Deconstructing Smart Cities

Abstract

This chapter defines the smart city in terms of the process whereby computers and computation are being embedded into the very fabric of the city itself. In short, the smart city is the automated city where the goal is to improve the efficiency of how the city functions. These new technologies tend to improve the performance of cities in the short term with respect to how cities function over minutes, hours or days rather than over years or decades. After establishing definitions and context, the author then explores questions of big data. One important challenge is to synthesize or integrate different data about the city's functioning and this provides an enormous challenge which presents many obstacles to producing coherent solutions to diverse urban problems. The chapter augments this argument with ideas about how the emergence of widespread computation provides a new interface to the public realm through which citizens might participate in rather fuller and richer ways than hitherto, through interactions in various kinds of decision-making about the future city. The author concludes with some speculations as to how the emerging science of smart cities fits into the wider science of cities.