Developing a Critical Understanding of Smart Urbanism?

Smart urbanism is emerging at the intersection of visions for the future of urban places, new technologies and infrastructures. Smart urbanism discourses are deeply rooted in seductive and normative visions of the future where digital technology stands as the primary driver for change. Yet our understanding of the opportunities, challenges, and implications of smart urbanism is limited. Research in this field is in its infancy, fragmented along disciplinary lines and often based on single city case studies. As a result, we lack both the theoretical insight and empirical evidence required to assess the implications of this potentially transformative phenomenon. Given the significant implications of smart urbanism there is an urgent need to critically engage with why, how, for whom and with what consequences smart urbanism is emerging in different urban contexts. The aim of this review is to unpack the different logics and rationales behind smart urbanism discourses and proposals, and in this way understand the ways by which imaginaries of urban futures are currently being constructed, along with their socio-technical and political implications for future research priorities

Mobile networks and internet of things infrastructures to characterize smart human mobility

The evolution of Mobile Networks and Internet of Things (IoT) architectures allows one to rethink the way smart cities infrastructures are designed and managed, and solve a number of problems in terms of human mobility. The territories that adopt the sensoring era can take advantage of this disruptive technology to improve the quality of mobility of their citizens and the rationalization of their resources. However, with this rapid development of smart terminals and infrastructures, as well as the proliferation of diversified applications, even current networks may not be able to completely meet quickly rising human mobility demands. Thus, they are facing many challenges and to cope with these challenges, different standards and projects have been proposed so far. Accordingly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been utilized as a new paradigm for the design and optimization of mobile networks with a high level of intelligence. The objective of this work is to identify and discuss the challenges of mobile networks, alongside IoT and AI, to characterize smart human mobility and to discuss some workable solutions to these challenges. Finally, based on this discussion, we propose paths for future smart human mobility researches.This work has been supported by FCT–Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020. This work has also been supported by national funds through FCT–Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through project UIDB/04728/202

Mobile search, a case for next generation information society policies

After more than a decade of development work and hopes, the usage of mobile Internet has finally taken off. Now, we are witnessing the first signs of evidence what might become the explosion of mobile content and applications that will be shaping the (mobile) Internet of the future. Similar to the wired Internet, search will become very relevant for the usage of mobile Internet. Within the mobile ecosystem framework, this paper will discuss if and how intense public action in the mobile search domain should (could) be. Potential actions refer both to ‘conventional’ and 'non-conventional' regulatory approaches. Public administrations as procurement bodies may leverage services and thus acting as early deployers of applications is an example of a ‘conventional’ case, while the use of the wealth of public data with high added value in mobile search scenarios would be one of a ‘non-conventional’ case. The paper will present a list of different policy options and analyse their feasibility. These include policies options aimed both at the demand side (user-oriented) and at the supply side (innovation-support policies, regulatory policies, industrial-type policies, …) of mobile search