Abstract Smart Space and Concrete Risks

Abstract representations of space in the smart city, like the control rooms of intelligent operation centres, simulate a panoptic gaze in order to legitimate the planning, management and control of urban space. In the corresponding language of quantified risk assessment, smart risks can be presented as objective numerical values whose probability of occurrence can be significantly reduced through smart measures for resilience. In our paper, we argue that the smart city’s technological solutions aim at reducing risk, but, in fact, create the paradoxical situation that measures for technological resilience reduce some technological risks, but reproduce and even amplify risks on technological and social levels at the same time. We illustrate this argument by critically discussing the emerging smart city with a view to the narrative of technological urban improvement for the good life, which is accompanied by acceptability of, and habituation to setbacks, or to potential disruptive impacts on urban services

Urban Resilience Thinking. Dealing with Epistemic Uncertainty in Smart City Development

The term resilience is used in various contexts where it is mostly considered within the boundaries of the system under consideration. Relevance of resilience thinking is emphasized in the UN Sustainable Development Goals– especially Sustainable Cities and Communities and Climate Action– and the UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, which explicitly mentions resilience as a keypriority. Thus, resilience and system transformations must be considered together if sustainability developments should prevail in the long-term. We propose Urban Resilience Thinkingas a design approach that sensitizes for transformational dynamics on different temporal scales from the short-term to thelong-term, for relations between physical resilience and socio-cultural issues of urban well-being, and for interdependencies between local urban resilience and global sustainability. Crucial to Urban Resilience Thinking is the consideration of potential multiple stable states in urban socio-technical systems, which poses questions with regard to dynamics of transformation between stable states, but also – more fundamentally – with regard to the criteria and values that define notions of systemic stability, risk and resilience. In a world of changing boundary conditions (e.g. climate change) and fundamentally changing socio-technical urban systems, neither the frequency nor the consequences of various future risks can be reliably determined. This can be illustrated by the unpredictability of future urban supply risks, e.g. power supply, in smart cities with increasingly digitalized, automated and more interconnected services systems including critical services. Adding to such looming epistemic uncertainty we point to the phenomenon of creeping urban risks, such as risks associated with the built up of smart urban infrastructure, which are likely to shapefuture urban risk cultures through citizens’ gradual accommodation to emergent risks. Eventually, and in spite of short-term reactions to immediate risks in smart cities, it is creeping urban risks that deserve more research attention

A Novel MCDA-Based Methodology Dealing with Dynamics and Ambiguities Resulting from Citizen Participation in the Context of the Energy Transition

In the context of the energy transition, sound decision making regarding the development of renewable energy systems faces various technical and societal challenges. In addition to climate-related uncertainties affecting technical issues of reliable grid planning, there are also subtle aspects and uncertainties related to the integration of energy technologies into built environments. Citizens’ opinions on grid development may be ambiguous or divergent in terms of broad acceptance of the energy transition in general, and they may have negative attitudes towards concrete planning in their local environment. First, this article identifies the issue of discrepancies between preferences of a fixed stakeholder group with respect to the question of the integration of renewable energy technology, posed from different perspectives and at different points in time, and considers it as a fundamental problem in the context of robust decision making in sustainable energy system planning. Second, for dealing with that issue, a novel dynamic decision support methodology is presented that includes multiple surveys, statistical analysis of the discrepancies that may arise, and multicriteria decision analysis that specifically incorporates the opinions of citizens. Citizens are considered as stakeholders and participants in smart decision-making processes. A case study applying agent-based simulations underlines the relevance of the methodology proposed for decision making in the context of renewable energies