Abstract
Here we sketch the rudiments of what constitutes a smart city which we define as a city in which ICT is merged with traditional infrastructures, coordinated and integrated using new digital technologies. We first sketch our vision defining seven goals which concern: developing a new understanding of urban problems; effective and feasible ways to coordinate urban technologies; models and methods for using urban data across spatial and temporal scales; developing new technologies for communication and dissemination; developing new forms of urban governance and organisation; defining critical problems relating to cities, transport, and energy; and identifying risk, uncertainty, and hazards in the smart city. To this, we add six research challenges: to relate the infrastructure of smart cities to their operational functioning and planning through management, control and optimisation; to explore the notion of the city as a laboratory for innovation; to provide portfolios of urban simulation which inform future designs; to develop technologies that ensure equity, fairness and realise a better quality of city life; to develop technologies that ensure informed participation and create shared knowledge for democratic city governance; and to ensure greater and more effective mobility and access to opportunities for urban populations. We begin by defining the state of the art, explaining the science of smart cities. We define six scenarios based on new cities badging themselves as smart, older cities regenerating themselves as smart, the development of science parks, tech cities, and technopoles focused on high technologies, the development of urban services using contemporary ICT, the use of ICT to develop new urban intelligence functions, and the development of online and mobile forms of participation. Seven project areas are then proposed: Integrated Databases for the Smart City, Sensing, Networking and the Impact of New Social Media, Modelling Network Performance, Mobility and Travel Behaviour, Modelling Urban Land Use, Transport and Economic Interactions, Modelling Urban Transactional Activities in Labour and Housing Markets, Decision Support as Urban Intelligence, Participatory Governance and Planning Structures for the Smart City. Finally we anticipate the paradigm shifts that will occur in this research and define a series of key demonstrators which we believe are important to progressing a science of smart cities.
Highlights
Simulators and the Participatory Platforms that are key to the FuturICT approach
We define six scenarios based on new cities badging themselves as smart, older cities regenerating themselves as smart, the development of science parks, tech cities, and technopoles focused on high technologies, the development of urban services using contemporary ICT, the use of ICT to develop new urban intelligence functions, and the development of online and mobile forms of participation
The smart city will be the boost to new forms of policy analysis and planning in the information age, and the greatest impacts of new technologies will be on the way we organise ourselves in cities and the way we plan this organisation
Summary
For much of the 20th century, the idea that a city could be smart was a science fiction that was pictured in the popular media but quite suddenly with the massive proliferation of computable devices across many scales and with a modicum of intelligence being embedded into such devices, the prospect that a city might become smart, sentient even, is fast becoming the new reality. We will focus directly on ways in which this infrastructure can be integrated, how the data that are being collected can be mined, how services delivered by traditional means can be organised and delivered much more efficiently using these new technologies, all part of the idea of the Planetary Nervous System that is central to our proposal This is our first goal but in parallel and embedded within this, we are interested in standing back from the nuts and bolts of the smart city, and devising much more effective models and simulations that will address problems of efficiency, equity and quality of life, set within a new context where a much wider group of citizens can engage in the science of smart cities through new ways of participating in the future design of their cities and neighbourhoods.
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