them, we’re saving time by making sure those decisions are right before we execute them,” said Bonet.

Although the scheme is still in its test phase, Bonet said she expects the city’s high-tech approach to urban development will soon be the norm in cities across the EU.

“Within a five-year horizon I expect to see this as a basic urban planning tool,” she said.

Looking for blindspots

Barcelona’s popular superilles, or “superblocks,” are a prime example of an urban scheme that could have benefited from data modelling in the planning stages, according to Bonet.

Since 2014 the city has been creating mini-neighborhoods where through-traffic and on-street parking is all but banned, with the goal of establishing a “network of green hubs and squares where pedestrians have priority.” The superblocks were also touted as a way to help tackle air pollution, which is directly responsible for over 1,000 deaths in Barcelona each year…(More)”.

Smart Cities and Smart Communities: Empowering Citizens through Intelligent Technologies

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Book edited by Srikanta Patnaik, Siddhartha Sen, Sudeshna Ghosh: “Smart City” programs and strategies have become one of the most dominant urban agendas for local governments worldwide in the past two decades. The rapid urbanization rate and unprecedented growth of megacities in the 21st century triggered drastic changes in traditional ways of urban policy and planning, leading to an influx of digital technology applications for fast and efficient urban management. With the rising popularity in making our cities “smart”, several domains of urban management, urban infrastructure, and urban quality-of-life have seen increasing dependence on advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) that optimize and control the day-to-day functioning of urban systems. Smart Cities, essentially, act as digital networks that obtain large-scale real-time data on urban systems, process them, and make decisions on how to manage them efficiently. The book presents 26 chapters, which are organized around five topics: (1) Conceptual framework for smart cities and communities; (2) Technical concepts and models for smart city and communities; (3) Civic engagement and citizen participation; (4) Case studies from the Global North; and (5) Case studies from the Global South…(More)”.