Informational Urbanism. A Conceptual Framework of Smart Cities

Contemporary and future cities are often labeled as “smart cities,” “digital cities” or “ubiquitous cities,” “knowledge cities,” and “creative cities.” Informational urbanism includes all aspects of information and (tacit as well as explicit) knowledge with regard to urban regions. “Informational city” (or “smart city” in a broader sense) is an umbrella term uniting the divergent trends of information-related city research. Informational urbanism is an interdisciplinary endeavor incorporating on the one side computer science and information science as well as on the other side urban studies, city planning, architecture, city economics, and city sociology. In this article, we present both, a conceptual framework for research on smart cities as well as results from our empirical studies on smart cities all over the world. The framework consists of seven building blocks, namely information and knowledge related infrastructures, economy, politics (e-governance) and administration (e-government), spaces (spaces of flows and spaces of places), location factors, the people’s information behavior, and problem areas. \

Project Khepri: Mining Asteroid Bennu for Water

Deep space asteroid mining presents the opportunity for the collection of critical resources required to establish a cis-lunar infrastructure. In specific, the Project Khepri team has focused on the collection of water from asteroid Bennu. This water has the potential to provide a source of clean-energy propellant as well as an essential consumable for humans or agriculture on crewed trips to the Moon or Mars. This would avoid the high costs of launching from Earth - making it a highly desirable element for the future of cis-lunar infrastructure. The OSIRIS-REx mission provided a complete survey of asteroid Bennu and is set to return regolith samples to Earth in 2023. This makes asteroid Bennu a well-understood and low-risk target that is estimated to be around 6.26% water by mass. The Khepri Project comprises a team of international students, academics, and industry subject matter experts working on the technical design, business case, and political aspects of a mission to mine asteroid Bennu for water. The research output explores the multi-year mission that the Khepri team has proposed

Imported Expertise in World-class Knowledge Infrastructures: The Problematic Development of Knowledge Cities in the Gulf Region

Due to the oil business, settlements in the Gulf Region developed into prosperous cities. But in the near future, oil is off. The plans of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states bank on diversified and knowledge-intensive economies. Are those development plans realistic? What is the state of the art of knowledge institutions in the GCC countries? Applying the theoretical frameworks of Knowledge City and Science Indicators research, we empirically and theoretically studied the emerging Gulf cities Kuwait City (Kuwait), Manama (Bahrain), Doha (Qatar), Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah (all UAE), and Muscat (Oman). Our methodological framework includes grounded theory, ethnographic field study, ServQual-like quantitative questionnaires and semi-standardized qualitative interviews conducted on-site with informed people, informetrics, and, finally, the use of official statistics. In particular, we describe and analyze the cities' knowledge infrastructures, their academics, and expenditure on R&D as input indicators; and publications as well as graduates as output indicators. A further crucial aspect of a knowledge society is the transition of graduates into knowledge-intensive public services and private companies