Exploring 'smart citizenship' as a socio-technical ecology: the case of Oxfordshire, UK

Critical social science scholarship on ‘smart citizenship’ has thus far emphasised ‘bottom-up’ participation as a democratising antidote to ‘top-down’ corporate or state-led smart cities. It is implied that contesting these powerful smart actors involves increasing the degree of citizen participation in smart programmes or projects and by enabling greater political agency in grassroots or citizen-centric alternatives. In this thesis, I emphasise the multiple and heterogenous ways ‘smart citizenship’ is enacted through a diverse set of discourses, practices, and materialities. Approaching these collectives as ‘socio-technical ecologies’, I seek to move beyond existing dichotomies that frame smart citizenship as either a condition of technologically-mediated authoritarian control (top-down) or of increased democratic participatory processes (bottom-up). My approach, I argue, helps to account for a wider set of interrelated ways in which citizenship is negotiated in actually-existing contexts of the smart city. The thesis draws on empirical materials generated through a study of how the UK county of Oxfordshire is being made ‘smart’. In doing so, I identify four overlapping, interconnected ways in which smart citizenship is constituted through ecologies of discourses, practices and materialities. The first is a type of ‘informational’ smart citizenship, which is centred on establishing and mobilising a fairly familiar mix of participatory deliberative engagement practices, procedures, and technologies. The second is the primarily discursive framing of citizens as living lab ‘beneficiaries’ who accrue relative advantages from experiments with technological products or services. Beneficiary citizens are enrolled in political-economic discourses of innovation to legitimise imaginaries of anticipated smart futures. The third raises the importance of 'expert' citizenship, which is deployed by partners to constitute local tech workers as experts engaged in making Oxford smart. I finally consider the ‘sim’ citizenships produced from machine learning methods of data analysis generative of road actor behaviour models for digital twin modelling. Sim citizens, calibrated by smart city data, populate the digital twin for iterative validation and verification testing of automated driving systems. The thesis altogether contributes to scholarly understandings of smart city citizenship by identifying emerging sets of relations between humans and technologies in digitally-mediated cities

Digital twins : a critical discussion on their potential for supporting policy‐making and planning in urban logistics

Poor logistics efficiency, due to low load factors caused by high demand fragmentation, will have relevant negative consequences for cities in terms of pollution, congestion and overall city liveability. Policy-makers should equip themselves with appropriate tools to perform reliable, comprehensive and timely analyses of urban logistics scenarios, also considering upcoming (i) technological changes, (ii) business model evolutions and (iii) spatial-temporal changes these innovations will produce. This paper discusses the Digital Twin (DT) concept, illustrating the role it might play and clarifying how to properly conceive it with respect to urban freight transport policy-making and planning. The main message is that without a sound theory and knowledge with respect to the relationships linking contextual reality and choice/behaviour, it is not possible to make sense of what happens in the real world. Therefore, the joint use of behavioural and simulation models should characterise a DT within a Living Lab approach so to stimulate effective, well-informed and participated planning processes, but also to forecast both behaviour and reactions to structural changes and policy measures implementations. Keywords: digital twins, urban freight, living lab, behavioural models, policy, planningpublishedVersio

Through the clouds : urban analytics for smart cities

Data has been collected since mankind, but in the recent years the technical innovations enable us to collect exponentially growing amounts of data through the use of sensors, smart devices and other sources. In her lecture Nanda will explore the role of Big Data in urban environments. She will give an introduction to the world of Big Data and Smart Cities, and an assessment of the role that data analytics plays in the current state of the digital transformation in our cities. Examples are given in the field of energy and mobility

The opportunity for smart city projects at municipal scale: Implementing a positive energy district in Zorrozaurre

The urgency of climate change is demanding new urban energy transition processes that will be accelerated by the implementation of innovative urban solutions. This paper proposes a three-step methodology to encompass the energy transition in cities. Firstly, the design of urban spaces in accordance to Positive Energy District (PED) concept is defining a very ambitious objective that will lead the development and implementation of innovative urban approaches. Secondly, the implementation of Urban City Labs is proposed for testing and demonstrating urban innovations at real scale as reasonable approach for consolidated urban landscapes. Thirdly, energy transition is demanding new governance mechanisms where top-down and bottom-up perspectives are continually combined and harmonized. ATELIER H2020 is accelerating the demonstration of this methodology at the recently defined PED in Zorrozaurre (Bilbao, Basque Country)

Institutionalising smart city research and innovation: from fuzzy definitions to real-life experiments

By exploring and defining characteristics of a smart city research and innovation centre, we contribute to the discussion on smart city development capacity. To do so, using a qualitative method, we review definitions of the concept and map international groups and institutes affiliated with this domain. Our main result is an overview of global research centres dealing with smart cities. One of the key implications of this paper is that instead of a strict definition, the important aspect appears in the framing provided by the complex real-life challenges that require and enable cross-disciplinary research, even though the concept keeps evolving

The promotion of assets in the community

Espoon keskuksessa toteutetun osallistava budjetointi Mun Idea -hankkeen osatuoto

Heritage-led ontologies: Digital platform for supporting the regeneration of cultural and historical sites

The increasing application of digital technologies to cultural heritage (CH) is wide and well documented, including a variety of tools such as digital archives, online guides and HBIM repositories. Several vocabularies and ontologies were designed to order heritage data and make CH more accessible and exploitable. However, these tools have often focused on a particular dimension of CH producing high value in separate sectors (e.g. access to conservation of historic buildings and data valorisation for restoration of heritage assets) but lacking ways for adapting or replicating the model to urban complex systems. Moreover, many studies and tools show large effort in cataloguing and archiving, but less in providing tools for designing and managing. The ROCK platform, developed within the Horizon 2020 (H2020) funded project ROCK (GA 730280), addresses the need for a management and interventionoriented interoperable tool, aimed at storing, visualizing, elaborating and linking data on cultural heritage. The use of already existing ontologies was not sufficient for developing a tool to deal with the complexity of urban systems and heterogeneous data sources. Instead, a participative methodology was set in place for the development of a context-based semantic framework to define the needs and requirements of heritage-led regeneration actions

Transition UGent: a bottom-up initiative towards a more sustainable university

The vibrant think-tank ‘Transition UGent’ engaged over 250 academics, students and people from the university management in suggesting objectives and actions for the Sustainability Policy of Ghent University (Belgium). Founded in 2012, this bottom-up initiative succeeded to place sustainability high on the policy agenda of our university. Through discussions within 9 working groups and using the transition management method, Transition UGent developed system analyses, sustainability visions and transition paths on 9 fields of Ghent University: mobility, energy, food, waste, nature and green, water, art, education and research. At the moment, many visions and ideas find their way into concrete actions and policies. In our presentation we focused on the broad participative process, on the most remarkable structural results (e.g. a formal and ambitious Sustainability Vision and a student-led Sustainability Office) and on recent actions and experiments (e.g. a sustainability assessment on food supply in student restaurants, artistic COP21 activities, ambitious mobility plans, food leftovers projects, an education network on sustainability controversies, a transdisciplinary platform on Sustainable Cities). We concluded with some recommendations and reflections on this transition approach, on the important role of ‘policy entrepreneurs’ and student involvement, on lock-ins and bottlenecks, and on convincing skeptical leaders