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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 Beyond defining the smart city – Meeting top-down and bottom-up approaches in the middle from 2014 by Jonas Breuer, Nils Walravens, and Pieter Ballon, presented at the Eight International Conference INPUT 2014 titled Smart City – Planning for Energy, Transportation and Sustainability, and published in the Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see an investigation into the bottom-up and top-down smart city approaches and where they can meet. This article introduces what smart city can mean for the different stakeholders and the consequences of its interpretation.

The city is more than ever the axis of humanity, and urbanisation is the defining trend of the 21^st century. This relatively new imbalance between rural and urban population poses many and diverse challenges for cities, their governments and citizens. A prerequisite to accommodate this scale of urbanisation is without any doubt well-functioning infrastructures for urban areas ensuring efficiency and effectiveness in urban processes. An accepted idea for this is to incorporate modern technology into urban structures. ICT are pushed by the industry to provide tailored services to the citizens, while governments investigate what ICT services and products can enhance urban quality of life or improve internal processes. This quest is most often captured in the smart city concept, originating from the crossroads of technological progress and urban challenges due to increasing urbanisation and population growth. The smart city concept has become key in bridging academic research, projects and commercial initiatives exploring the role of technology in urban life.

However, many different operationalizabilities, approaches and definitions exist for the smart city, and a lack of overview in thinking about the concept persist. Establishing an all-encompassing, definite definition is as difficult as projects, opinions and initiatives in the field are diverse. Perhaps the goal then should not be chasing this all-encompassing definition but rather having a clear overview of what stakeholders are talking about and the different viewpoints on the city of tomorrow. After all, who would want to live in the rhetorical alternative to the smart city, in the dumb city? Therefore, this paper doesn’t aim to answer the question what the smart city is, but to understand what the concept means to the stakeholders and the consequences of its interpretations.

The top-down smart city approach is often closely related to the technologically deterministic idea of a control room for the city. It aims at providing an ICT-based architecture to overview urban activities as well as the tools to automatically interact with infrastructures and adjust parameters to predefined optima. There is a strong emphasis on optimization through technology, and, besides gathering data, a large part of the processes that essentially constitute this approach are built up from calculations, visualisation and predictions based on the gathered metrics. Making cities smarter based on big data promises enormous opportunities for large private companies, like technology vendors. In the most extreme manifestation, a top-down approach translates to cities that are planned, designed and built from scratch with the optimisation of urban processes through technology in mind.

These visions have been heavily criticised for being sterile, overly planned, prohibitively expensive, anonymous, uniform and conformist, and the result is that these cities struggle to be completed within the predicted budgets and timeframes or do not attract enough economic activity so people don’t want to move there. Additionally, certain kinds of top-down visions have been heavily criticised with the main argument that they are dictated by commercial interests and entail questions of control and privacy. Too much monitoring and too many integrated technologies and infrastructures can pose actual threats for freedom and privacy, whether controlled by private actors or ruling bodies. The focus on efficiency raises the questions of who and what gets left out and whether efficiency is the real aim of a city. The business potential is there, but cities are about citizens, the people live in and use them.

Therefore, the top-down approach is contrasted with the bottom-up approach of smart cities, which are more experimental about what a smart city could be. Change and improvement comes only from people using the city and this approach dismisses any form of top-down urbanisation, especially the involvement of powerful companies. The bottom-up smart city is about the smart citizen, those who live, work and engage in all kind of activities in the city. This is a decidedly distributed approach, supporting and accepting some form of chaos, as this is the default mode of urban development.

Although these characteristics have positive impact on the local scale, they often conflict objectives of decision-makers, urban planners, and dynamics of the globalised economy. Chaotic bottom-up processes oppose the idea of a master plan, an ideal state of place. Since the city is a system of systems put together by people who bring it to life, it is complex and cannot be but dynamic and flexible. Consequently, the solution to urban challenges of the future, a real smart city, is more than just technological, networked and intelligent: it is about people. The smart city presents an unparalleled opportunity to enable citizens, connect them and make them smarter. It has the potential to empower them to participate, encourage them to shape urbanisation and make it more sustainable together. In such a perspective, what defines the smart city is not the infrastructures or architecture it offers, but the ways in which its citizens interact with these systems as well as each other.

However, relying solely on bottom-up approaches also appears unlikely or even infeasible. Citizens are not detached from the wider urban context they live in, with other stakeholders playing roles. Even though some of such initiatives have impact and effect some change, they can lack a vision on the issue at hand, be often very short term, can conflict with some long term goals set out by local policy and in some cases even be illegal. The authors, therefore, argued for a smart citizen that uses a variety of tools to interact with and move around the city, and for whom the emphasis lies on their citizenship rather than technology as a primary factor. However, relying purely on bottom-up initiatives remains problematic with regards to scalability, interoperability, barriers and incentives to entry.

While both type of approaches have their merits, they also have their respective challenges. Thus, the authors proposed a more nuanced interpretation, one that combines the top-down and bottom-up approaches, and established the smart city as a platform that fosters collective local intelligence of all affected stakeholders. Smart city becomes the meeting place where the public sector, private interest and citizens can come together to generate new value, to collaborate and innovate together. Smart city can only be successful if they act as local innovation platforms that bring together all involved stakeholders. The platform is the intermediary, the enabler of interaction of multiple actors who have corresponding interests or needs. The delivery of public services in such a reciprocal relationship between all stakeholders, for instance, is a very appealing and promising for developing truly smart cities.

As mentioned before, technology is not necessarily the most critical factor for smartening a city. Smartness still fundamentally depends upon people, thus some even could argue that cities have always been smart. Interpreting the smart city as a platform is about seeing and fostering it as a framework which enables the interactions and collaborations of the stakeholders. This enabling city combines the creativity of citizens and experts, politicians and business for making cities in collaboration. One of the steps towards such a collaboration is open data – governments and industry partners need to open up their data sets to the public who can play with it and potentially find answers to urban challenges and increasing urban agency of citizens.

For this platform approach to the smart city, the concept of open innovation can be highly relevant, because it is about organised collaboration between all involved stakeholders. It includes co-creation of services, products and much more. The aim is to establish processes that allow all players to make constructive contributions according to their own role and knowledge without a stakeholder or a need being more important than another. Open innovation is already being practiced in the form of Living Lab projects which provide the platforms for open innovation, which facilitate productive collaboration and thereby ensure that development complies with real problems and needs. We had investigated living labs in episode 46 if you want to know more about them. Back to the article.

In spite of the many attempts at definitions, the smart city concept remains elusive. However, it is an indication of the increasing need to develop new ways of looking at the city of the future and to think about structured approaches to provide answers f or the divers and complex questions companies, citizens, and governments face there. Smart cities, then, should capture and foster creative and collaborative innovation through direct interactions among public bodies, private actors and citizens for dealing with the next data flood, identifying and tackling new relational complexities between actors, facing grand societal challenges in a local context, while offering innovative and engaging experiences to citizens. The collaboration between the stakeholders is the key for making cities smarter.

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

1. Top-down smart city approaches can have technological aspects with data generation, but need to be careful around surveillance, control and privacy.
2. Bottom-up smart city approaches can involve the citizens answering their specific challenges, but need to keep in mind the bigger context and vision for the city.
3. Smart city can be the collaborative platform for the stakeholders where they can work, innovate and experience the world together.

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

1. Where would you like to live: in a smart city or in a dumb city?
2. What do you think is better: top-down or bottom-up approaches?
3. What would you propose in such a collaboration to become smarter in your city?

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