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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 Analysis and comparison of Smart City initiatives from 2016 by Aranzazu Fernández-Vázquez and Ignacio López-Forniés, in the book titled Advances on Mechanics, Design Engineering and Manufacturing, published by Springer. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see the investigation of smart city initiatives. This chapter investigates smart city initiatives based on citizen-centred design methodologies, also paying attention to living labs as methodologies and organisations.

The authors start with the usual facts in urbanisation: 66% of the human race will live in cities by 2050, which is usually used for highlighting the urgency with which new approaches must be made to improve citizens’ conditions now and for the near future. Many models have emerged to be the solution for the challenges, eco-city, high-tech city, real-time city. One of the most successful ones is smart city, and many initiatives and much research have been done in the recent years around that. This research aims to make a critical analysis of different initiatives developed within this model based on the role of citizens in each one of them, as citizen implication is a fact that can guarantee the success of the initiatives and its economic and social viability.

It becomes clear that intensive research and numerous proposals have been developed under the smart city label, but yet there is not a unique definition for smart city, and the indicators of the smartness of a city are still far from indisputable. Nevertheless, the analysis of urban governance has appeared as a promising approach for measuring the impact of innovation in urban daily processes, and it is interesting to analyse the role of the citizen in the whole process.

The first approach defines smart city as the city that is using new Information and Communication Technologies, ICT, innovatively and strategically to achieve its aims. According to this definition, the smart city is characterised by its ICT infrastructures which facilitate an urban system increasingly smart, interconnected, and sustainable. The paradigm that supports the need of this ICT deployment is the Internet of Things, IoT, which proposes a system in which the pervasive presence of a variety of devices able to interact with each other without the intervention of people, thus smart city is driven and enabled by interconnected objects placed in the urban space. IoT is supposed to successfully contribute to a more efficient and accurate use of the resources allowing access to a large amount of information that can be processed for its subsequent use by data mining techniques.

This approach is rather futuristic, where citizens, objects, utilities and everything else are seamlessly connected using ubiquitous technologies to significantly enhance urban living experience. These proposals have been developed mainly in the field of transport, services and energy efficiency, and all those related with data mining. But this point of view has not only been encouraged by companies, as the European Commission itself also started promoting smart cities with bigger focus on energy efficiency, renewable energy and green mobility, than in citizens themselves.

Unfortunately, there are many issues with ICT-based smart city initiatives. The intensive wiring of cities and the collection of data without consideration of some of the possible associated problems, such as the need to ensure the privacy of participants when data is collected seems rather problematic. Accordingly, cities often claim to be smart but do not define what that means or offer any evidence to support such claims. Additionally, the ambitious initiatives only slightly resemble the results. It seems to be difficult to transform the higher level concepts found in smart city literature into actionable and effective policies. Furthermore, the self-regulatory nature of smart cities can cause a kind of anxiety in people.

In response to the problems arising from the predominantly technological model, a current opinion has claimed that the design of the genuine smart city only could be possible by the emergence of smart citizens, conferring the smart attributes to cities. Instead of considering people as just another one of the enabling forces of the smart city, these proposals have opted for the application of citizen-centric and participatory approaches to the co-design and development of smart city. It already has a new name: the human smart city.

Most of the proposals, however, sill have limited citizens’ participation. The main exception, and the environment that has made possible the emergence of projects in which citizens have played a major role throughout the entire process, have been the experiences of living labs developed in the field of smart cities.

Living labs have been defined both as a research and development methodology and as the organisation that is created for its practice. As a methodology, living labs is one in which innovations are created and validated in collaborative, multi-contextual and multi-cultural empirical real-world environments. This approach seeks for the implication of users in every phase of the process as the mean to ensure their engagement with the services or products developed and it is performed through iterative cycles of proposal, alternatives and testings. Thereby, it can be considered a user-centred design methodology in which user involvement in encouraged. As an organisation, living labs appear in cities with their own initiatives, focusing on developing new business models mainly in technical and industrial context, making them the ideal candidate to create an appropriate model for the implementation of the smart city. These smart city living labs have aimed at improving the governance of cities, promoting proposals coming from citizens themselves and applying user-centred design methodologies, such as co-design or service design.

Naturally, there are shortcomings with living labs regarding smart cities as well. The citizen engagement does not seem to be clear or easy, therefore citizens are not the ones actually running the innovation processes. Therefore, living labs could be better considered as a methodology between user-centred design and participatory design. Additionally, the results can be at various scales and levels of impact. The common good, the social benefit achieved by citizenship by the active participation in the realm of politics and public services, has not been interiorised as desirable by society, and the social benefit is not achieved, thus, many of the projects have remained in academia. Moreover, the current challenges and cost create barriers and obstacles for innovation through living labs.

To compare the two approaches, it can be occasionally confusing because ICT based initiatives often seem to adopt citizen-driven approaches by establishing a distinction between hard and soft domains, the latter meaning governance and people. But a clear distinction can be made based on the indicators, such as drivers, beneficiaries, resources, pros and cons. Although citizen-based smart city initiatives rely on co-creative and collective processes with involved groups of people that can be autonomous, ICT features can become a very strong support. It is only necessary to rethink the idea of city we are heading to.

Smart city on the one hand refers to cities that are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing, and, on the other hand, to those whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. The links between these two are not clear, and only living labs seems to create the proper experiences to involve people and properly integrate ICT. Unfortunately, these are not numerous and homogenous, and have limited citizen participation and involvement. Regardless, the living labs characteristics are very promising from the designers’ perspective as they allow the emergence of new processes that can develop real and better user involvement in smart cities.

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

1. Smart city can refer to a city that is increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing
2. Smart city can refer to a city whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people
3. Living labs are great links between these two approaches though not without fault, involving people while properly integrating ICT.

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

1. Why is it so hard to involve people?
2. Does this difficulty changed during COVID where we were all in our own environments and experienced them more closely figuring out our own opinions? Are we more open to share those opinions?
3. Why are we so unwilling to contribute to the greater good in our cities?

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