From intelligent to smart cities

Abstract

Drawing upon the smart experiences of ‘world class’ cities in N. America, Canada and Europe, this special issue draws together five papers from leading international experts on the transition from intelligent to smart cities. Together they do what Hollands (‘Will the real smart city stand up?’ City 12(3), 302–320) has recently asked of smart cities and provide the definitional components, critical insights and institutional means by which to get beyond the all-too-often self-congratulatory tone cities across the world strike when claiming to be smart.

Keywords:

• digitally inclusive regeneration
• e-services
• form-based design codes
• governance
• intelligent cities
• knowledge trajectories
• master plans
• networks
• smart cities
• transition

The first paper, from Deakin and Al Waer, reflects upon some of the anxieties surrounding the transition from intelligent to smart cities. In particular, it considers the anxiety that the transition has more to do with cities meeting the needs of the market, than the intelligence which is required for them to be smart. Working on the assumption that any attempt to overcome such an anxiety means shifting attention away from the needs of the market and towards the intelligence which is required for cities to be smart, this paper begins to set out a less presumptuous, more critically aware and insightful understanding of the transition. This less presumptuous, more critically aware and insightful understanding of the transition leads to the realization that it is the legacy of Castells (1996) and Graham and Marvin's (1996, 2001) work undertaken on the informational basis of the communications embedded in such intelligence, rather than Mitchell's (1995, 1999, 2001, 2003), which leads us away from the purely technical issues surrounding the business logic of such developments. That is to say, away from the purely technical aspects of such developments and towards an examination of the social capital which is not only critical in underpinning their informational and communicative qualities, but pivotal in supporting the wider environmental and cultural role intelligence plays in supporting the transition to smart cities.

What follows captures the information-rich and highly communicative qualities of these technical, social, wider environmental and cultural developments, the particular methodological issues they pose and the critically insightful role which the networks of innovation and creative partnerships set up to embed such intelligence play in the learning, knowledge transfer and capacity-building exercises that service the transition to smart cities. This is what the paper suggests Hollands' (2008) account of smart cities misses and it goes some way to explain why he asks ‘the real smart city to stand up!’ For, in cutting across the legacy of the transition from the informational to the intelligent and now smart city, Hollands' (2008) account of the transition is not as well grounded in the informational and communicative qualities of the embedded intelligence they are built on.

This, the paper suggests, is a critical insight of some note, for only in giving such a well-grounded account of the embedded intelligence drawn attention to does it become possible to do what Hollands (2008) asks of smart cities: that is ‘undergird’ the social capital which is not only critical in underpinning the informational and communicative qualities of the embedded intelligence smart cities stand on, but pivotal in gaining a fuller insight into their significance.

The second paper, from Paskaleva, suggests that, over the course of the past decade, the smart cities agenda is an issue that has gained real momentum in Europe. The significance of this is reinforced further by other international organizations, such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, who suggest that smart cities offer society the prospect of being not only environmentally sustainable, but also sufficiently competitive and cohesive to meet their emerging quality-of-life agenda (OECD – EUROSTAT, 2005). As the paper points out, as a result of such high-ranking institutional support, many cities have now adopted this socially cohesive, environmentally sound and economically competitive reading of what it means to be smart, as a way of profiling themselves as forward-looking, prosperous and well endowed. For instance:

•	the Amsterdam Smart City initiative emphasizes the importance of collaboration between the citizens, government and businesses to develop smart projects that will ‘change the world’ by saving energy;
•	Southampton City Council uses smart cards to stress the importance of integrated e-services;
•	the City of Edinburgh Council has formed a smart city vision around an action plan for government transformation;
•	the Malta Smart City strategy promotes a business park as a way to leverage economic growth;
•	IBM, Siemens and ORACLE have formed their visions of the Smart Planet;
•	a number of EU research and policy projects have emerged as well to deal with various issues of the ‘smart city’ (Komninos, 2002, 2008). The recently concluded pan-European research project IntelCities, for example, concluded that governance, as a process and outcome of joint decision making, has a leading role to play in building the ‘smart city’ and that cities should develop collaborative digital environments to boost local competitiveness and prosperity by using knowledge networks as a means to integrate the governance of e-service delivery (Curwell et al., 2005; Deakin and Allwinkle, 2007; Paskaleva, 2009);1
•	the Smart Cities INTERREG project is also using an innovation network between academic, industrial and governmental partners to develop the ‘triple helix’ of e-services in the North Sea Region by way of and through a novel customization process (Deakin, 2010).

Paskaleva's paper advocates this view of smarter cities as people-based, human and progressive in their deployment of digital technologies, not to hardwire themselves, but instead to be socially inclusive in using them to foster good governance and create services capable of improving the quality of life.

Taking this ‘digitally inclusive’ vision of cities (Deakin, 2007, 2011) forward, the paper reflects upon the current trends and understanding of what it means for urban administrations, policy makers and businesses in Europe to be smart, and what it takes for them to become smarter. In developing this vision, the paper pays particular attention to the role of the ‘smart city’ as a nexus for open innovation and how the strategic significance of this development has become the mainstay of current discussions about the future of the Internet, living labs, innovation and competitiveness-driven (urban) development.

By conducting a critical review of some high-profile programmes and initiatives on smart cities, the emerging trends are explored and insights are drawn about the challenges these developments pose. The analysis is based on four Smart City projects and their relevant EU programmes. They are chosen because, collectively, they reveal what Europe expects smart cities to stand for.

Set within the terms of reference set out by Paskaleva, the paper from Komninos discusses the spatial intelligence of (smart) cities, the use of digital technologies and the institutional settings of those innovation systems seen as smart enough to radically transform cities. The paper has as its starting point two related observations about the increased use of terms like intelligent and smart in contemporary urban planning and development. The first concerns the somewhat over-simplistic way cities tend to use the term ‘intelligent’, or ‘smart’. The second relates to the diverse range of strategies cities are currently assembling in laying claim to such a status. The observation here is that such a diverse range of strategies tends to say more about the ambiguity of the relationship digital technologies have to the planning and development of cities, rather than what it means for them to be ether intelligent, or smart. This is because, for Komninos, the strategies in question are seen as being left with plans insufficiently developed for their digital technologies to either embed the intelligence needed for cities to be smart, or build the means required for them to claim such status.

As a counterpoise to these observations, this paper lays down some of the ‘fundamentals of spatial intelligence’, the strategies and applications of which can be seen as being smart. It argues that, despite the great diversity of strategies and applications, the logistics of spatial intelligence teaches us that smart cities rest on a few knowledge-based trajectories. In particular, they rest on those knowledge-based trajectories that are embedded in the transitions of Bletchley Park, Hong Kong and Amsterdam and which the paper suggests are still only partially understood.

Taking Komninos' idea that cities are still stuck in the digital, rather than embedded in the intelligence of what is smart, as the ‘third’ observation on the transition, the paper from Deakin examines the thesis on the ‘embedded intelligence of smart cities’ first advanced by Mitchell (1995, 1999, 2003). For, as the paper points out, while Mitchell (1995) sets out a vision of urban life literally done to bits, left fragmented and in danger of coming unstuck, Mitchell's (1999) e-topia offers a counter-point to this and an image of the city no longer left in bits, but a place ‘where it all comes together’.

Dwelling on the reconciliatory nature of these statements, this paper suggests that, while this thesis on the ‘coming together’ of the virtual and physical and dissolution of the boundaries between ‘cyber and meat space’ is compelling, there are a number of concerns surrounding the technical, social and environmental status of the embedded intelligence which is currently available for urban planners and developers to make cities smart. While problematic in itself, the paper also suggests that if the difficulties experienced over the transition from intelligent to smart cities were only methodological they might perhaps be manageable, but the problem is that they run deeper than this and relate to more substantive issues that surround the trajectory of Mitchell's (1995, 1999, 2003) thesis.

This, the paper suggests, is a critical insight of some significance because, if the trajectory of the thesis is not in the direction of either the embedded intelligence of smart cities, or the ICTs of what is referred to as ‘digitally inclusive regeneration platforms’, then the question arises as to whether the whole notion of e-topia can be seen as a progressive force for change, or merely as a way for the embedded intelligence of smart cities to reproduce the status quo.

This unfortunate scenario is drawn from what Graham and Marvin (1996, 2001) have referred to, not as e-topia, but splintering urbanism, because, under their thesis, the citizenship underlying the informatics of these communities is no longer able to carry the sheer weight of the material which such a cybernetic-based networking of intelligence is supposed to support. This, the paper suggests, is important because such a representation of the transition offers what can only be referred to as the antithesis to Mitchell's (1999) e-topia. An antithesis that, it might well be added, goes to some length to search out, uncover and expose the other side of this cybernetic-based intelligence and reveal what currently lies hidden in the debate which is currently taking place about the transition to smart cities.

From this perspective, the paper suggests the problems with e-topia are as much substantive as methodological, the former holding the key to the latter. In substantive terms this paper offers another twist on the question as to what the transition from intelligent to smart cities means and, in doing so, goes very much against the grain, arguing that our current understanding of embedded intelligence, smart cities and the ICTs of digitally inclusive regeneration puts us on the verge of a new environmental determinism.

To avoid repeating this mistake (yet) again, attention is drawn to the work of Graham and Marvin (1996, 2001) and the spaces which their radical democratic, i.e. egalitarian and ecologically integral, account of the transition opens up for a much more emancipatory view of the intelligence embedded in those knowledge-based agents smart enough to meet these requirements. Those knowledge-based agents, it should perhaps be added, who are smart enough to meet these requirements do so by way of and through their exploitation of the social capital that underlies the very communities which give rise to the norms, rules and values of such developments.

The paper suggests that, in ignoring these warnings and being unable to learn the lessons which such a critical reworking of the thesis offers, the strategy Mitchell (1999, 2003) adopts must be seen as suspect. Not only because the vision and scenarios it advances have a tendency to side-step the social significance of digital technologies, but for the reason that, in doing so, the strategy ends up replacing the ‘agonies of equality and ecological-integrity’ with little more than the ‘gnostics’ of ‘new age’ wordings, which are centred around storylines about the quality of life. The strategy advocated for adoption by this paper is not grounded in such rhetoric.

The vision of e-topia it builds instead rests on the messages the likes of Graham and Marvin advance, by turning the tables and agreeing that, while words offer the possibility of ‘bringing what it all means back together’, actually turning things around lies not so much in the words, as it rests with the semantics of the syntax and vocabulary governing the digitally inclusive nature of the regenerative storylines emerging from this discourse and, perhaps even more importantly, the degree to which they overcome the divided antagonisms of the excluded. In this way, the paper suggests that it becomes possible for the multiplied memory and infinite mind of the ‘cyborg civics and environments’ of their ‘tribe-like culture’, not to so much bemoan the ‘nomadicity of wireless bi-peds’, but actively to celebrate the creativity of the virtual communities emerging from the digital-inclusive nature of such regenerative storylines.

In particular, it is added, celebrate the opportunity this in turn creates for virtual communities to use the collective memory, wikis and blogs of their electronically-enhanced services, as a means for such platforms to bridge such social divisions. Bridge them – it is important to note – by drawing upon the political subjectivities of cyborg-civics, their tribe-like culture and nomadicity, as wireless bi-peds with the embedded intelligence smart enough for the citizens of this community to span them. Span them with bridges that are not merely symbolic, but real in the sense which the semantic web of this knowledge-base serves to be the agent of something more than a prop. Something more than a prop and bigger in the sense which the embedding of such intelligence allows the web-based services that supports all of this to begin doing the job asked of them. That is the job of building a stage which is large enough for the analytic, synthetic and symbolic components of the transition to be smart in playing out the possibilities there are for urban planning to be both equitable and ecologically integral.

The paper from Walters picks up on what might be referred to as a ‘fourth’ observation on the trajectory to which Komninos draws attention. His observation also harks back to Mitchell's thesis and suggests that, irrespective of how digital technologies are developed to exploit the electronic opportunities they offer, the physical places of urban spaces will retain their relevance in society because people still care about meeting face-to-face and gravitate to places which offer particular cultural, urban, scenic or climatic spaces, unable to be experienced at the end of a wire and through a computer screen.

The paper from Walters offers what might best be referred to as a ‘re-urbanist’, or ‘new urbanist’ account of the transition from intelligent to smart cities. Rooted in the ‘equity planning of public participation’, it argues that the transition is progressive because it is not only intelligent, i.e. founded on the cognitive logic (cybernetics) of systems thinking, but smart enough to present cities with the master plans and design codes capable of regulating the form, massing and placement of the buildings they in turn ‘build out’. This, the paper argues, is possible because the embedded intelligence of smart cities rests on the master plans and design codes that are assembled to represent the urban form, spatial infrastructures and buildings seen as capable of sustaining such development.

As the paper goes on to suggest, within the spatial infrastructures and buildings of smart cities, we find that place is something which truly matters. As the paper makes clear: it matters because, while exactly what ‘smart’ means for cities can be subject to several interpretations, the simplest and most potent definition of smart cities is of a ‘place enriched by the assignment of meaning’. For, while technology keeps pushing us apart, in using media to bridge physical distance, we as a culture continue to gather in specific locations meaningful to us. The smartest places, therefore, are those that combine the best of both the physical and virtual worlds, where presence and ‘tele-presence’ are fused together in a specific location. Here physical locations are pervasively penetrated by digital technologies to provide a collaborative meshing of physical and virtual environments. As an antidote to the ‘splintering urbanism’ suggested by Graham and Marvin, Walters suggests that in such locations the centrifugal tendencies of digital technologies are balanced by centripetal forces of human interaction which manifest themselves in physical space.

This paper takes it as read that ICTs will continue to evolve in ways that continually challenge our perception of place and as a consequence, space will offer as-yet unforeseen opportunities. As a consequence, it suggests that there will likely be as many negative as positive outcomes from this technological evolution, and that one of the roles of physical, place-based urban planning, development and design is to capitalize on the positives and offset as many of the negatives as possible by means of determined, activist and design-based public policies. As the paper emphasizes, the challenges that surface from such a reading of the transition to smart cities range from counterbalancing the power of global capitalism, to creating generic ‘themed’ environments which are devoid of place-specific designs, to assisting poor communities in under-serviced parts of cities to participate in grassroots regeneration.

As the paper also makes clear, while debate continues to swirl around the relevance of traditionally construed physical places as settings for human activity in a world both expanded and collapsed by digital media, it is recognized that Mitchell's view of a potentially fruitful and mutually beneficial collaboration between the physical and virtual worlds currently stands in stark contrast to Graham and Marvin's more dystopian vision of a world splintered and fragmented by technological mobilities and networked infrastructures. In particular, it contrasts with that view of the world which suggests that the electronic spaces of urban places threaten to develop ‘silent, invisible and pervasive networks with unprecedented potential for exclusion’. The implication of this is clear: if ‘place’ matters at all, well-planned and designed locations shall become the realm of the more privileged classes and those not fitting some pre-defined intellectual notion of what is smart shall be denied admittance.

In spite of this critique, Walters argues that Mitchell's position is still relevant, particularly if the process of place-making is rooted in participatory democracy, utilizes electronic media to structure and extend democratic debate and, most importantly of all, creates clear implementation strategies regulated by way of, and through, the master planning of form-based design codes.

While the paper suggests that there is no denying the power of Graham and Marvin's alternative view (which states that a ‘privatization and liberalization of infrastructural systems’ is unravelling the city as a place where people come together for common purposes, implanting instead the conditions of spatial segregation, social polarization and exclusion) the City of Beaufort, SC, stands as a place of resistance to these trends, using electronic media as an agent of social and physical cohesion. While Graham and Marvin quite rightly suggest that traditional place-making should be treated with scepticism because it can fix exclusionary policies in time and place to the detriment of certain social groups, the inclusionary and electronically enhanced democratic process used by Beaufort in its planning and design activities mitigates such concerns by going out of its way to enhance the public's input into charrette-based blogs and online community discussions.

Referring to the ‘triple bottom line’ of economic prosperity, environmental stewardship and social justice found in Beaufort's smart growth and sustainability audit, this paper suggests their experience of the transition manages to challenge the belief that such urban planning, development and design exercises merely reproduce the status quo. Whereas some plans do minimize change to suit the interests of upper- and middle-income residents to the detriment of those less well-off, the Beaufort plan specifically encourages, for example, housing diversity and affordability, with an emphasis on workforce housing and ‘aging in place’. Indeed, as the paper goes to some length to show, a large segment of work in the case-study charrette deals with many of the substantive issues surrounding the development of housing and the quality of life of people with low and moderate incomes.

Overall, the paper suggests that the Beaufort case study illustrates how the digital town hall can be used to embed place-based master planning and design codes into the town's e-governance. In doing so, this case study is seen as offering a clear example of how Mitchell's thesis on the electronic codification of urban planning and design can give ‘character’ to a place and, what is more, make this intelligible by embedding the rules and protocols which are smart in encouraging some activities and discouraging others.

This particular charrette, with its detailed preparation, analyses and subsequent code-building methodology, is said to represent state-of-the-art community design practice for neighbourhood renewal in the USA. Its extensive scope, digital presence and attention to small-scale contextual detail are also seen as important in creating ‘market-ready’ redevelopment projects and providing the benchmarks of progressive planning practice. In particular, the charette can be seen to realize the prospect there is to ‘bring this all together’ under the reciprocal capacities of a form-based code recalibrated by the site-specific urban design proposals contained in a plan. This, in turn, is seen as something of a step change in what has previously gone under the name of ‘progress’.

Notes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelcities.