City as a Sensor for Platform Urbanism

Abstract

The data-driven approach to sustainable urban development is becoming increasingly popular among cities across the world. This is due to cities' attention in supporting smart and sustainable urbanism practices. In an era of digitalisation of urban services and processes, that is upon us, platform urbanism is becoming a fundamental tool to support smart urban governance, and helping in the formation of a new version of cities—i.e., City 4.0. This new version utilises urban dashboards and platforms in its operations and management tasks of its complex urban metabolism. These intelligent systems help in maintaining the robustness of our cities, integrating various sensors (e.g., internet-of-things) and big data analysis technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence) with the aim of optimising urban infrastructures and services (e.g., water, waste, energy), and turning the urban system into a smart one. The chapter generates insights from the sensor city best practices by placing some of the renowned projects, implemented by Huawei, Cisco, Google, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Alibaba, under the microscope. The investigation findings disclosed that the sensor city approach: (a) Has the potential to increase the smartness and sustainability level of cities; (b) Manages to engage citizens and companies in the process of planning, monitoring, and analysing urban processes; (c) Raises awareness on the local environmental, social, and economic issues; and (d) Provides a novel city blueprint for urban administrators, managers, and planners. Nonetheless, the use of advanced technologies—e.g., real-time monitoring stations, cloud computing, surveillance cameras—poses a multitude of challenges related to: Quality of the data used; Level of protection of traditional and cybernetic urban security; Necessary integration between the various urban infrastructure; and Ability to transform feedback from stakeholders into innovative urban policies.