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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 article titled Smartness that matters: Towards a comprehensive and human-centred characterisation of smart cities from 2016 by Alexander Prado Lara, Eduardo Moreira Da Costa, Thiago Zilinscki Furlani, and Tan Yigitcanlar, published in the Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market and Complexity. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see a collection of smart city definitions and their deficiencies. This article investigates previous smart city definitions and proposes a new, human-centred characterisation for them.

Over the past decades smart urban technologies have begun to blanket our cities forming the backbone of a large intelligent infrastructure. Additionally, sustainability has become significant in urban planning and development. Smart city, therefore, surpassed the intelligent city becoming a popular topic for researchers, urban planners, administrators, development and real estate companies, and technology firms. The smart city meaning is wide ranging from pure ecological to technological, from economic to organisation and societal views. In many visions, technology and innovation are common elements to shape our cities into a form that we want to leave to our descendants. The boundless examples worldwide create an opportunity to re-evaluate the definition of smart cities.

There are many definitions currently for urban futures based on ICT: smart, intelligent, ubiquitous, digital, knowledge, sustainable, green, creative, all related to urban agglomerations with probably identifiable aspects, such as urban mobility, security, combatting poverty. Although the concept of smart cities share the target problems, there is not a common and context-free view that clearly explains to city policy-makers what a smart city is. This ambiguity seems to be a major obstacle to convince the decision-makers to invest in smart city initiatives to transform their cities. Additionally, although innovation is an integral part for smart city concepts, innovation alone does not transform a city to a smart city, it is not the sole ingredient of success in establishing smart cities.

Moreover, there are additional questions when investigating smart cities, such as: is smart better, are indicators enough to establish smartness, is smart better for whom? What are the minimum requirements to transform a city into a smart city? Would these answers be the same in every culture or locality? One can imagine that at least part of the resistance and criticism towards the smart city term and approaches could be minimised if the concept did not leave any doubt that the construction or transformation of any urban agglomeration into smarter city has to start from the premise of being integrated to the wishes, interests and needs of its residents and also of producing positive practical impact on their daily lives. Therefore, this research investigated smart city definitions to identify central elements and then proposed a wider definition for smart cities.

The investigated, more than 100 definitions had a significant focus on the operational side, with central role given to ICTs. Even the ones minimising technologies’ importance are based on the prescription of strategic actions and usually make it much more explicit how the proposal should be executed than why to do it and what does it aim to generate in people’s lives. They are centred in the means such as the intensive use of new technologies, more open governance processes or more sustainable strategies for economic and social development. Despite attempts to create a holistic view, smart cities vary from a perspective centred on one of four domains: infrastructure and ICT, creative economy, human infrastructure, and sustainability.

This finding is interesting as the city, even from the Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, has been at least partially understood as society, and urban happiness as a collective good that should pervade it. Therefore, if smart city is intended to be seen a s model of excellence, the term cannot leave any doubt that the promotion of the well-being and the happiness of its residents is a guiding principle and one of its key challenges.

Unfortunately, well-being is also a controversial concept without a resolved definition or agreed ways to properly measure it. Not to mention the differences based on cultures and locations. For these reasons, subjective aspects of well-being promotion should demand the same attention from city planners as they pay to its objective aspects. Meaning that in addition to providing quality of life, understood as levels of income, health education, mobility, and so on – it would be also smart to promote a lifestyle aligned with the values and other constituents of local culture.

Based on the investigated definitions and their disadvantages, the authors proposed a new smart city definition: smart city is a community that systematically promotes the overall well-being for all of its members, and flexible enough to proactively and sustainably become an increasingly better place to live, work and play. Although this definition places people at the heart of smart city concept, it does not undermine the role of infrastructure, economy, and sustainability. Moreover, even being deliberately neutral in relation to the use of specific technologies or strategies, the definition implicitly incorporates the main approaches in literature, since the intelligence obviously manifests itself when the city promotes economic development with social justice and environmental sustainability, adopts and develops appropriate technologies for its local reality and uses governance processes that help build a community associated with the culture values and lifestyle its residents desire to retain or embrace.

In additional to being human-centred, it brings promotion of well-being to the centre of the smartness concept, this definition imprints a dynamic character to the smart city approach. Being smart is not just getting a high score on a set of metrics, even if that is a form of assessment. The definition implies the existence of neighbourhood communities with the goal of changing themselves for the best on a continuous and sustainable way. In order to support this leading role, the community should be able to learn to build on their strengths and find their own way to become a better place for the current future residents.

The main practical implication of this definition is that any smart city project is set by and assessed from local cultural values point of view. The appropriate smart city proposal will be different for Sao Paulo and Beijing. There must be reservations to replication proposals of successful projects imported from other cultures and geographies. In order to establish real understanding of the place, collaboration of people and institutions who actually understand the history and values of the community is required. In addition to the continuous nature of the transformation process, it is assumed that potentially in the long run the most successful smart city projects are the ones those made for, with and eventually by the residents themselves.

Considering a smart city as a set of one or more smart neighbourhood communities makes it human-centred and creates one of the pillars of city smartness: participatory governance based on the engagement of civil society in the processes of urban transformation. From the individuals’ point of view, the desirable emotional connection between the place and its residents suggests that planning a smart city needs to strongly engage its residents in the process of building the vision for the future. This involvement can go way beyond participating or providing feedback: it also includes helping in its building itself, through co-design and public-private-academia-community partnerships. In this approach, individuals are seen as the producers of their own well-being by having a say and determining the features of their smart community and city.

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

1. Cities form the beginning were at least partially understood as the society and the community with their collaborations for becoming happy, therefore, any city strategy, initiative, or urban future plan need to incorporate people into their frameworks.
2. Smart city was articulated as a community that systematically promotes the overall well-being for all of its members and flexible enough to proactively and sustainably become an increasingly better place to live, work and play.
3. Each city needs to find their own smartness and citizens need to participate and be involved being the experts of their urban experiences – both of these enhance the chance of a strategy or initiative, let it be for smartness or not, to succeed.

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

1. How can we encourage decision-makers to incorporate such approaches to their work?
2. How can we include the experts into this participatory approach and co-design with a balanced way? Yes, inhabitants are the experts of their own lives, but experts can help solving issues, enhancing quality of life and well-being?
3. How much are you involved with your own city? How much are you part of creating its present and future?

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