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

Impact of the Smart City Industry on the Korean National Economy: Input-Output Analysis

The characteristics of the smart city industry and its effects on the national economy of Korea are investigated using input-output analysis. The definition and industrial classification of a smart city are established using the Delphi technique for experts in various fields, from information and communication technologies (ICT) to governmental policies for urban matters. The results of the analysis, including the production, value added and employment induction effects, show that the smart city industry has intermediate characteristics between ICT and urban construction industries, indicating that acquisition of the competitive edge of both the ICT and construction industries is the key to the success of the smart city industry. The crucial industries related to the smart city industry are identified based on an analysis of the forward and backward linkage effects, the results of which suggest the importance of the relevant service industries. The economic effects on the national economy induced by the governmental program for smart city demonstration are estimated using input-output analysis results. Overall, the results of this study indicate that facilitation of the smart city industry plays a key role not only in the sustainable city, but also in the growth of the national economy

Sustainable–Smart–Resilient–Low Carbon–Eco–Knowledge Cities; Making sense of a multitude of concepts promoting sustainable urbanization

Over the last couple of decades, metropolitan areas around the world have been engaged in a multitude of initiatives aimed at upgrading urban infrastructure and services, with a view to creating better environmental, social and economic conditions and enhancing cities' attractiveness and competitiveness. Reflecting these developments, many new categories of 'cities' have entered the policy discourse: 'sustainable cities'; 'green cities'; 'digital cities'; 'smart cities'; intelligent cities'; 'information cities'; 'knowledge cities'; 'resilient cities'; 'eco-cities'; 'low carbon cities'; 'liveable cities'; and even combinations, such as 'low carbon eco-cities' and 'ubiquitous eco-cities’. In practice, these terms often appear to be used interchangeably by policy makers, planners and developers. However, the question arises whether these categories nevertheless each embody distinct conceptual perspectives, which would have implications for how they are understood theoretically and applied in policy. In response, this article investigates, through a comprehensive bibliometric analysis, how the twelve most frequent city categories are conceptualised individually and in relation to one another in the academic literature. We hypothesize that, notwithstanding some degree of overlap and cross-fertilization, in their essence the observed categories each harbour particular conceptual perspectives that render them distinctive. This is borne out by the findings, which demonstrate robustly for the first time the conceptual differences and interrelationships among twelve dominant city categories. The 'sustainable city' is the most frequently occurring category and, in a map of keyword co-occurrences, by far the largest and most interconnected node, linked closely to the 'eco-city' and 'green city' concepts. Recently, the more narrow concepts of 'low carbon city' and 'smart city' have been on the rise, judging by their frequency of occurrence in academic journals; the latter in particular appears to have become an increasingly dominant category of urban modernization policy. On their part, ‘resilient city’ and ‘knowledge city’ represent distinct concepts, albeit with comparatively low frequency. Overall, the findings point to the need for rigor and nuance in the use of these terms, not least if one wishes to comprehend their implications for urban development and regeneration policy and practice

Smart energy transition: An evaluation of cities in South Korea

One positive impact of smart cities is reducing energy consumption and CO2 emission through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Energy transition pursues systematic changes to the low-carbon society, and it can benefit from technological and institutional advancement in smart cities. The integration of the energy transition to smart city development has not been thoroughly studied yet. The purpose of this study is to find empirical evidence of smart cities' contributions to energy transition. The hypothesis is that there is a significant difference between smart and non-smart cities in the performance of energy transition. The Smart Energy Transition Index is introduced. Index is useful to summarize the smart city component's contribution to energy transition and to enable comparison among cities. The cities in South Korea are divided into three groups: (1) first-wave smart cities that focus on smart transportation and security services; (2) second-wave smart cities that provide comprehensive urban services; and (3) non-smart cities. The results showed that second-wave smart cities scored higher than first-wave and non-smart cities, and there is a statistically significant difference among city groups. This confirms the hypothesis of this p

CHOICE Internal report I-4: The current status of ICT R&D&I for Chinese Eco-Cities

This report attempts to give a flavour of the current of status of ICT R&D&I for Chinese Eco-cities and thereby provide some insights into the potential of China’s emerging market for Eco-city solutions for EU- China collaborative ICT R&D&I. It addresses Eco-city standards development in China. Evaluation Centres for Eco-City software solutions, the context into which ICT for Chinese Eco-cities fits, Chinese ICT R&D in smart cities, EU-China collaboration in ICT R&D smart cities, EU Member states bilateral cooperation with China on ICT R&D for Eco-cities, Chinese smart city industry alliances, other Chinese industry alliances active in eco-friendly cities, Wuhan Intelligent City, and current concerns related to the market situation for the EU ICT industry. Conclusions are presented followed by recommendations targeted at organisations in EU member states interested in exploring the potential for collaborative ICT R&D&I with Chinese organisations targeted at China’s emerging market for Eco-city solution

Benchmarking real-time vehicle data streaming models for a smart city

The information systems of smart cities offer project developers, institutions, industry and experts the possibility to handle massive incoming data from diverse information sources in order to produce new information services for citizens. Much of this information has to be processed as it arrives because a real-time response is often needed. Stream processing architectures solve this kind of problems, but sometimes it is not easy to benchmark the load capacity or the efficiency of a proposed architecture. This work presents a real case project in which an infrastructure was needed for gathering information from drivers in a big city, analyzing that information and sending real-time recommendations to improve driving efficiency and safety on roads. The challenge was to support the real-time recommendation service in a city with thousands of simultaneous drivers at the lowest possible cost. In addition, in order to estimate the ability of an infrastructure to handle load, a simulator that emulates the data produced by a given amount of simultaneous drivers was also developed. Experiments with the simulator show how recent stream processing platforms like Apache Kafka could replace custom-made streaming servers in a smart city to achieve a higher scalability and faster responses, together with cost reduction.This research is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the “HERMES – SmartDriver” project (TIN2013-46801-C4-2-R), the “HERMES – Smart Citizen” project (TIN2013-46801-C4-1-R), and the “HERMES –Space&Time” project (TIN2013-46801-C4-3-R)