Creating smart cities

Many cities around the world are presently pursuing a smart cities agenda in which networked ICTs are positioned and utilized to try to solve urban issues, drive local and regional economies, and foster civic initiatives. Regardless of whether cities have formulated and are implementing smart city visions, missions and policies, all cities of scale utilize a number of smart city technologies (e.g., intelligent transport systems, urban control rooms, smart grids, sensor networks, building management systems, urban informatics) to manage city services and infrastructures and to govern urban life (see Table 1.1). In this sense, we are already living in the smart city age, with assemblages of networked technologies being used to mediate many aspects of everyday life (e.g., work, consumption, communication, travel, service provision, domestic living), with the trend moving towards ever more computation being embedded into the urban fabric, previously dumb objects and processes becoming ‘smart’ in some fashion, and services being shaped by or delivered in conjunction with digital platforms (Kitchin and Dodge 2011). Smart city agendas corral the development and use of these technologies into a rhetoric and agenda in which digital technologies are championed as commonsensical, pragmatic solutions to all the ills of city life. Table 1.1 Smart city technologies Domain Example technologies Government E-government systems; online transactions; city operating systems; performance management systems; urban dashboards Security and emergency services Centralized control rooms; digital surveillance; predictive policing; coordinated emergency response Transport Intelligent transport systems; integrated ticketing; smart travel cards; bikeshare; real-time passenger information; smart parking; logistics management; transport apps; dynamic road signs Energy Smart grids; smart meters; energy usage apps; smart lighting Waste Compactor bins and dynamic routing/collection Environment IoT sensor networks (e.g., pollution, noise, weather; land movement; flood management); dynamically responsive interventions (e.g., automated flood defences) Buildings Building management systems; sensor networks Homes Smart meters; app-controlled smart appliances Source: Kitchin (2016).