Inside Smart Cities Place, Politics and Urban Innovation

The era of the smart city has arrived. Only a decade ago, the promise of optimising urban services through the widespread application of information and communication technologies was largely a techno-utopian fantasy. Today, smart urbanisation is occurring via urban projects, policies and visions in hundreds of cities around the globe.

Inside Smart Cities provides real-world evidence on how local authorities, small and medium enterprises, corporations, utility providers and civil society groups are creating smart cities at the neighbourhood, city and regional scales. Twenty three empirically detailed case studies from the Global North and South ? ranging from Cape Town, Stockholm and Abu Dhabi to Philadelphia, Hong Kong and Santiago ? illustrate the multiple and diverse incarnations of smart urbanism. The contributors draw on ideas from urban studies, geography, urban planning, science and technology studies and innovation studies to go beyond the rhetoric of technological innovation and reveal the political, social and physical implications of digitalising the built environment.

Collectively, the practices of smart urbanism raise fundamental questions about the sustainability, liveability and resilience of cities in the future. The findings are relevant to academics, students, practitioners and urban stakeholders who are questioning how urban innovation relates to politics and place.

1 Introduction: situating smart cities PART 1 – GROUNDING AND CONTEXTUALISING 2 Realising smart cities: partnerships and economic development in the emergence and practices of smart in Newcastle, Australia 3 Dissecting the Frankenstein city: an examination of smart urbanism in Hong Kong 4 Ordinary Chinese smart cities: the case of Wuhan 5 The free zone and smart-global urbanization in Philadelphia PART 2 – INTEGRATING AND ALIGNING 6 Actually-existing Smart Dublin: exploring smart city development in history and context 7 Smart cities as strategic actors: insights from EU Lighthouse projects in Stavanger, Stockholm, and Nottingham 8 Smart goes green: digitalising environmental agendas in Bristol and Manchester 9 Smart urbanism and the visibility and reconfiguration of infrastructure and public action in the French cities of Issy-les-Moulineaux and Nice 10 The transnational smart city as urban eco-modernisation: the case of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi PART 3 – CONTRADICTING AND CHALLENGING 11 Acknowledging the idiot in the smart city: experimentation and citizenship in the making of a low-carbon district in Santiago de Chile 12 A smart equivocation: co-laboration and subsidiarity in Munich’s smart city consortium 13 Parramatta Smart City and the quest to build Australia’s next great city 14 From participation to startup urbanisation: re-situating open data in Lisbon PART 4 – EXPERIENCING AND ENCOUNTERING 15 Barcelona: from corporate smart city to technological sovereignty 16 Smart innovation at the margins: learning from Cape Town and Kibera 17 Innovating for an aging society: insights from two Japanese smart cities 18 Life in smart Seoul: the female factor 19 Conclusions: the long and unsettled future of smart cities

Andrew Karvonen is Assistant Professor of Sustainable Urban Development at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

Federico Cugurullo is Assistant Professor in Smart and Sustainable Urbanism at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Federico Caprotti is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the Department of Geography, University of Exeter, UK.