5 research outputs found
Sidewalk and Toronto: Critical Systems Heuristics and the Smart City
`Smart cities', urban development projects that design computational systems
and sensory technology to monitor activity and regulate energy consumption and
resource distribution, are a frontier for the prospective deployment of ICTs
for sustainability. Often reduced to technological problems of optimization,
these projects have implications far beyond narrow environmental and
consumptive frames of sustainability. Studying them requires frameworks that
support us in examining technological and environmental sustainability
dimensions jointly with social justice perspectives. This paper uses Critical
Systems Heuristics (CSH) to examine the design of Sidewalk Toronto, an ongoing
smart city development. We explore how the professed values guiding the project
are contentiously enacted, and we argue that key stakeholders and beneficiaries
in the planning process significantly constrain the emancipatory and
transformative potential of the project by marginalizing the role of residents
in determining project purposes. This analysis contributes an example that
illustrates the relevance of critical systems thinking in ICT4S and offers CSH
as a conceptual frame that supports critical reflection on the tensions between
the visions and realities of `sustainable' ways of organizing human life.Comment: 1 figur
Shifting the maturity needle of ICT for Sustainability
The ubiquity of ICT means the potential of ICT4S covers a broad range of sustainability topics and application domains. However, ICT4S research can be ill positioned with regard to the complexity of transforming society in such a way that people and environmental ecologies can coexist in a sustainable system. The danger is that ICT4S becomes partitioned into a small subset of sustainability and using a limited set of the levers at our disposal. Grounded in the Mann-Bates maturity scale for sustainability this paper performs an analysis of the ICT4S conference corpus to measure how mature the research is in our field with regard to sustainability. Based on this analysis we identify areas in which the ICT4S community can begin to shift the maturity of research in order to promote sustainable futures. By applying the Transformation Mindset our article demonstrates through a series of illustrative how ICT4S can apply this mindset to shift ICT4S research towards more sustainable trajectories. This is an essential first step in taking stock, highlighting shortcomings and identifying opportunities in ICT for sustainability
ICT for Sustainable Last-Mile Logistics:Data, People and Parcels
In this paper we present a vision of how ICT can be leveraged to help combat the impact on pollution, congestion and carbon emissions contributed by the parcel delivery sector. This is timely given annual growth in parcel deliveries, especially same-day deliveries, and the need to inform initiatives to clean up our cities such as the sales ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles in the UK by 2040. Our insights are informed by research on parcel logistics in Central London, leveraging a data set of parcel manifests spanning 6 months. To understand the impact of growing e-commerce trends on parcel deliveries we provide a mixed methods case study leveraging data-driven analysis and qualitative fieldwork to demonstrate how ICT can uncover the impact of parcel deliveries on delivery drivers and their delivery rounds during seasonal deliveries (or “the silly season”). We finish by discussing key opportunities for intervention and further research in ICT4S and co-created Smart Cities, connecting our findings with existing research and data as a call to the ICT4S community to help tackle the growth in carbon emissions, pollution and congestion linked to parcel deliveries