Abstract
This paper focuses on the need for a widened definition of the notion of technology within the smart city discourse, with a particular focus on the “built environment”. The first part of the paper describes how current tendencies in urban design and architecture are inclined to prioritize high tech-solutions at the expense of low-tech functionalities and omits that information and communication technology (ICT) contrasts the art of building cities as an adaptable and habitually smart technology in itself. It continues with an elaboration on the need for expanding the limits of system boundaries for a better understanding of the energy and material telecouplings that are linked to ICT solutions and account for some perils inherent in smart technologies, such as rebound effects and the difficulty of measuring the environmental impacts of ICT solutions on a city level. The second part of the paper highlights how low-tech technologies and nature-based solutions can make cities smarter, representing a new technology portfolio in national and international policies for safeguarding biodiversity and the delivery of a range of ecosystem services, promoting the necessary climate-change adaption that cities need to prioritize to confer resilience.
Highlights
As a group of researchers in sustainability science with a special interest in sustainable urban development, we have been invited to contribute to the current Special Issue devoted to “Smart Cities, Smart Homes and Sustainable Built Environment”
“wicked”; i.e., problems that lack simplistic solutions and straightforward planning responses [8]. In this communication paper we focus on the need for a widened definition of technology within the smart city discourse—a definition that comes close to the original meaning of the term in Greek as
We discuss the need for expanding the limits of system boundaries for a better understanding of the energy and material telecouplings that are linked to information and communication technology (ICT) solutions and which transgress the physical boundaries of cities
Summary
As a group of researchers in sustainability science with a special interest in sustainable urban development, we have been invited to contribute to the current Special Issue devoted to “Smart Cities, Smart Homes and Sustainable Built Environment”. Smart technologies may trigger problems that are “wicked”; i.e., problems that lack simplistic solutions and straightforward planning responses [8] In this communication paper we focus on the need for a widened definition of technology within the smart city discourse—a definition that comes close to the original meaning of the term in Greek as ‘techne, knowledge of techniques, skills, and processes’ of building cities. In the second part of the paper, we highlight how low-tech technologies and nature-based solutions can make cities smarter, representing a new technology portfolio in national and international policies for safeguarding biodiversity and the delivery of a range of ecosystem services, promoting the necessary climate-change adaption that cities need to prioritize to confer resilience. We pose a major sustainability question, as we see it, to which extent the natural resources that go into the smart technology are eroding the resiliency of ecosystems to generate essential life-supporting services to humankind
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