An Empty Promise? Digital Democracy in the Smart City

The digital transformation affects every part of our societies and everyday lives, including the processes and structures of our democracies. On the one hand, information and communication technologies have the potential to lower the threshold for political communication and participation. On the other hand, they can be used for large-scale data collection and surveillance, posing a risk to the public sphere. This thesis investigates the impact of digitization on the legitimacy of democracy. It first develops a novel framework based on the theories of participatory and deliberative democracy, drawing on recent work on deliberative systems. On this basis, digital democracy is examined as a system, consisting of different engagement spaces and actors within the smart city. The smart city is a particularly fruitful testbed for digital democracy as it is based on the promise of applying a high density of digital technologies to facilitate civic participation as well as better service delivery and governance. Through an in-depth case study of the smart city of Amsterdam, this thesis not only reveals the legitimacy dilemmas of digital democracy in the smart city, but also illustrates the limits of applying participatorydeliberative systems theory on a digital democracy ecosystem. The analysis demonstrates design conflicts between different online engagement platforms within the digital democracy system, as well as conflicting objectives among the actors behind them. The findings do not support the claim that digitization negatively impacts democracy’s legitimacy in the smart city of Amsterdam through marketization, large-scale data collection, and surveillance, as some authors warn. However, a significant positive impact of digitization on democratic legitimacy, through higher levels of inclusiveness, empowerment, or civic influence, is also not confirmed. The findings show that digital technologies’ promise of facilitating large-scale citizen participation and deliberation in the smart city does not live up to the normative ideal. The results from Amsterdam are exposed to smart city and digital democracy experts across the globe to test their generalizability, demonstrating that, despite its shortcomings, Amsterdam’s extensive digital democracy system is far advanced in international comparison. What may appear a contradiction in fact illustrates that we are still in the early stages of development, with potential to enhance the legitimacy of digital democracy, both in the smart city of Amsterdam and beyond

Digital urban nature

Within policy and research debates on the smart city, the urban environment has become an arena of contestation. Claims that digitalisation will render the city more resource-efficient are countered by criticism of the tensions between smart and sustainability practices. Little attention has been paid, however, to the role of nature in digitally mediated urban environments. The flora, fauna and habitats of a city are a void in research and policy on digital urbanism. This paper provides one of the first conceptually grounded, empirical studies of ‘digital urban nature’ in practice. Taking the empirical example of Berlin, the paper demonstrates how a single city can spawn a rich variety of digital nature schemes, develops from this a typology to guide future research and analyses two schemes in depth to illustrate the aspirations and limitations of digital technologies targeting urban nature. The empirical findings are interpreted by bringing into dialogue pertinent strands of urban research: first, between smart environments and urban nature to explore ways of representing nature through digital technologies and, second, between digital and urban commons to interpret changes in the collective and individual use of urban nature. The paper reveals that digital platforms and apps are creating new ways of seeing and experiencing nature in the city, but often cling to conventional, anthropocentric notions of urban nature, with sometimes detrimental effects. More broadly, it suggests that exploring practices of digitalisation beyond the remit of conventional smart city policy can enrich scholarship on digitally mediated human-nature relations in the city.Peer Reviewe

Aurora Smart Cities Youth Summit

Mayor Richard Irvin has set the! goal to make the City of Aurora a regional technology hub. Poised to become a sandbox for innovation, Aurora\u27s 605 Innovation District is partnering with world-class companies and investing in smart city infrastructure to become a leading-edge urban development hub for the State of Illinois and beyond. What is a Smart City | As defined by the United Nations “a smart sustainable city is an innovative city that uses information a11d communications technology and other means to improve quality of life, efficie11cy of urban operations and services and competitiveness while ensuring that it meets the needs of present and future generations with respect to economic, social and environmental aspects.\u27\u27 Think-a-than | A gathering of people from a variety of perspectives and expertise, coming together to think, talk and push each of us out of our boxes to find rich and radical new approaches to tough problems. IMSA and 605 Innovation District invite Aurora youth, parents, and educators to facilitate discussions about the impact, and possibilities of a Smart City. We agree, today\u27s youth are the Smart City citizens of tomorrow. Views of our youth are especially important when designing concepts for future urban areas and digital economies. If cities fail to address the needs and suggestions of youth, they risk economic and cultural impacts

Fostering IoT service replicability in interoperable urban ecosystems

Worldwide cities are involved in a digital transformation phase specially focused on sustainability and improving citizen's quality of life. However, such objectives are hard to achieve if the migration of the urban processes are not performed following a common approach. Under the paradigm of smart city, different Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been deployed over urban environments to enable such digital transformation. However, actual implementations differ from one city to another, and even between services within the same city. As a consequence, the deployment of urban services is hindered, since they need to be tailored to each city. In addition, the isolation of urban services obstructs its optimization, since it cannot harness contextual information coming from other services. All in all, it is necessary to implement tools and mechanisms that allow us to ensure that city solutions and their vertical services are interoperable. In order to tackle this issue, different initiatives have proposed architectures that homogenize the interaction with smart cities from different angles. However, so far the compliance with such architectures has not been assessed. Having this in mind, in this work we present a validation framework, developed under the umbrella of the SynchroniCity project, which aims to verify that interfaces and data exposed by cities are aligned with the adopted standards and data models. In this regard, the validation framework presented here is the technical enabler for the creation of an interoperability certi cate for smart cities. To assess the bene ts of the validation framework, we have used it to check the interoperability of 21 smart city deployments worldwide that adhered the SynchroniCity guidelines. Afterwards, during an open call a total number of 37 services have been deployed over such SynchroniCity instances, thus con rming the goodness of uniform and validated smart cities to foster service replicability.This work was supported in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme [SynchroniCity (Delivering an IoT enabled Digital Single Market for Europe and Beyond)] under Grant 732240, and in part by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, MINECO-FEDER) through the project FIERCE: Future Internet Enabled Resilient smart CitiEs under Grant RTI2018-093475-AI00

Supporting the Transformation Process to Smart Sustainable Cities in Switzerland: Implementation Guidelines and Promising Practices

Challenges such as the digitalisation of administration, the change of cities through urbanisation, climate change and the restructuring of infrastructure systems in the energy and mobility sector require a rethinking of the existing urban development approaches. The Smart City concept enables cities to tackle these challenges in the sense of a holistic development approach across departments, networked with partners and supported by digital technologies. In Switzerland's view, the Smart City concept goes far beyond internal administrative e-government and digitisation strategies. The overriding goal is to develop efficient and resource-saving solutions while at the same time increasing the quality of life and the attractiveness of the location. The overall aim is to create an innovative urban environment that involves the inhabitants and the economy and opens up new design possibilities

Концепція «Smart City» та цифрові технології забезпечення комфортного міського середовища

The development of production and the rapid growth of cities in the 20th century led to environmental pollution, the presence of unfinished, dilapidated and dilapidated buildings, the reduction of the area of green spaces, which significantly affected the ecological state of cities and the comfort of living in them. The concept of "Smart City" has become a digital answer to numerous problems of urban development and a mechanism for creating a comfortable urban environment for people. The purpose of this study is to determine the main vectors of the application of the "Smart City" concept to ensure a comfortable urban environment in preparation for solving the problems of rebuilding Ukrainian cities after the war. It is noted that in the context of the "Smart City" concept, the term "Smart" does not mean "intelligent". This is a very apt coincidence, which has become widespread in the media, but veils the true meaning of the term. In fact, the term "Smart" is a mnemonic abbreviation formed from the English words - specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, time-related, that is, specific, measurable, has an executor, realistic, limited in time. Analyzed: areas of application of the "Smart City" concept, experience in its implementation, different definitions of the "Smart City" concept, the relationship between the "Smart City" concept and digital technologies, difficulties in implementing the "Smart City" concept. It is concluded that not only digital technologies are needed for the implementation of the "Smart City" concept. Such projects go far beyond simply getting everyone connected to the Internet or providing access to information about administrative services. Smart City initiatives transform such services into digital communication between community residents and authorities, completely changing the way urban environments are created and managed, as well as the way city residents interact and live in this environment.Розвиток виробництва і швидке зростання міст у 20 столітті призвело до забруднення навколишнього середовища, що істотно позначилося на екологічному стані міст і комфортності проживання в них. Концепція «Smart City» стала цифровою відповіддю на численні проблеми міського розвитку та механізмом створення комфортного міського середовища для людей у нинішньому столітті. Метою даного дослідження є визначення основних векторів застосування концепції «Smart City» та цифрових технологій для забезпечення комфортного міського середовища при підготовці до вирішення проблем відбудови українських міст після війни. Відзначено, що в контексті концепції «Smart City» термін «Smart» не означає «розумний». Це дуже влучне співпадіння, яке набуло широко розповсюдження в media, але воно завуальовує істинне значення терміну. В дійсності термін «Smart» є мнемонічною абревіатурою яка утворена з англійських слів – specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, time-related, тобто конкретна, вимірювана, має виконавця, реалістична, обмежена в часі. Проаналізовано: сфері застосування концепції «Smart City», досвід її реалізації, різні визначення поняття «Smart City», взаємозв'язок між концепцією «Smart City» та цифровими технологіями, складнощі в реалізації концепції «Smart City». Робиться висновок, що не тільки цифрові технології потрібні для реалізації концепції «Smart City». Такі проекти виходять далеко за рамки простого забезпечення підключення всіх до Інтернету або надання доступу до інформації про адміністративні послуги. Ініціативи «Smart City» перетворюють такі послуги в цифрову комунікацію жителів громад з владою, повністю змінюють спосіб створення та управління міським середовищем, а також спосіб, у який жителі міст взаємодіють та живуть в цьому середовищі

Smart City :"fiction" et innovation stratégique

Ce dossier de Quaderni sur la smart city (ville intelligente) se situe à l’intersection de différentes approches de sciences humaines et sociales. Il a pour objectif de questionner le slogan ‘smart city’ utilisé non seulement par des ingénieurs des techniques numériques mais aussi par des responsables politiques, des professionnels de l’aménagement urbain et des chercheurs. Il tente de répondre à l’interrogation suivante : la ‘smart city’ relève-t-elle d’un récit de « fiction » (e-democracy au-delà de e-government) au service d’une innovation technique – qui tout compte fait se limite à l’optimisation de services urbains (grâce aux capteurs, aux objets connectés et à Internet) – proposée par des entreprises privées ou faut-il plutôt l’interpréter comme une innovation majeure autorisant la fluidité de la ville en cours de recomposition spatiale, sociale et économique sous l’effet de la mondialisation et de la révolution numérique ?This special issue of Quaderni on the smart city (ville intelligente) lies at the intersection of different social science approaches. It questions the buzzword smart city not only used by engineers of the digital revolution but also by political officials, planners and researchers. It tries to answer the following interrogation: Does the smart city belong to a “fiction” storytelling (e-democracy beyond e-government) used for a technical innovation – which is actually limited to the optimization of urban services – offered by private firms? Or does it stand up as a major innovation enabling the fluidity of the city involved in a process of spatial, social and economic reconfigurations linked to globalization and the digital revolution

Smart City : « fiction » ou innovation stratégique ?

International audienceThis special issue of Quaderni on the smart city (ville intelligente) lies at the intersection of different social science approaches. It questions the buzzword smart city not only used by engineers of the digital revolution but also by political officials, planners and researchers. It tries to answer the following interrogation: Does the smart city belong to a “fiction” storytelling (e-democracy beyond e-government) used for a technical innovation – which is actually limited to the optimization of urban services – offered by private firms? Or does it stand up as a major innovation enabling the fluidity of the city involved in a process of spatial, social and economic reconfigurations linked to globalization and the digital revolution?Ce dossier de Quaderni propose de croiser différentes approches de sciences humaines et sociales sur la ville intelligente. Il a pour objectif de questionner le slogan 'smart city' utilisé non seulement par des ingénieurs des techniques numériques mais par des responsables politiques, des professionnels de l'aménagement urbain et des chercheurs. Il tente de répondre à la question: « la smart city » relève-t-elle d'une « fiction » (e-democracy au-delà de e-government) au service d'une innovation technique-qui tout compte fait se limite à l'optimisation de services urbains (grâce aux capteurs, aux objets connectés et à Internet)-proposée par des entreprises privées ou faut-il plutôt l'interpréter comme une innovation majeure autorisant une gestion stratégique de la ville en cours de recomposition spatiale, sociale et économique sous l'effet de la mondialisation et de la révolution numérique

SDG-11 and smart cities: contradictions and overlaps between social and environmental justice research agendas

There is an increased role Information and Communications Technology (ICT) plays in the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper focuses specifically on SDG-11 “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” and how cities are increasingly incorporating ICT toward this goal. The public discourse on Smart Cities suggests economic, social and environmental benefits are possible through the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). However, the increased deployment and use of digital infrastructure and processes in the name of sustainability and optimization itself is the focus of a growing body of critical literature on Smart Cities. This mini-review collates critical literature on digital infrastructures and processes related to SDG-11 and Smart Cities to identify areas of significance for further research. Although many Smart City projects discuss sustainability benefits, the distribution of benefits and risks across different communities is rarely examined. An increased use of ICT in Smart City projects can provide environmental benefits to some communities, while shifting the burden of risks to other communities. An increased use of ICT has its own energy and resource impacts that has implications for sustainability beyond the geography of individual cities to global impacts. The lifecycle and supply chain impacts of advanced ICT projects are being identified and documented. The end user of the Smart City projects may benefit significantly from the increased use of ICTs, while the environmental costs are often borne by disparate communities. In some cases, within the same city where a Smart City project is deployed, the inequities in distribution of environmental resources and services are exacerbated by layering new ICT implementations on top of existing socio-economic inequities. Therefore, this paper combines a broad view of Smart City environmental impacts, as well as a deep examination of the intersection of social justice and environmental justice issues to create more wholistic approaches for analysis of governance of Smart City projects. A more wholistic approach for governance of Smart City projects is required that includes combined social justice and environmental justice frameworks, toward achievement of SDG-11 goals

Kleinstädte - digital, smart oder intelligent?

Digitalisierung ist ein Schlagwort, ein Leitmotiv in Stadtentwicklungsstrategien sowie ein Megatrend. Sie schreitet voran und betrifft alle Arbeits- und Lebensbereiche, somit auch die Stadtentwicklung. Dabei ist jedoch die Kleinstadt nicht explizit Gegenstand der raumwissenschaftlichen Diskussion und Forschung zur Digitalisierung bzw. Digitalen Transformation. Kleinstädte müssen bisher ihren Weg innerhalb der aktuellen Smart-City-Diskurse (also zwischen Top-down- und vorwiegend technologiegetriebenen Ansätzen für Großstädte) sowie der Smart-Country-Debatte (Bottom-up und lokale bzw. regionale Akteursansätze für ländliche Räume) suchen. Ein Blick in die Geschichte der ARL zeigt, dass die sich mit der Digitalen Transformation stellenden Fragen und Aufgaben nicht ganz neu sind. Ziel des Beitrags ist es zu klären, ob es einer eigenen Forschung zur Digitalen Transformation und Kleinstadtentwicklung mit spezifischen Schwerpunktsetzungen, die über die aktuellen Untersuchungen, Diskurse und Entwicklungen in den Bereichen Smart City und Smart Country hinausgeht, bedarf.Digitalisation is a keyword, a guiding motif in urban development strategies and a megatrend. It is advancing into all fields of work and life, including urban development. However, the small town is not explicitly the object of spatial scientific discussion and research on digitalisation or the digital transformation. To date, small towns have had to find their own way between the current Smart City discourses (top-down and primarily technology-driven approaches for cities) and Smart Country debates (bottom- up and local or regional stakeholder approaches for rural areas). A glance at the history of the ARL shows that the questions and tasks presented by the digital transformation are not entirely new. The article aims to clarify whether there is a need for specific research on the digital transformation and small town development with explicit focuses that go beyond current investigations, discourses and developments in the fields of Smart City and Smart Country research