115,097 research outputs found
Privacy, security and data protection in smart cities : a critical EU law perspective
"Smart cities" are a buzzword of the moment. Although legal interest is growing, most academic responses at least in the EU, are still from the technological, urban studies, environmental and sociological rather than legal, sectors and have primarily laid emphasis on the social, urban, policing and environmental benefits of smart cities, rather than their challenges, in often a rather uncritical fashion . However a growing backlash from the privacy and surveillance sectors warns of the potential threat to personal privacy posed by smart cities . A key issue is the lack of opportunity in an ambient or smart city environment for the giving of meaningful consent to processing of personal data; other crucial issues include the degree to which smart cities collect private data from inevitable public interactions, the "privatisation" of ownership of both infrastructure and data, the repurposing of “big data” drawn from IoT in smart cities and the storage of that data in the Cloud. This paper, drawing on author engagement with smart city development in Glasgow as well as the results of an international conference in the area curated by the author, argues that smart cities combine the three greatest current threats to personal privacy, with which regulation has so far failed to deal effectively; the Internet of Things(IoT) or "ubiquitous computing"; "Big Data" ; and the Cloud. It seeks solutions both from legal institutions such as data protection law and from "code", proposing in particular from the ethos of Privacy by Design, a new "social impact assessment" and new human:computer interactions to promote user autonomy in ambient environments
Creating room for citizen perspectives in ‘smart city’ Amsterdam through interactive theatre
The ‘smart city’ vision is popular, but it lacks citizen perspectives. The aim of this study was to gain insight into whether and how art-based citizen engagement can create more room for citizen perspectives in smart cities by developing and testing an art-based citizen engagement project in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. To that end, a combination of interactive theatre, interaction design and social research methods was used to bring together diverse publics and innovation professionals for joint exploration of increased dataveillance in cities. The events were studied through observations, and through interviews with participants and organisers. Data analysis was guided by the outcomes, processes and challenges of the responsible innovation dimensions: inclusion, reflexivity, anticipation and responsiveness (Stilgoe et al., 2013). The most important achievements of art-based citizen engagement were: engaging people who would not have engaged with the topic otherwise, encouraging participants to question common phrases and assumptions, exploring future social implications of technologies, and staging meaningful interactions between citizens and professionals. The most significant challenge was to involve citizens in a way that could influence innovation trajectories
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The Right to the Sustainable Smart City
Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructures. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper contributes to an emerging body of work that seeks to involve citizens in the design of sustainable smart cities, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. We present a study involving co- designing Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities and discuss three ways in which design can participate in the right to the sustainable smart city through designing for the commons, care, and biocultural diversity
Mining Urban Performance: Scale-Independent Classification of Cities Based on Individual Economic Transactions
Intensive development of urban systems creates a number of challenges for
urban planners and policy makers in order to maintain sustainable growth.
Running efficient urban policies requires meaningful urban metrics, which could
quantify important urban characteristics including various aspects of an actual
human behavior. Since a city size is known to have a major, yet often
nonlinear, impact on the human activity, it also becomes important to develop
scale-free metrics that capture qualitative city properties, beyond the effects
of scale. Recent availability of extensive datasets created by human activity
involving digital technologies creates new opportunities in this area. In this
paper we propose a novel approach of city scoring and classification based on
quantitative scale-free metrics related to economic activity of city residents,
as well as domestic and foreign visitors. It is demonstrated on the example of
Spain, but the proposed methodology is of a general character. We employ a new
source of large-scale ubiquitous data, which consists of anonymized countrywide
records of bank card transactions collected by one of the largest Spanish
banks. Different aspects of the classification reveal important properties of
Spanish cities, which significantly complement the pattern that might be
discovered with the official socioeconomic statistics.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, to be published in the proceedings of ASE
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Place and city: merging our affective and social spatial dimension in the (smart) platial city
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Information Management, specialization in Geographic Information SystemsWe are living in (smart) cities that hold social-oriented promises but currently, most
of these cities disregard the humans. Although some alternatives are appearing such
as smart citizen-centric approaches, there is a lack of how promoting truly appealing
perspectives toward a common good or better social synergies. Thereby, smart cities,
with their associated Information and Communication Technology tools, are offering
new possibilities, but, unfortunately, citizens are not fully exploiting the opportunities
to empower themselves because, among other reasons, they are not aware of their
common spatialities. Currently, we are not able to operationalize the spatial humanurban
interactions regarding citizens’ cognitions, feelings and behaviors towards city
places (i.e., sense of place) and meaningful geographic human relationships (i.e., social
capital). Both concepts are significant as resources for an alternative landscape
based on human perception and organization of social interactions fostered through
the geographic place(s). In this research, we highlight the need to understand and
operationalize social concepts spatial dimension for a better understanding of a smart
citizen-centric approach which is mainly dependent on our capability to understand
platial urban dynamics. We conceptualized a (spatial) conceptual framework for sense
of place and social capital at the individual level to study their spatial relationship in
the urban context. We developed a web map-based survey based on the literature to
spatialize, characterize and measure sense of place, social capital and civic engagement.
Using the spatial data collected, we validated our framework and demonstrated the
importance to encompass the spatial dimension of social concepts (i.e., sense of place
and social capital) as pivotal aspect (1) to understand the platial urban dynamics; (2)
to provide useful social-spatial data to city processes (e.g. civic engagement); and (3)
to reveal the potential to include them in social theory and structural equation models.
Furthermore, we highlighted the crucial role of Geographic Information Science (GISc)
techniques to gather the spatial dimension of those social concepts. Although in this research we focus on the spatial relationship between sense of place and social capital
on civic engagement, the possibilities to relate our framework and methodology to other
city based-notions can bring to light new platial urban dynamics. This research wants to
open up the agenda for further research into exploratory place-based geography studies
and, simultaneously, sets up a common social ground to build other socially-oriented
conceptualizations or applications on top of it
World caf\ue9 method to engage smart energy-district project partners in assessing urban co-benefits
Urban energy-district projects introduce outstanding technological innovation in buildings and energy systems increasing sustainability in city neighborhoods. Such projects generate additional co-benefits for the city beyond changes in physical elements and development of social and institutional relationships (e.g. local employment, environmental quality, public health, property values, innovation attitude, etc.). Since exceeding main declared goals or not always clearly foreseen in the early project phase, these co-benefits are often not properly understood and considered. However, only their explicit recognition will make possible their inclusion in the assessment of the whole project\u2019s performance. From these considerations, this study faces the issue of engaging project partners in assessing co-benefits in order to consider a broad spectrum of relevant, positive effects in the evaluation process. Group knowledge and group thinking of this complex topic are investigated through the world caf\ue9 method, providing an atmosphere of trust and open discussions among participants. This empirical work lays the foundations to go beyond the mere economic measure as the sole criterion for assessing project effects, also including changes in end-user behavior and intangible asset
Design smart city apps using activity theory.
In this paper we describe an innovative approach to the design process of Smart City interventions. We tested it with participants enrolled in the Master\u2019s Degree program in \u201cInnovators in enterprise and public administration\u201d: the objective of the Master was to stimulate the acquisition of technical and methodological skills useful in designing and implementing specific Smart City actions. During the "project work" phase, participants learned about a design method named SAM \u2013 Smart City Model - based on the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). We present an overview of design criteria for Smart City projects, the description of the theoretical framework of Activity Theory, and our proposal of the SAM design model. We also present some examples of student\u2019s \u201cprojects\u201d and a more extensive description of one case study about the full design process of an App planned using SAM, for \u201csmart health\u201d vaccine management and monitoring services. The App was later published and made available to the citizens and was successful in attracting thousands of users. All the participants considered the model very useful in particular because it made possible to understand the interaction and solve contradictions between different stakeholders and systems involved
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