Complex City Systems

Information and communications technology (ICT) is being exploited within cities to enable them to better compete in a global knowledge-based service-led economy. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cities exploited large technical systems (LTSs) such as the telegraph, telephony, electrical networks, and other technologies to enhance their social and economic position. This paper examines how the LTS model applies to ICT deployments, including broadband network, municipal wireless, and related services, and how cities and city planners in the twenty-first century are using or planning to use these technologies. This paper also examines their motivations and expectations, the contribution to date, and the factors affecting outcomes. The findings extend the LTS model by proposing an increased role for organizations with respect to an individual agency. The findings show how organizations form themselves into networks that interact and influence the outcome of the system at the level of the city. The extension to LTS, in the context of city infrastructure, is referred to as the complex city system framework. This proposed framework integrates the role of these stakeholder networks, as well as that of the socioeconomic, technical, and spatial factors within a city, and shows how together they shape the technical system and its socioeconomic contribution. The CCS framework has been presented at Digital Cities Conferences in Eindhoven, Barcelona, Taiwan, London and at IBM’s Global Smart Cities Conference in Shanghai between 2010 and 2012. Its finding are timely in the context of major policy decisions on investments at regional, national and international level on ICT infrastructure and related service transformation, as well as the governance of such projects, their planning and their deployment

Organizational models for implementing microgrids and district energy systems in urban commercial districts

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-61).There is a growing trend in cities toward establishing localized, shared energy infrastructure. As existing energy infrastructure ages and demand increases, cities face rising energy costs and security risks combined with mandates to decrease carbon emissions. Local energy infrastructure provides cities and neighborhoods with greater control over their energy production and consumption, including the ability to lower the cost of energy, move to low-carbon energy technologies, and improve energy reliability and security. This thesis seeks to understand how stakeholders in urban commercial districts are creating organizations to implement two types of shared local energy infrastructure: district energy and microgrids. Building district energy and microgrids is a complex undertaking, which is one reason that they proliferate in urban environments where that complexity is reduced, such as universities, hospitals, and military bases. These areas may have single property owners, single land-owners or preexisting energy infrastructure that simplifies regulatory, legal, and development complexities of building new energy systems. Commercial businesses districts are significantly more complicated; they have multiple properties that abut public right of ways and that are owned by multiple, unaffiliated customers of legacy energy utilities. Establishing such a system in a commercial district requires addressing local utility rights, public right-of-way and franchise issues, as well as creating a new organizational structure that allows for the involvement of multiple parties in developing the system. This thesis assesses the feasibility of two organizational models for implementing local energy infrastructure in commercial districts: a joint cooperative model and an independent provider model. In a joint cooperative, all properties in a district become customers of a jointly owned, operated, and managed energy system. With an independent provider, all district properties become customers of an independently owned and operated system. These models are evaluated through two cases in which they are currently being tested: a proposed district energy system in Portland, Oregon and a proposed microgrid in Stamford, Connecticut. Therein, barriers to implementation such as perception of risk and lack of familiarity with shared energy systems are also examined.by Genevieve Rose Sherman.M.C.P

Economic Impacts of GO TO 2040

The economy of the Chicago metropolitan region has reached a critical juncture. On the one hand, Chicagoland is currently a highly successful global region with extraordinary assets and outputs. The region successfully made the transition in the 1980s and 1990s from a primarily industrial to a knowledge and service-based economy. It has high levels of human capital, with strong concentrations in information-sector industries and knowledge-based functional clusters -- a headquarters region with thriving finance, business services, law, IT and emerging bioscience, advanced manufacturing and similar high-growth sectors. It combines multiple deep areas of specialization, providing the resilience that comes from economic diversity. It is home to the abundant quality-of-life amenities that flow from business and household prosperity.On the other hand, beneath this static portrait of our strengths lie disturbing signs of a potential loss of momentum. Trends in the last decade reveal slowing rates, compared to other regions, of growth in productivity and gross metropolitan product. Trends in innovation, new firm creation and employment are comparably lagging. The region also faces emerging challenges with respect to both spatial efficiency and governance.In this context, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) has just released GO TO 2040, its comprehensive, long-term plan for the Chicago metropolitan area. The plan contains recommendations aimed at shaping a wide range of regional characteristics over the next 30 years, during which time more than 2 million new residents are anticipated. Among the chief goals of GO TO 2040 are increasing the region's long-term economic prosperity, sustaining a high quality of life for the region's current and future residents and making the most effective use of public investments. To this end, the plan addresses a broad scope of interrelated issues which, in aggregate, will shape the long-term physical, economic, institutional and social character of the region.This report by RW Ventures, LLC is an independent assessment of the plan from a purely economic perspective, addressing the impacts that GO TO 2040's recommendations can be expected to have on the future of the regional economy. The assessment begins by describing how implementation of GO TO 2040's recommendations would affect the economic landscape of the region; reviews economic research and practice about the factors that influence regional economic growth; and, given both of these, articulates and illustrates the likely economic impacts that will flow from implementation of the plan. In the course of reviewing the economic implications of the plan, the assessment also provides recommendations of further steps, as the plan is implemented, for increasing its positive impact on economic growth

How Leaders Invest Staffing Resources for Learning Improvement

Analyzes staffing challenges that guide school leaders' resource decisions in the context of a learning improvement agenda, staff resource investment strategies that improve learning outcomes equitably, and ways to win support for differential investment

REGIONAL PUSH: TOWARDS A GEOGRAPHY OF DEVELOPMENT AND GROWTH IN LOW- AND MIDDLE-INCOME COUNTRIES

Regional push derives from the geographic agglomeration of economic activities, and is expressed in increments to national productivity. Various pieces of statistical evidence in favor of the existence of regional push effects in low- and middle-income economies are marshalled. The origins of these effects in different sorts of externalities and increasing returns to agglomerative scale and scope are analyzed in theoretical terms. Further evidence for the existence of these effects is displayed in a brief review of published case studies of African, Asian, and Latin American regions. A number of observations are then offered on the possibilities of identifying viable developmental policies and practices directed to enhancing the productivity-boosting properties of regions in low- and middle-income economies.Agglomeration, big push, regional development, developing countries, local economic development

The energy center initiative at politecnico di torino: practical experiences on energy efficiency measures in the municipality of torino

Urban districts should evolve towards a more sustainable infrastructure and greener energy carriers. The utmost challenge is the smart integration and control, within the existing infrastructure, of new information and energy technologies (such as sensors, appliances, electric and thermal power and storage devices) that are able to provide multi-services based on multi-actors and multi and interchangeable energy carriers. In recent years, the Municipality of Torino represents an experimental scenario, in which practical experiences in the below-areas have taken place through a number of projects: 1. energy efficiency in building; 2. smart energy grids management and smart metering; 3. biowaste-to-energy: mixed urban/industrial waste management with enhanced energy recovery from biogas. This work provides an overview and update on the most interesting initiatives of smart energy management in the urban context of Torino, with an analysis and quantification of the advantages gained in terms of energy and environmental efficiency

Monitoring Rural Water Points in Tanzania with Mobile Phones:The Evolution of the SEMA App

Development professionals have deployed several mobile phone-based ICT (Information and Communications Technology) platforms in the global South for improving water, health, and education services. In this paper, we focus on a mobile phone-based ICT platform for water services, called Sensors, Empowerment and Accountability in Tanzania (SEMA), developed by our team in the context of an action research project in Tanzania. Water users in villages and district water engineers in local governments may use it to monitor the functionality status of rural water points in the country. We describe the current architecture of the platform’s front-end (the SEMA app) and back-end and elaborate on its deployment in four districts in Tanzania. To conceptualize the evolution of the SEMA app, we use three concepts: transaction-intensiveness, discretion and crowdsourcing. The SEMA app effectively digitized only transaction-intensive tasks in the information flow between water users in villages and district water engineers. Further, it resolved two tensions over time: the tension over what to report (by decreasing the discretion of reporters) and over who should report (by constraining the reporting “crowd”)

Smart Cities and Positive Energy Districts: Urban Perspectives in 2020

Since their creation eight years ago, the EERA Joint Programmes and their participating institutions have accumulated important knowledge on specific topics of the programmes they carried out. This includes Smart Cities and Positive Energy Districts, which are not only crucial topics tackled by EERA Joint Programme in the Smart Cities Workplan, but also in H2020 as well as Horizon Europe or national calls, focusing on innovative solutions based on interdisciplinary approaches, which are needed to face the highly complex challenges in coming years, from sustainable urban development to emergencies in cities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The foreword of EERA JP in SC Special Issue 1|2018 highlighted the aim of the Special Issues series, which was, and still is, to support the growth of research networks in the EC framework. According to this, our ambition is to publish the most promising research and innovation projects which EERA JPonSC partners, and others, set up in the framework of H2020 Programme, to drive the attention to the fact that EERA JP on SC is one of the strong voices in research in Europe, capable of highlighting and integrating different solutions and points of view

Boston Unplugged: Mapping a Wireless Future

Reviews a variety of models that would allow Boston to provide free or low-cost high-speed Internet access citywide. Outlines the benefits and mechanics of citywide WiFi, and lists factors to consider in designing, developing, and deploying a system