Public Libraries In The Smart City

Far from heralding their demise, digital technologies have lead to a dramatic transformation of the public library. Around the world, libraries have reinvented themselves as networked hubs, community centres, innovation labs, and makerspaces. Coupling striking architectural design with attention to ambience and comfort, libraries have signaled their desire to be seen as both engines of innovation and creative production, and hearts of community life. This book argues that the library’s transformation is deeply connected to a broader project of urban redevelopment and the transition to a knowledge economy. In particular, libraries have become entangled in visions of the smart city, where densely networked, ubiquitous connectivity promises urban prosperity built on efficiency, innovation, and new avenues for civic participation. Drawing on theoretical analysis and interviews with library professionals, policymakers, and users, this book examines the inevitable tensions emerging when a public institution dedicated to universal access to knowledge and a shared public culture intersects with the technology-driven, entrepreneurialist ideals of the smart city.

In achieving civic engagement and social justice in smart cities, literacy programs are offered in the society by three essential information service providers: libraries, archives, and museums. Although the library and museum services are documented in literature, there is little evidence of community-led library or museum services that make a full circle in understanding community-library, community-archive, and community-museum relationships. The Handbook of Research on the Role of Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Achieving Civic Engagement and Social Justice in Smart Cities examines the application of tools and techniques in library and museum literacy in achieving civic engagement and social justice. It also introduces a new outlook in the services of libraries and museums. Covering topics such as countering fake news, human rights literacies, and outreach activities, this book is essential for community-based organizations, librarians, museum administrations, education leaders, information professionals, smart city design planners, digital tool developers, policymakers engaged in diversity, researchers, and academicians.

In the contemporary moment, smart cities have become the dominant paradigm for urban planning and administration, which involves weaving the urban fabric with digital technologies. Recently, however, the promises of smart cities have been gradually supplanted by recognition of their inherent inequalities, and scholars are increasingly working to envision alternative smart cities. Informed by these pressing challenges, Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City foregrounds discussions of how we should think of and work towards urban digital justice in the smart city. It provides a deep exploration of the sources of injustice that percolate throughout a range of sociotechnical assemblages, and it questions whether working towards more just, sustainable, liveable, and egalitarian cities requires that we look beyond the limitations of "smartness" altogether. The book grapples with how geographies impact smart city visions and roll-outs, on the one hand, and how (unjust) geographies are produced in smart pursuits, on the other. Ultimately, Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City envisions alternative cities – smart or merely digital – and outlines the sorts of roles that the commons, utopia, and the law might take on in our conceptions and realizations of better cities.

This book offers a reassessment of "smart cities" and reveals what is lost when we conceive of our urban spaces as computers. -- Publisher's description.

Care and the City is a cross-disciplinary collection of chapters examining urban social spaces, in which caring and uncaring practices intersect and shape people’s everyday lives. While asking how care and uncare are embedded in the urban condition, the book focuses on inequalities in caring relations and the ways they are acknowledged, reproduced, and overcome in various spaces, discourses, and practices. This book provides a pathway for urban scholars to start engaging with approaches to conceptualize care in the city through a critical-reflexive analysis of processes of urbanization. It pursues a systematic integration of empirical, methodological, theoretical, and ethical approaches to care in urban studies, while overcoming a crisis-centered reading of care and the related ambivalences in care debates, practices, and spaces. These strands are elaborated via a conceptual framework of care and situated within broader theoretical debates on cities, urbanization, and urban development with detailed case studies from Europe, the Americas, and Asia. By establishing links to various fields of knowledge, this book seeks to systematically introduce debates on care to the interconnecting fields of urban studies, planning theory, and related disciplines for the first time.

As a threat, a pandemic has indirect implications for social, economic and political conditions both at domestic and international levels. Thus, collective and comprehensive efforts are needed in responding to and preventing the expansion of infections caused by the virus, including Covid-19. This international conference provides the discourse on social, economic as well as political issues regarding the condition after the pandemic. Social issues are studied through social welfare, sociology, governance, communication and international relations approaches. Meanwhile, economic problems are discussed through business, economic development and economic management approaches. Under the First International Conference on Humanities and Social Sciences (ICHSOS) 2021, speakers from several countries provided solutions and alternative perspectives in preventing and dealing with problems after the Covid-19 pandemic. This book contains 42 papers presented at the conference.

Digital and analog games have long served modern public libraries as educational tools and as drawcards for new patrons – from dedicated gaming zones and children’s spaces to Minecraft gaming days, makerspaces, and virtual reality collections. Much has been written about the role of games and play in libraries’ programming and collections. But their wider role in transforming libraries as public institutions remains unexplored. In this book, the authors draw on ethnographic research to provide a rich portrait of the intersection between games, play, and public libraries. They look at how games and play are increasingly spilling out of designated zones within libraries and beyond their walls, as part of a broader reconfiguration and “reimagining” of libraries in the digital era. The library’s association with play has historically been understood through its classification as a “third place”: somewhere to relax, socialise and experiment outside of the utilitarian demands of work and home. But far from just offering patrons an opportunity for detached leisure, this book illustrates how libraries are connecting games and play to policies agendas around their municipality’s economic and cultural development. Attending to the institutionalisation of play, the book sheds new light both on the contradictions at the heart of play as a theoretical concept, and what libraries are in contemporary public life.

Vor über drei Jahren haben die Herausgeberinnen ihr erstes Seminar zu den Smarten Bibliotheken oder, wie sie es nennen, zu den Smart Libraries veranstaltet. Und seitdem stellten sie Ihr Konzept bei verschie­denen Bibliothekartagen und bei Workshops in Institutionen wie dem ZBIW oder der TH Köln vor. Das Interesse an diesem Thema hat sich im Rahmen eines gemeinsamen Forschungsprojekts zu Augmented Reality in Informationseinrichtungen mylibrARy (2014-2017) herausgebildet und sich erstmalig als theoretisches Blockseminar an der Fachhochschule Potsdam manifestiert. Am Beispiel einer Bibliotheksapp, die im Rahmen des Forschungsprojekts konzipiert wurde, stellten sie fest, dass bei jeder Form von Innovation und dem Einsatz von neuen Technologien generell, diese keinen Selbstzweck darstellen dürfen, sondern Teil einer individu­ellen analog-digitalen Gesamtstrategie sein müssen, die man am besten mit der Idee einer Smart Library beschreiben kann. Der Begriff „smart“ wird in vielen Bereichen für zeit- oder ressourcensparende Eigenschaften genutzt, die mit Innovation und Technologieeinsatz oder auch mit Vollautomatisierung verschiedener Lebensbereiche assoziiert werden.