An unflinching look at the aspiring city-builders of our smart, mobile, connected future. From Beijing to Boston, cities are deploying smart technology—sensors embedded in streets and subways, Wi-Fi broadcast airports and green spaces—to address the basic challenges faced by massive, interconnected metropolitan centers. In Smart Cities, Anthony M. Townsend documents this emerging futuristic landscape while considering the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings of the key actors—entrepreneurs, mayors, philanthropists, and software developers—at work in shaping the new urban frontier.

Key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts for understanding smart cities, along with discussions of both drawbacks and benefits of this approach to urban problems. Over the past ten years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Emerging smart cities have become both crucibles and showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the integration of big data into everyday life. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally networked solutions to urban problems? Or are they neoliberal, corporate-controlled, undemocratic non-places? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise introduction to smart cities, presenting key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts, along with discussions of both the drawbacks and the benefits of this approach to urban life. After reviewing current terminology and justifications employed by technology designers, journalists, and researchers, the book describes three models for smart city development—smart-from-the-start cities, retrofitted cities, and social cities—and offers examples of each. It covers technologies and methods, including sensors, public wi-fi, big data, and smartphone apps, and discusses how developers conceive of interactions among the built environment, technological and urban infrastructures, citizens, and citizen engagement. Throughout, the author—who has studied smart cities around the world—argues that smart city developers should work more closely with local communities, recognizing their preexisting relationship to urban place and realizing the limits of technological fixes. Smartness is a means to an end: improving the quality of urban life.

Provides the foundations and principles needed for addressing the various challenges of developing smart cities Smart cities are emerging as a priority for research and development across the world. They open up significant opportunities in several areas, such as economic growth, health, wellness, energy efficiency, and transportation, to promote the sustainable development of cities. This book provides the basics of smart cities, and it examines the possible future trends of this technology. Smart Cities: Foundations, Principles, and Applications provides a systems science perspective in presenting the foundations and principles that span multiple disciplines for the development of smart cities. Divided into three parts—foundations, principles, and applications—Smart Cities addresses the various challenges and opportunities of creating smart cities and all that they have to offer. It also covers smart city theory modeling and simulation, and examines case studies of existing smart cities from all around the world. In addition, the book: Addresses how to develop a smart city and how to present the state of the art and practice of them all over the world Focuses on the foundations and principles needed for advancing the science, engineering, and technology of smart cities—including system design, system verification, real-time control and adaptation, Internet of Things, and test beds Covers applications of smart cities as they relate to smart transportation/connected vehicle (CV) and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for improved mobility, safety, and environmental protection Smart Cities: Foundations, Principles, and Applications is a welcome reference for the many researchers and professionals working on the development of smart cities and smart city-related industries.

Why technology is not an end in itself, and how cities can be “smart enough,” using technology to promote democracy and equity. Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself. In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to technology: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.

The era of the smart city has arrived. Only a decade ago, the promise of optimising urban services through the widespread application of information and communication technologies was largely a techno-utopian fantasy. Today, smart urbanisation is occurring via urban projects, policies and visions in hundreds of cities around the globe. Inside Smart Cities provides real-world evidence on how local authorities, small and medium enterprises, corporations, utility providers and civil society groups are creating smart cities at the neighbourhood, city and regional scales. Twenty three empirically detailed case studies from the Global North and South – ranging from Cape Town, Stockholm and Abu Dhabi to Philadelphia, Hong Kong and Santiago – illustrate the multiple and diverse incarnations of smart urbanism. The contributors draw on ideas from urban studies, geography, urban planning, science and technology studies and innovation studies to go beyond the rhetoric of technological innovation and reveal the political, social and physical implications of digitalising the built environment. Collectively, the practices of smart urbanism raise fundamental questions about the sustainability, liveability and resilience of cities in the future. The findings are relevant to academics, students, practitioners and urban stakeholders who are questioning how urban innovation relates to politics and place.

This book investigates the role of smart cities in the broader context of urban innovation and e-government, identifies what a smart city is in practice and highlights their importance to the welfare of society. The book offers specific, measurable, and action-oriented public sector planning and management principles and ideas for smart governance in the era of global urbanization and innovation to help with the challenges in maintaining the democratic system of checks and balances as well as the division of powers in a highly interconnected world. The book will be of interest researchers, practitioners, students, and public sector IT professionals that work within innovation management, public administration, urban technologies and urban innovation, and public local administration studies.

This book presents a coherent, novel vision of Smart Cities, built around a value-driven architecture. It describes the limitations of the contemporary notion of the Smart City and argues that the next developmental step must actively include not only the physical infrastructure, but information technology and human infrastructure as well, requiring the intensive integration of technical solutions from the Internet of Things (IoT) and social computing. The book is divided into five major parts, the first of which provides both a general introduction and a coherent vision that ties together all the components that are required to realize the vision for Smart Cities. Part II then discusses the provisioning and governance of Smart City systems and infrastructures. In turn, Part III addresses the core technologies and technological enablers for managing the social component of the Smart City platform. Both parts combine state-of-the-art research with cutting-edge industrial efforts in the respective fields. Lastly, Part IV details a road map to achieving Cyber-Human Smart Cities. Rounding out the coverage, it discusses the concrete technological advances needed to move beyond contemporary Smart Cities and toward the Smart Cities of the future. Overall, the book provides an essential overview of the latest developments in the areas of IoT and social computing research, and outlines a research roadmap for a closer integration of the two areas in the context of the Smart City. As such, it offers a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students alike.