Smart City: The Importance of Innovation and Planning

Abstract

Smart Cities are in particular focusing on the implementation of new technologies with the purpose to tackle urban challenges like climate change, urban competitiveness and other problems of sustainable development. During the last years the ways of collecting data, of computing and using big data and of communicating evidence had been improved significantly. Smart Cities show a wide range of new technical facilities and services which are the outcome of specific concepts of innovation and urban planning approaches.With respect to urban transformation processes coping with mentioned challenges, technical innovations are important. They enable the realization of energy efficiency, reduction of energy use or mitigation of emissions. At the same time technically-driven transformation processes in mobility conditions and communication are supporting the attractivity of cities. Smart cities very often claim to provide a ‘better life’ and sustainable development. In front of these developments it becomes obvious that technical innovations play a crucial role but at the same time we can assume a mutual relation with specific approaches of urban planning beyond such transformation processes.The main objective of this contribution is to elaborate these different concepts of innovation and the corresponding role of urban planning. Based on a short description of the technical core of a Smart City which enables a more comprehensive data collecting, a more precise analysis of bigger and better integrated data sets and a faster communication, three different forms of innovation and their mutual relation with planning approaches are elaborated. Doing so, special attention is given to the basic understanding what is a city, who are the crucial actors, and which role do planning approaches have. Finally, it is shown that the concept of ‘open innovation’ can be used in a technical and in particular in a predominantly socially integrative way through the enforced co-creation of ‘urban innovation’. The corresponding planning tool for its identification, conceptualization and implementation is the concept of an ‘urban Living Lab’ which enables and supports a smart and evidence-based understanding of urban planning.KeywordsSmart CityInnovationTriple and quadruple helixUrban Living Labs