(The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
by Germaine Halegoua (Author)
Key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts for understanding smart cities, along with discussions of both drawbacks and benefits of this approach tourban 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.