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You can find the transcript through this link.

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Are you interested in contemporary urban concepts, like sustainable and resilient city, and their political premises? 

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Summary of the article titled The political premises of contemporary urban concepts: the global city, the sustainable city, the resilient city, the creative city, and the smart city from 2018 by Tali Hatuka, Issachar Rosen-Zvi, Michael Birnhack, Eran Toch, and Hadas Zur, published in the Planning Theory and Practice journal. 

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how these urban concepts compare. This article presents their juxtaposition and the possibility of them becoming prescriptive for decision-makers and developers.

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

1. Urban futures, like the global, sustainable, resilient, creative and smart cities are individually presented in the literature, while in practice they are used together, so there is a gap for researchers to bridge.
2. These ideas can lose their cores and meanings in implementation because they are morphed to the specific city’s economy and political structure – these can be cured with constructive criticism and revisions.
3. These concepts should be in the planners and decision-makers’ toolbox rather then prescriptive ideas, to use them for real change in urban areas with attention to how they will affect people’s lives.

You can find the article through this link.

Abstract: Numerous studies have focused on the global city, the sustainable city, the resilient city, the creative city, and the smart city, analyzing their politics, ideologies, and social implications. However, the literature lacks synthetic analysis that addresses these concepts by juxtaposing them and exploring their similarities and differences. This paper provides synthetic analysis, followed by a discussion of the concepts’ competing and complementary logics of governance and citizenship. The concluding section addresses the importance of taking into account these diverse concepts as political ideas and discusses how these concepts become a prescriptive mix promoted by public officials and private developers.

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

• No.008R – What are the differences between sustainable and smart cities?
• No.010R – Is the smart city resilient? Evidence form China;
• No.028R – Enhancing sustainable urban development through smart city applications;
• No.065R – Smart cities concept and challenges – Bases for the assessment of smart city projects;
• No.071R – Towards intelligently sustainable cities? – From intelligent and knowledge city programmes to the achievement of urban sustainability;
• No.083R – Operationalising a concept: the systemic review of composite indicator building for measuring community disaster resilience;
• No.084I – Interview with Jacek Urbanowicz talking about smartness and sustainability;

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