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Are you interested in both smartness and the city in the smart city concept?

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Our summary today works with the article titled Ontological review of smart city research from 2017 by Arkalgud Ramaprasad, Aurora Sánchez-Ortiz and Thant Syn, presented at the Twenty-third Americas Conference on Information Systems. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how academic research investigated smart cities in 2016. This article investigates how smartness is very much interesting for the research community, but the city seems largely unexplored in the smart city term.

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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. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss.

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Cities play a key role in global development, being responsible for more than 80% of global GDP, and this will just increase. International organisations estimate that the infrastructure development for the next 35 years will surpass the one built over the last 4000 years. This rapid urbanisation may bring multiple risks which may surpass the cities’ ability to provide adequate services for their inhabitants. If cities are properly managed, there could be enormous benefits as a result of the economies of scale by sharing amenities such as transportation, sport and entertainment facilities, business services, broadband access, and so on. Therefore, cities need to become what has been called smart in order to fulfill the expectations of their stakeholders and produce the desired outcomes for them. However, what this smartness means is highly contested.

Since its beginning, researchers who are interested in the scope of the term have systematically reviewed the smart city literature for the best definition of the term. Researchers, urban policy-makers, and international organisations have conceived frameworks, rankings, and technical standards to assess the level of smartness of cities globally. Nevertheless, a complete picture of the field has been difficult to agree on, in part due to the multidisciplinary nature of the field, and the difficulties associated with the integration of disciplines as diverse as urban design, information technology, public policy and social sciences. However, there are recurring themes.

Many of the existing frameworks agree that networked infrastructure, business-led urban development, social inclusion, social and relational capital, and social and environmental sustainability need to be included. In general, most of the analysed frameworks focus on technology and infrastructure, as their main components and only some include people’s wellbeing. Benchmarkings consider variables like economy, infrastructure, innovation, quality of life, resilience, transportation, urban development and so on. International standards also contribute to this conversation, mostly focusing on IT, infrastructure and sustainability.

Compared to these approaches, the authors proposed a high-level ontological framework of smart city based on an extensive literature review with 36 different definitions from urban studies, computer and information technology, sociology and public health. Ontology has many different definitions in different fields, but the authors sidestepped this debate using it as an adjective, Thus the ontological framework can be understood as a structured natural language framework or a linguistic framework. Smart city is a compound construct with two major parts – smart and city – each of which is a complex construct. The city is defined by its stakeholders and the outcomes, which include sustainability, quality of life, equity, liveability and resilience. The combination of the stakeholders and outcomes – like the quality of life of the citizens – defines the smartness of the city.

Smartness will be built up from the structure, functions, focus and semiotics of these combinations. Semiotics is the iterative process of generating and applying intelligence. In the iterative semiotics process, data are converted to information, information to knowledge, and knowledge is then translated into smart actions. The focus may be cultural, economic, demographic, environmental, political, social, technological and infrastructural. The functions include sensing, monitoring, processing, translating and communicating. The structure includes architecture, infrastructure, systems, services, policies, processes and personnel. The smartness of a city will be a combination of these dimensions – like architecture to sense cultural data.

Taken together, there are 25 200 potential components of a smart city encapsulated in this approach. A truly smart city is one that has realised a significant proportion of them. And thus cities may be smart in different ways and to different degrees. This ontological framework defines the smart city concept simply and visually without compromising its underlying combinational complexity. It is systemic and systematic. With this framework, any research and practice can be described. It is designed to be actionable and practical.

Using the framework, the authors then investigated the smart city research landscape through scientific articles published in 2016. In total, they included 373 articles’ abstracts, titles and keywords into their examination. The analysis showed that researchers focus their conceptual definition of the term according to their field of study – information technologists concentrate on the Smart part emphasising IT and its functions with little attention to the desired outcomes. Researchers from social sciences and disciplines associated with urban design emphasise the city part with stakeholders and outcomes focusing on sustainability and quality of life. 44% of the articles are interested in systems from the structure dimension while 27% in infrastructure, as the leading topics. Outcomes received negligible focus even with sustainability included. Research regarding the stakeholders is lacking. The focus of the smart city research is still at the level of efficiency or optimisations of the city’s processes using IT and the city compound is almost forgotten.

The established framework can help characterise the logic of the smart city from many perspectives. It can be used by planners and government officials to assess local smartness, provide a roadmap to next actions, guide cooperative thinking and map bright and blind spots. The mapping of the scientific literature shed light on the bright spots – IT and system thinking, and the blind spots – stakeholders and outcomes. There is no doubt that information technology development has increased urban complexity and this is reflected in the scientific literature. However, this cannot lead us to neglect the needs of the stakeholders and the desired outcomes. Researchers should consider the interdisciplinary nature of the smart city research and must integrate technological, social, and urban aspect of the smart city with the aim to achieve the desired outcomes in a more unified approach.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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

1. The introduced ontological framework approaches smart cities from smartness with structure, functions, focus and semiotics and city with stakeholders and outcomes which can be used to investigate any smart city initiative or research.
2. In the investigated research, the authors found more focus on the structure aspect with systems and IT than on stakeholders and outcomes.
3. Researchers should consider the interdisciplinary nature of the smart city research and must integrate technological, social, and urban aspect of the smart city with the aim to achieve the desired outcomes in a more unified approach.

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

1. How has the focus shifted since the article?
2. How can we encourage researchers more to focus also on stakeholders and outcomes?
3. Which dimension do you think needs more attention in your city?

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