Architecture And The Smart City

Increasingly the world around us is becoming ‘smart.’ From smart meters to smart production, from smart surfaces to smart grids, from smart phones to smart citizens. ‘Smart’ has become the catch-all term to indicate the advent of a charged technological shift that has been propelled by the promise of safer, more convenient and more efficient forms of living. Most architects, designers, planners and politicians seem to agree that the smart transition of cities and buildings is in full swing and inevitable. However, beyond comfort, safety and efficiency, how can ‘smart design and technologies’ assist to address current and future challenges of architecture and urbanism? Architecture and the Smart City provides an architectural perspective on the emergence of the smart city and offers a wide collection of resources for developing a better understanding of how smart architecture, smart cities and smart systems in the built environment are discussed, designed and materialized. It brings together a range of international thinkers and practitioners to discuss smart systems through four thematic sections: ‘Histories and Futures’, ‘Agency and Control’, ‘Materialities and Spaces’ and ‘Networks and Nodes’. Combined, these four thematic sections provide different perspectives into some of the most pressing issues with smart systems in the built environment. The book tackles questions related to the future of architecture and urbanism, lessons learned from global case studies and challenges related to interdisciplinary research, and critically examines what the future of buildings and cities will look like.

As cities compete globally, the Smart City has been touted as the important new strategic driver for regeneration and growth. Smart Cities are employing information and communication technologies in the quest for sustainable economic development and the fostering of new forms of collective life. This has made the Smart City an essential focus for engineers, architects, urban designers, urban planners, and politicians, as well as businesses such as CISCO, IBM and Siemens. Despite its broad appeal, few comprehensive books have been devoted to the subject so far, and even fewer have tried to relate it to cultural issues and to assume a truly critical stance by trying to decipher its consequences on urban space and experience. This cultural and critical lens is all the more important as the Smart City is as much an ideal permeated by Utopian beliefs as a concrete process of urban transformation. This ideal possesses a strong self-fulfilling character: our cities will become ‘Smart’ because we want them to. This book opens with an examination of the technological reality on which Smart Cities are built, from the chips and sensors that enable us to monitor what happens within the infrastructure to the smartphones that connect individuals. Through these technologies, the urban space appears as activated, almost sentient. This activation generates two contrasting visions: on the one hand, a neo-cybernetic ambition to steer the city in the most efficient way; and on the other, a more bottom-up, participative approach in which empowered individuals invent new modes of cooperation. A thorough analysis of these two trends reveals them to be complementary. The Smart City of the near future will result from their mutual adjustment. In this process, urban space plays a decisive role. Smart Cities are contemporary with a ‘spatial turn’ of the digital. Based on key technological developments like geo-localisation and augmented reality, the rising importance of space explains the strategic role of mapping in the evolution of the urban experience. Throughout this exploration of some of the key dimensions of the Smart City, this book constantly moves from the technological to the spatial as well as from a critical assessment of existing experiments to speculations on the rise of a new form of collective intelligence. In the future, cities will become smarter in a much more literal way than what is often currently assumed.

DIGITAL CITIES ROADMAP This book details applications of technology to efficient digital city infrastructure and its planning, including smart buildings. Rapid urbanization, demographic changes, environmental changes, and new technologies are changing the views of urban leaders on sustainability, as well as creating and providing public services to tackle these new dynamics. Sustainable development is an objective by which the processes of planning, implementing projects, and development is aimed at meeting the needs of modern communities without compromising the potential of future generations. The advent of Smart Cities is the answer to these problems. Digital Cities Roadmap provides an in-depth analysis of design technologies that lay a solid foundation for sustainable buildings. The book also highlights smart automation technologies that help save energy, as well as various performance indicators needed to make construction easier. The book aims to create a strong research community, to have a deep understanding and the latest knowledge in the field of energy and comfort, to offer solid ideas in the nearby future for sustainable and resilient buildings. These buildings will help the city grow as a smart city. The smart city has also a focus on low energy consumption, renewable energy, and a small carbon footprint. Audience The information provided in this book will be of value to researchers, academicians and industry professionals interested in IoT-based architecture and sustainable buildings, energy efficiency and various tools and methods used to develop green technologies for construction in smart cities.

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.

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.

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.

The adoption of cloud and IoT technologies in both the industrial and academic communities has enabled the discovery of numerous applications and ignited countless new research opportunities. With numerous professional markets benefiting from these advancements, it is easy to forget the non-technical issues that accompany technologies like these. Despite the advantages that these systems bring, significant ethical questions and regulatory issues have become prominent areas of discussion. Social, Legal, and Ethical Implications of IoT, Cloud, and Edge Computing Technologies is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the non-technical repercussions of IoT technology adoption. While highlighting topics such as smart cities, environmental monitoring, and data privacy, this publication explores the regulatory and ethical risks that stem from computing technologies. This book is ideally designed for researchers, engineers, practitioners, students, academicians, developers, policymakers, scientists, and educators seeking current research on the sociological impact of cloud and IoT technologies.

This book brings together the papers presented at the Smart and Sustainable Built Environments Conference, 2018 (SASBE).This latest research falls into two tracks: smart and sustainable design and planning cities; and the technicalities of smart and sustainable buildings. The growth of smart cities is evident, but not always linked to sustainability. This book gives an overview of the latest academic developments in increasing the smartness and sustainability of our cities and buildings. Aspects such as inclusivity, smart cities, place and space, the resilient city, urbanity and urban ecology are prominently featured in the design and planning part of the book; while energy, educational buildings, comfort, building design, construction and performance form the sub-themes of the technical part of the book. This book will appeal to urban designers, architects, urban planners, smart city designers and sustainable building experts.