Connected seeds and sensors: co-designing internet of things for sustainable smart cities with urban food-growing communities.

We present a case study of a participatory design project in the space of sustainable smart cities and Internet of Things. We describe our design process that led to the development of an interactive seed library that tells the stories of culturally diverse urban food growers, and networked environmental sensors from their gardens, as a way to support more sustainable food practices in the city. This paper contributes to an emerging body of empirical work within participatory design that seeks to involve citizens in the design of smart cities and Internet of Things, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. It also contributes empirical work towards non-utilitarian approaches to sustainable smart cities through a discussion of designing for urban diversity and slowness

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

Using Delay Tolerant Networks as a Backbone for Low-cost Smart Cities

Rapid urbanization burdens city infrastructure and creates the need for local governments to maximize the usage of resources to serve its citizens. Smart city projects aim to alleviate the urbanization problem by deploying a vast amount of Internet-of-things (IoT) devices to monitor and manage environmental conditions and infrastructure. However, smart city projects can be extremely expensive to deploy and manage. A significant portion of the expense is a result of providing Internet connectivity via 5G or WiFi to IoT devices. This paper proposes the use of delay tolerant networks (DTNs) as a backbone for smart city communication; enabling developing communities to become smart cities at a fraction of the cost. A model is introduced to aid policy makers in designing and evaluating the expected performance of such networks. Preliminary results are presented based on a public transit network data-set from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Finally, innovative ways of improving network performance in a low-cost smart city is discussed.Comment: 3 pages, accepted to IEEE SmartComp 201

Design for the Right to the Smart City in More-than-Human Worlds

Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructure processes. 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 aims to add to the growing body of critical and civic led smart city literature in HCI by leveraging concepts from the environmental humanities about more than human worlds, as a way to shift understandings within HCI of smart cities away from the exceptional and human centered, towards a more inclusive understanding that incorporates and designs for other others and other species. We illustrate through a case study that involved codesigning Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities, possibilities for creating more environmentally and socially just smart cities

5G-Enabled Tactile Internet for smart cities: vision, recent developments, and challenges

The Tactile Internet (TI) is an emerging technology next to the Internet of Things (IoT). It is a revolution to develop smart cities, communities, and cultures in the future. This technology will allow the real-time interaction between humans and machines as well as machine-to-machine with the 1ms challenge to achieve in round trip latency. The term TI is defined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in August 2014. The TI provides a fast, reliable, secure and available internet network that is the requirements of the smart cities in 5G. Tactile internet can develop the part of the world where the machines are strong, and humans are weak. It increases the power of machines so that the value of human power will increase automatically. In this framework, we have presented the idea of tactile internet for the next generation of smart cities. This research will provide a high-performance reliable framework for the internet of smart devices to communicate with each other in a real-time (1ms round trip) using IEEE 1918.1 standard. The objective of this research is expected to bring a new dimension in the research of smart cities

Internet of Things and Big Data Analytics for Smart and Connected Communities

This paper promotes the concept of smart and connected communities SCC, which is evolving from the concept of smart cities. SCC are envisioned to address synergistically the needs of remembering the past (preservation and revitalization), the needs of living in the present (livability), and the needs of planning for the future (attainability). Therefore, the vision of SCC is to improve livability, preservation, revitalization, and attainability of a community. The goal of building SCC for a community is to live in the present, plan for the future, and remember the past. We argue that Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to provide a ubiquitous network of connected devices and smart sensors for SCC, and big data analytics has the potential to enable the move from IoT to real-time control desired for SCC. We highlight mobile crowdsensing and cyber-physical cloud computing as two most important IoT technologies in promoting SCC. As a case study, we present TreSight, which integrates IoT and big data analytics for smart tourism and sustainable cultural heritage in the city of Trento, Italy