Sustainability’s Coming Home: Preliminary Design Principles for the Sustainable Smart District

Consumer trends like local consumption, sharing of property, and environmental awareness change our habits and thereby our surroundings. These trends have their origin in our direct environment, in the districts of our city or community, where we live and socialize. Cities and districts are changing to “smart cities” and “smart districts” as a part of the ongoing digitalization. These changes offer the possibility to entrench the idea of sustainability and build a platform-based ecosystem for a sustainable smart district. This research aims to identify guidelines in form of preliminary design principles for sustainable smart districts. To achieve this, we conduct a structured literature review. On this basis, we derive and develop preliminary design principles with the help of semistructured interviews and a non-representative sample of the German population. The resulting nine preliminary design principles describe a first insight into the design of sustainable smart districts

Sustainability's Coming Home : Preliminary Design Principles for the Sustainable Smart District

Consumer trends like local consumption, sharing of property, and environmental awareness change our habits and thereby our surroundings. These trends have their origin in our direct environment, in the districts of our city or community, where we live and socialize. Cities and districts are changing to “smart cities” and “smart districts” as a part of the ongoing digitalization. These changes offer the possibility to entrench the idea of sustainability and build a platform-based ecosystem for a sustainable smart district. This research aims to identify guidelines in form of preliminary design principles (PDPs) for sustainable smart districts. To achieve this, we conduct a structured literature review. On this basis, we derive and develop PDPs with the help of semi-structured interviews and a non-representative sample of the German population. The resulting nine PDPs describe a first insight into the design of sustainable smart districts

Research Roadmap of Service Ecosystems: A Crowd Intelligence Perspective

With the mutual interaction and dependence of several intelligent services, a crowd intelligence service network has been formed, and a service ecosystem has gradually emerged. Such a development produces an ever-increasing effect on our lives and the functioning of the whole society. These facts call for research on these phenomena with a new theory or perspective, including what a smart society looks like, how it functions and evolves, and where its boundaries and challenges are. However, the research on service ecosystems is distributed in many disciplines and fields, including computer science, artificial intelligence, complex theory, social network, biological ecosystem, and network economics, and there is still no unified research framework. The researchers always have a restricted view of the research process. Under this context, this paper summarizes the research status and future developments of service ecosystems, including their conceptual origin, evolutionary logic, research topic and scale, challenges, and opportunities. We hope to provide a roadmap for the research in this field and promote sound development

Bifurcate

Bifurcating means: reconstituting a political economy that reconnects local knowledge and practices with macroeconomic circulation and rethinks territoriality at its different scales of locality; developing an economy of contribution on the basis of a contributory income no longer tied to employment and once again valuing work as a knowledge activity; overhauling law, and government and corporate accounting, via economic and social experiments, including in laboratory territories, and in relation to cooperative, local market economies formed into networks and linked to international trade; revaluing research from a long-term perspective, independent of the short-term interests of political and economic powers; reorienting digital technology in the service of territories and territorial cooperation. The collective work that produced this book is based on the claim that today’s destructive development model is reaching its ultimate limits, and that its toxicity, which is increasingly massive, manifest and multidimensional (medical, environmental, mental, epistemological, economic – accumulating pockets of insolvency, which become veritable oceans), is generated above all by the fact that the current industrial economy is based in every sector on an obsolete physical model – a mechanism that ignores the constraints of locality in biology and the entropic tendency in reticulated computational information. In these gravely perilous times, we must bifurcate: there is no alternative

Bifurcate

Bifurcating means: reconstituting a political economy that reconnects local knowledge and practices with macroeconomic circulation and rethinks territoriality at its different scales of locality; developing an economy of contribution on the basis of a contributory income no longer tied to employment and once again valuing work as a knowledge activity; overhauling law, and government and corporate accounting, via economic and social experiments, including in laboratory territories, and in relation to cooperative, local market economies formed into networks and linked to international trade; revaluing research from a long-term perspective, independent of the short-term interests of political and economic powers; reorienting digital technology in the service of territories and territorial cooperation. The collective work that produced this book is based on the claim that today’s destructive development model is reaching its ultimate limits, and that its toxicity, which is increasingly massive, manifest and multidimensional (medical, environmental, mental, epistemological, economic – accumulating pockets of insolvency, which become veritable oceans), is generated above all by the fact that the current industrial economy is based in every sector on an obsolete physical model – a mechanism that ignores the constraints of locality in biology and the entropic tendency in reticulated computational information. In these gravely perilous times, we must bifurcate: there is no alternative

Stakeholder Management and Social Responsibility

The main objective of this book is to provide an innovative set of concepts and tools regarding company management, internal and external stakeholders and social responsibilities, reflecting the necessities and opportunities generated by the digital transformation, the transition to a knowledge-based economy, and the COVID-19 crisis. The book, based on a holistic vision and contextual approach of business, contributes to the development of company management and stakeholder and social responsibility theories and practices, being structured in 12 chapters. The original company management vision, approaches, and tools are based on three pillars: a new "manager–relevant stakeholder" rather than "manager–subordinate" managerial paradigm; a new type of company social responsibility rather than corporate social responsibility; and a new concept of company-relevant stakeholder rather than that of salient stakeholders. The book contains two innovative managerial mechanisms: the managerial synapse and company-relevant stakeholders-based management system able to help companies and stakeholders face successfully the challenges of digital transformation and the COVID-19 crisis and to generate greater organization functionality and performance. The book will be of interest to company managers and management specialists, management academics, consultants and researchers, and MBA students interested in a style of management with social responsibility at the forefront

Stakeholder Management and Social Responsibility

The main objective of this book is to provide an innovative set of concepts and tools regarding company management, internal and external stakeholders and social responsibilities, reflecting the necessities and opportunities generated by the digital transformation, the transition to a knowledge-based economy, and the COVID-19 crisis. The book, based on a holistic vision and contextual approach of business, contributes to the development of company management and stakeholder and social responsibility theories and practices, being structured in 12 chapters. The original company management vision, approaches, and tools are based on three pillars: a new "manager–relevant stakeholder" rather than "manager–subordinate" managerial paradigm; a new type of company social responsibility rather than corporate social responsibility; and a new concept of company-relevant stakeholder rather than that of salient stakeholders. The book contains two innovative managerial mechanisms: the managerial synapse and company-relevant stakeholders-based management system able to help companies and stakeholders face successfully the challenges of digital transformation and the COVID-19 crisis and to generate greater organization functionality and performance. The book will be of interest to company managers and management specialists, management academics, consultants and researchers, and MBA students interested in a style of management with social responsibility at the forefront

Socio-technical Challenges to the Smart City: a citizen-centric perspective

By 2050, approximately 70% of the global population will be living in cities, catalysing both socio-economic and environmental challenges. Therefore, in order to ensure sustainable growth, cities around the world are adopting the concept of ‘smart cities’. There is consensus that the smart city has the potential to address the urgent need for sustainable urbanism through innovations and ICT systems that are both designed to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, and that can provide high-quality living for its citizens. However, the concept has been broadly critiqued for being driven by technocratic agendas and not actually meeting the needs of the citizens. While recent initiatives claim to include citizens in smart city developments through collaboration and co-creation, there is significant debate regarding the extent to which this has stimulated a more inclusive approach. Consequently, to create a more citizen-centric smart city there remains a need to introduce citizens' perceptions and improve engagement. Institutions such as universities are playing an increasingly important role in the urban sustainability challenge and energy transitions in smart cities. Through conducting a survey of students (n=1007) living in the smart city district of Manchester, UK, this research found low awareness and understanding of the smart city concept, with three-quarters of respondents reporting they had never heard of the smart city. Moreover, interviews with smart city implementers (n=12) revealed contesting perceptions of ‘smart’. Whilst both students and implementers placed technology at the heart of the concept, students understood it as a city that would ensure protection of the environment whilst implementers adamantly claimed it would increase quality of life of citizens. However, when implementers described the role of citizens in the smart city, this research found that their perceptions were underpinned by a tokenistic rhetoric. Furthermore, by adopting a co-creational approach with citizens, this research explored the potential for smart solutions to overcome a split incentive scenario energy challenge. An Innovation Challenge (n=13) and focus groups with students (n=49) found encouraging indications that provision of contextualized information using intuitive visual cues which, coupled with gamification, could change students’ energy behaviours in halls of residence where financial drivers do not exist

CANADA’S BIOTECHNOLOGY STRATEGY: STRUGGLES ON THE KNOWLEDGE COMMONS

This research critically analyses a number of the social, economic, environmental, and informational questions that attach to biotechnology in the context of Canada’s Biotechnology Strategy. A neo-Marxist biopolitical framework that draws on a number of theoretical elements from autonomist Marxism informs the conceptual scheme. Much like Marx’s methodological orientation based on the perspective of the working class rooted in its own historical activity, contemporary efforts at understanding and situating the current conjuncture of capitalist social relations can be advanced through research into the genealogy of social and political opposition movements. By apprehending these emerging subjectivities we might begin developing a new social vision of our own era. It is precisely those struggles mobilised around biotechnology issues in Canada that this research seeks to elaborate. Drawing on documentary analysis and interviews, the research seeks to determine the role the Canadian Biotechnology Strategy has played in commodifying biotechnology and biotechnological information as part of the social factory, and to interrogate the counter struggles that have emerged to resist the enclosure of the biological and the knowledge commons, with emphasis on the information and knowledge issues encompassed by such struggles. A basic presupposition of this research is that the commodification of biotechnology, as a branch of science that has assumed a central role in production as a source of new knowledge, offers an exemplary case study of both the mobilisation of the social factory in contemporary society and the scope of counter struggles that, themselves, include a variety of information and knowledge issue

Bifurcate: there is no alternative

Bifurcating means: reconstituting a political economy that reconnects local knowledge and practices with macroeconomic circulation and rethinks territoriality at its different scales of locality; developing an economy of contribution on the basis of a contributory income no longer tied to employment and once again valuing work as a knowledge activity; overhauling law, and government and corporate accounting, via economic and social experiments, including in laboratory territories, and in relation to cooperative, local market economies formed into networks and linked to international trade; revaluing research from a long-term perspective, independent of the short-term interests of political and economic powers; reorienting digital technology in the service of territories and territorial cooperation. The collective work that produced this book is based on the claim that today’s destructive development model is reaching its ultimate limits, and that its toxicity, which is increasingly massive, manifest and multidimensional (medical, environmental, mental, epistemological, economic – accumulating pockets of insolvency, which become veritable oceans), is generated above all by the fact that the current industrial economy is based in every sector on an obsolete physical model – a mechanism that ignores the constraints of locality in biology and the entropic tendency in reticulated computational information. In these gravely perilous times, we must bifurcate: there is no alternative