Monitoring movement in the smart city : opportunities and challenges of measuring urban bustle

One of the promises of the smart city concept is using real-time data to enhance policy making. In practice, such promises can turn out to be either very limited in what is actually possible or quickly trigger dystopian scenarios of tracking and monitoring. Today, many cities around the world already measure forms of urban bustle, i.e. how busy it is during specific periods of time. They do this for all kinds of purposes like optimising mobility flows, attracting tourism, monitoring safety during events or stimulating the local economy, and they employ divergent technologies: from analogue counting, over surveys, to more advanced near real-time tracking using mobile operator data. This fragmentation of approaches to measuring urban bustle creates some challenges for cities related to privacy, vendor lock-in, comparability of data, data quality and accuracy, historical and predictive analysis of data and so on. To tackle these challenges and formulate a standardised approach to measuring urban bustle, the thirteen largest cities in Flanders (Belgium), together with local technology vendors, co-created a “definition manual”; a document outlining indicators and relevant technologies for measuring urban bustle, as well as shared profile descriptions of residents and visitors of the city. This paper outlines the process and presents the results, an agreed-upon framework of standard profiles and indicators, which are useful to academics, public servants and technology companies involved in this topic

Communication on Smart City Evaluation and Reporting In UK cities: Pilots, Demos and Experiments Case

Global trends towards urbanisation are associated with wide-ranging challenges and opportunities for cities. Smart technologies create new opportunities for a range of smart city development and regeneration programmes designed to address the environmental, economic and social challenges concentrated in cities. Whilst smart city programmes have received much publicity, there has been much less discussion about the evaluation and measurement of smart city programme outcomes. Existing evaluation approaches have been criticised as non-standard and inadequate, focusing more on implementation processes and investment metrics than on city outcomes and the impacts of smart city programmes. Addressing this, the SmartDframe project aimed to examine city approaches to the evaluation of smart city projects and programmes and reporting of their impacts on city outcomes. A number of ‘smarter’ UK cities were invited to participate, with agreement by city authorities from Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Peterborough to be interviewed about their smart city work. The findings provide a series of smart city case studies that exemplify contemporary city practices, offering a timely, insightful contribution to city discourse about existing and best practice approaches to evaluation and reporting of complex smart city projects and programmes

New issues in NGA regulation: is there a scope for geographic regulation?

The adoption of geographically differentiated remedies may be a new regulatory instrument to foster NGAN investment. We present economic insights and review recent cases on the implementation of such regulatory interventio

The Critical Role of Public Charging Infrastructure

Editors: Peter Fox-Penner, PhD, Z. Justin Ren, PhD, David O. JermainA decade after the launch of the contemporary global electric vehicle (EV) market, most cities face a major challenge preparing for rising EV demand. Some cities, and the leaders who shape them, are meeting and even leading demand for EV infrastructure. This book aggregates deep, groundbreaking research in the areas of urban EV deployment for city managers, private developers, urban planners, and utilities who want to understand and lead change