Smart Cities

As cities compete globally, the Smart City has been touted as the important new strategic driver for regeneration and growth. Smart Cities are employing information and communication technologies in the quest for sustainable economic development and the fostering of new forms of collective life. This has made the Smart City an essential focus for engineers, architects, urban designers, urban planners, and politicians, as well as businesses such as CISCO, IBM and Siemens. Despite its broad appeal, few comprehensive books have been devoted to the subject so far, and even fewer have tried to relate it to cultural issues and to assume a truly critical stance by trying to decipher its consequences on urban space and experience. This cultural and critical lens is all the more important as the Smart City is as much an ideal permeated by Utopian beliefs as a concrete process of urban transformation. This ideal possesses a strong self-fulfilling character: our cities will become 'Smart' because we want them to.

This book opens with an examination of the technological reality on which Smart Cities are built, from the chips and sensors that enable us to monitor what happens within the infrastructure to the smartphones that connect individuals. Through these technologies, the urban space appears as activated, almost sentient. This activation generates two contrasting visions: on the one hand, a neo-cybernetic ambition to steer the city in the most efficient way; and on the other, a more bottom-up, participative approach in which empowered individuals invent new modes of cooperation. A thorough analysis of these two trends reveals them to be complementary. The Smart City of the near future will result from their mutual adjustment. In this process, urban space plays a decisive role. Smart Cities are contemporary with a 'spatial turn' of the digital. Based on key technological developments like geo-localisation and augmented reality, the rising importance of space explains the strategic role of mapping in the evolution of the urban experience. Throughout this exploration of some of the key dimensions of the Smart City, this book constantly moves from the technological to the spatial as well as from a critical assessment of existing experiments to speculations on the rise of a new form of collective intelligence. In the future, cities will become smarter in a much more literal way than what is often currently assumed.

Autorentext
Antoine Picon is the G Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is also researcher at the ?cole Nationale des Ponts et Chauss?es and President of the Fondation Le Corbusier. His current research focuses on contemporary issues around digital culture, architecture and the city.

Leseprobe
IBM, infographic on 'building a smarter city and state', 2013
IBM has played an important role in the rise of the smart city ideal. This infographic was released to illustrate a series of projects launched in partnership with the city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts. It features some key elements of the smart city approach such as a better management of urban infrastructure and the quest for greater environmental efficiency.
Introduction A New Urban Ideal

Our cities are on the verge of a radical transformation, a revolution in intelligence comparable in scale to the one that, in its time, brought about industrialisation. The smart city, driven by digital technology, is poised to replace the typical networked city of the industrial era, whose success was built on its hard infrastructure, from roads to water supply and sanitation systems, not only as a technological optimum but also as a social and political project. This conviction is shared by many. Coined initially around 2005 to characterise a series of new urban uses of information and communications technology, the expression 'smart city' has spread everywhere, in both mass media and specialist literature, and in the discourse of businesses such as IBM and Cisco as well as out of the mouths of politicians. A new urban ideal is born; and this book is dedicated to it.

This ideal's increasing power has not prevented the existence of major ambiguities concerning the exact nature of the changes that are afoot. In the following pages, the different definitions of the smart city that are circulating today will be examined. It is worth noting immediately that they are almost all situated between two extremes: on one side, a limited meaning with an emphasis on optimisation of the city's functional aspects, and in particular of its infrastructure, through primarily digital tools; and on the other, a much broader vision that embraces not only the efficient management of facilities and services, but also the promotion of production and the exchange of knowledge - better quality of life through living more intelligently.

Aerial view of the Smart City Campus project, Barcelona, Spain, 2014

The smart city ideal represents an important component of the urban strategy of Barcelona. It entails the revitalisation of a former industrial area through the creation of a campus bringing together businesses, universities and other players involved in urban technology and innovation.

Beneath their apparent diversity, and despite the aforementioned opposition, the approaches to the smart city converge on several points. The first concerns the highly strategic character of information and communications technology, which is supposed to improve everyday city management at the same time as helping to make it more economical in terms of materials and energy - in a word, more ecological. On that subject, the need for sustainable development constitutes another point of convergence. Is it possible to speak of smart cities if urban zones continue, as they do today, to contribute to environmental degradation? There is likewise universal agreement on the importance of human factors. Whatever definition of the smart city one prefers, the phenomenon calls for new types of both individual and collective behaviour. Without people who are capable of modelling their conduct on the information that they supply, the sensors, microchips and display screens of the smart city would have only a limited impact. Contrary to the arguments of its less informed detractors, the looming new urban revolution cannot be reduced, even in its narrowest sense, to a mere plan to equip the city with digital tools. It is inherently linked to questions of anthropology, sociology and, ultimately, politics.

As if echoing the oppositio

Inhalt

Acknowledgements 005

Introduction: A New Urban Ideal 009

Spatialised Intelligence 011

Technology, Space and Politics 015

Chapter 1: The Advent of the Smart City, from Flow Management to Event Control 023

Defining the Smart City 024

Self-Fulfilling Fictions 030

The Sentient and Sensory City 037

Massive Quantities of Data 046

What Happens 052

Chapter 2: A Tale of Two Cities 067

Neocybernetic Temptation 069

The Cyborg-City Hypothesis 078

Spontaneous City, Collaborative City 083

The Digital Individual 091

Chapter 3: Urban Intelligence, Space and Maps 105

Augmented Reality and Geolocation 106

Towards Three-Dimensional Urbanism 110

A New Relationship to Infrastructure 119

The Stakes of Representation 124

A New Aesthetic 138

Laboratories of Public Life in the Digital Age 140

Conclusion: The Challenges of Intelligence 145

The Limits of All-Digital Solutions 146

The Necessary Diversification of Scenarios 149

Public/Private 153

From Event to History 154

Bibliography 158

Index 162

Picture Credits 167