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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the book chapter titled Smart cities in a smart world from 2015 by Beniamino Murgante and Giuseppe Burroso, from the book Future City architecture for optimal living, edited by Stamatina Rassia and Panos Pardalos, published by Springer. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see what clever approaches they talk about to guarantee a better management of resources and their sustainable access to present and future generations This chapter tries to insert the technological issues within a framework closer to planning and with attention to the social impact.

Murgante and Burroso started with the common understanding of smart cities: the combination of electronic devices and technological hard infrastructure. However, this understanding often forgets that there is also a city, and it is crucial to ask whether these devices and applications are really useful to the city. The not proper use of technology can evoke gloomy and distressing urban scenarios, pictured in the culture, like in the movie Blade Runner. The term smart is very popular today and has been adopted to every part of human life, like in the Smurf cartoon: there is smurf forest, smurf berry, smurf strawberries. In order to bring the smartness concept into the correct approach, it is important to highlight the challenges that cities face in upcoming years.

These challenges include the increasing urban population, congestion, urban poverty, security, despite the fact that the city is the greatest invention of mankind and living in a city involves more benefits than living in remote areas. Cities are the most vital economic elements of a nation. On the other hand, cities are also large consumers of energy and natural resources which need to be transported in. And therein lies a major challenge: an urban lifestyle implies a lower level of sustainability with more energy consumption, more pollution, more waste production and so on. Therefore, it is necessary to move from an approach based on pure physical growth of the city to one founded on the ability to use energy, water and other resources correctly and efficiently and to provide a good quality of life – to a cleverer approach. In practice, cities should become smarter in programming and planning the management and use of existing resources.

Cities represent the most visible footprint of humans on the planet, even without an agreed upon and unique definition of what is urban and is not. The authors summarised the different understandings as cities can be identified as places where activities and functions are located and concentrated so that not just the demographic and infrastructure points of view are considered, but, in addition, the functions that take place in that environment, typically consisting of a concentration of buildings and infrastructure, and people are also counted. The functions can be called as city serving – to fulfill the day-to-day life of inhabitants, and city forming, the ones making it special and performing, like universities and health care. And the city is also based on movement within, to and from the city. Cities are also networks built up of nodes and edges and smaller networks. And cities also have and integrate into different scales.

All of this can have a level of smartness – although this is not always understood as the smart city. Smartness was translated into six axes as the backbone of the smart city: economy, society, mobility, people, governance, and environment. These axes can be enhanced by modern ICT, optimising and making cities more efficient. Smart city is also strongly related to the sustainable city, and the difference lays mainly in the role played by technology. Although sustainability and smartness have bottom-up approaches, smart city is usually understood as a techy top-gown approach with a single set of decision-makers preparing supposed valuable solutions for citizens. The bottom-up approach, on the other hand, is based on how citizens or city-users live and interact with the city and develop their own applications and solutions for the different uses of the city. So the physical infrastructure and digital layer over the city can be the smart city, but with an open way it should allow and invite people to interact and develop their own activities. Also, smartness means different for everyone, so when we consider a smart city, we must also consider cultural and national differences, existing infrastructure and economies on how cities are interpreted and intended.

The risks today lie in focusing on just the technological side of smartness, maybe without a tight connection neither among techy initiatives nor with spatial and urban planning activities. In the all-encompassing meaning, the true smart city acts as an enabling platform for the activities that citizens are able to develop, linking those inherited from the past to those that can be realised in the future, so it is not focused just on applications but on the possibility that citizens realise them. For this, smart city can have three pillars: the connections, the data, and sensors, including citizens acting as live sensors actively participating in a bottom-up way in city activities. Urban governance, in this sense, need to harmonise the pillars and represent a set of minimum driving rules – regulating without entering too much into details concerning contents and applications developed by anyone. In this way, the solutions can be fitted to the specific needs of inhabitants, covering the niches and minorities’ needs as well. Furthermore, the six axes of smartness need to be connected to technology and the added value that innovation can lead to programs and plans already issued.

In most cases, however, open data is not properly used. Different classifications could be introduced to evaluate the data, spatial aspects must be considered, and a comprehensive approach should be applied when working with data. Nowadays, data represents a significant unused economic potential because if it was available to everybody, the collective imagination could create new companies, and produce additional business to existing companies. Moreover, not just the openness, but dimensions of data are also crucial to understand – big data encompasses any set of data so complex and large that it becomes challenges to process and analyse using traditional database management, and therefore, it requires new instruments and techniques. Although there are challenges, collected data can provide interesting insights about a city’s behaviour and can better orient planning strategies.

Additionally, the tension arises between devices and citizens, which is the more important. People are using devices and applications; however, we are probably far from reaching a really smart and complete use of them. The portable devices help us to act as real mobile sensors in the city, and we can choose how to use them and view their potentials. Our smartness as citizens should therefore be that of using the potential of such devices to exploit our interaction with the city to monitor it and highlight both positive and negative aspects and help its better management. This is how citizens can be smart in the city helping its advancements.

In investigating technologies for the city, it is fundamental to ask whether or not the innovations have relationships with the urban environment. The six axes of smart city, when considered in an integrative approach, often described as a cultural revolution, are no more than the first lesson of urban planning. Moreover, it is quite obvious that mobility has close relationships with economy, people, governance, environment, and quality of life. It is clear, that smartness is and should be more than only the application of technology to the urban environment. The main efforts in upcoming years have to be concentrated on distinguishing between what is and isn’t useful for cities.

Sustainability and quality of life in cities are among the main challenges that current and future communities have to tackle. A smart approach to achieving these involves the use of best available technologies, but with the question whether this technology is useful for the city. Additionally, cities around the world are very different and need different solutions. But, technologies represent a fundamental support in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of a city’s planning and management, they are the means not the target. Given the complexity of the cause-effects relationships of technologies and people, maybe today’s challenge is to understand how to put them correctly into planning procedures.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. The city means a lot of things, but these meanings must include inhabitants and functions.
2. Smart city is more than the technological advancements, technology is the mean, not the aim, and how we, as people use technology in the city is important and provides information for better management and planning
3. The main challenge for the coming years will be how to distinguish useful and useless technologies from each other for the city.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed the city meanings?
2. What are the biggest challenges in urban governance transformation to use data and information in a better way? And how can be those challenges solved?
3. How do you use the technology, devices and applications consciously to provide information for better city management?

What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up questions? Let me know on Twitter @WTF4Cities or on the website where the transcripts and show notes are available! I hope this was an interesting research for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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