The Smart Enough City

The Smart Enough City
Author: Ben Green
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2019-04-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262352257

Why technology is not an end in itself, and how cities can be “smart enough,” using technology to promote democracy and equity. Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself. In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to technology: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
Author: Anthony M. Townsend
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2013-10-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 039324153X

An unflinching look at the aspiring city-builders of our smart, mobile, connected future. From Beijing to Boston, cities are deploying smart technology—sensors embedded in streets and subways, Wi-Fi broadcast airports and green spaces—to address the basic challenges faced by massive, interconnected metropolitan centers. In Smart Cities, Anthony M. Townsend documents this emerging futuristic landscape while considering the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings of the key actors—entrepreneurs, mayors, philanthropists, and software developers—at work in shaping the new urban frontier.

Smart Cities: Issues and Challenges

Smart Cities: Issues and Challenges
Author: Anna Visvizi
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2019-06-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0128166487

Smart Cities: Issues and Challenges: Mapping Political, Social and Economic Risks and Threats serves as a primer on smart cities, providing readers with no prior knowledge on smart cities with an understanding of the current smart cities debates. Gathering cutting-edge research and insights from academics, practitioners and policymakers around the globe, it identifies and discusses the nascent threats and challenges contemporary urban areas face, highlighting the drivers and ways of navigating these issues in an effective manner. Uniquely providing a blend of conceptual academic analysis with empirical insights, the book produces policy recommendations that boost urban sustainability and resilience. - Combines conceptual academic approaches with empirically-driven insights and best practices - Offers new approaches and arguments from inter and multi-disciplinary perspectives - Provides foundational knowledge and comparative insight from global case-studies that enable critical reflection and operationalization - Generates policy recommendations that pave the way to debate and case-based planning

Uneven Innovation

Uneven Innovation
Author: Jennifer Clark
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231545789

The city of the future, we are told, is the smart city. By seamlessly integrating information and communication technologies into the provision and management of public services, such cities will enhance opportunity and bolster civic engagement. Smarter cities will bring in new revenue while saving money. They will be more of everything that a twenty-first century urban planner, citizen, and elected official wants: more efficient, more sustainable, and more inclusive. Is this true? In Uneven Innovation, Jennifer Clark considers the potential of these emerging technologies as well as their capacity to exacerbate existing inequalities and even produce new ones. She reframes the smart city concept within the trajectory of uneven development of cities and regions, as well as the long history of technocratic solutions to urban policy challenges. Clark argues that urban change driven by the technology sector is following the patterns that have previously led to imbalanced access, opportunities, and outcomes. The tech sector needs the city, yet it exploits and maintains unequal arrangements, embedding labor flexibility and precarity in the built environment. Technology development, Uneven Innovation contends, is the easy part; understanding the city and its governance, regulation, access, participation, and representation—all of which are complex and highly localized—is the real challenge. Clark’s critique leads to policy prescriptions that present a path toward an alternative future in which smart cities result in more equitable communities.

A City Is Not a Computer

A City Is Not a Computer
Author: Shannon Mattern
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2021-08-10
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 069122675X

A bold reassessment of "smart cities" that reveals what is lost when we conceive of our urban spaces as computers Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City Is Not a Computer reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models. Shannon Mattern begins by examining the ethical and ontological implications of urban technologies and computational models, discussing how they shape and in many cases profoundly limit our engagement with cities. She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the "city-as-computer" metaphor, which undergirds much of today's urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing. Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms. She shows how the public library functions as a steward of urban intelligence, and describes the scales of upkeep needed to sustain a city's many moving parts, from spinning hard drives to bridge repairs. Incorporating insights from urban studies, data science, and media and information studies, A City Is Not a Computer offers a visionary new approach to urban planning and design.

Smart Cities Cybersecurity and Privacy

Smart Cities Cybersecurity and Privacy
Author: Danda B. Rawat
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2018-12-04
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0128150335

Smart Cities Cybersecurity and Privacy examines the latest research developments and their outcomes for safe, secure, and trusting smart cities residents. Smart cities improve the quality of life of citizens in their energy and water usage, healthcare, environmental impact, transportation needs, and many other critical city services. Recent advances in hardware and software, have fueled the rapid growth and deployment of ubiquitous connectivity between a city's physical and cyber components. This connectivity however also opens up many security vulnerabilities that must be mitigated. Smart Cities Cybersecurity and Privacy helps researchers, engineers, and city planners develop adaptive, robust, scalable, and reliable security and privacy smart city applications that can mitigate the negative implications associated with cyber-attacks and potential privacy invasion. It provides insights into networking and security architectures, designs, and models for the secure operation of smart city applications. - Consolidates in one place state-of-the-art academic and industry research - Provides a holistic and systematic framework for design, evaluating, and deploying the latest security solutions for smart cities - Improves understanding and collaboration among all smart city stakeholders to develop more secure smart city architectures

The Right to the Smart City

The Right to the Smart City
Author: Paolo Cardullo
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2019-06-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1787691411

Globally, Smart Cities initiatives are pursued which reproduce the interests of capital and neoliberal government, rather than wider public good. This book explores smart urbanism and 'the right to the city', examining citizenship, social justice, commoning, civic participation, and co-creation to imagine a different kind of Smart City.

Sixteen Shades of Smart: How Cities Can Shape Their Own Future

Sixteen Shades of Smart: How Cities Can Shape Their Own Future
Author: Christos Cabolis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2019-11-11
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9782940485307

Smart cities are a fast-growing species, and a fascinating field for new experiments in a number of critical areas, ranging from urban planning, sustainable energy, and transport strategies to social integration and talent attraction, to name a few. As leaders and citizens around the world continue to assess, design, implement and improve on ways to create better cities, they often find themselves confronted with a multitude of decisions and a wide range of partial solutions to specific problems such as traffic congestion, waste management and crime. Unfortunately, they have precious few tools to enable them to define the strategies required and take advantage of the experience of other smart cities around the world. In such a context, metrics can play a significant and constructive role: by quantifying efforts and results, they increase the ability of decision-makers to identify where their priorities should lie as well as the relative merits of various approaches.

Smart Cities For Dummies

Smart Cities For Dummies
Author: Jonathan Reichental
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2020-07-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 111967994X

Become empowered to build and maintain smarter cities At its core, a smart city is a collection of technological responses to the growing demands, challenges, and complexities of improving the quality of life for billions of people now living in urban centers across the world. The movement to create smarter cities is still in its infancy, but ambitious and creative projects in all types of cities—big and small—around the globe are beginning to make a big difference. New ideas, powered by technology, are positively changing how we move humans and products from one place to another; create and distribute energy; manage waste; combat the climate crisis; build more energy efficient buildings; and improve basic city services through digitalization and the smart use of data. Inside this book you’ll find out: What it really means to create smarter cities How our urban environments are being transformed Big ideas for improving the quality of life for communities Guidance on how to create a smart city strategy The essential role of data in building better cities The major new technologies ready to make a difference in every community Smart Cities For Dummies will give you the knowledge to understand this important topic in depth and be ready to be an agent of change in your community.