Page 108 - IJES Special Issues for AIEC2016

8 © Lehmann 2016 | Advocacy for the Compact
urban infrastructure decisions are essential as
these have long-lasting ramifications.
Decisions made in infrastructure development
today will determine the effectiveness of cities
in delivering services for decades to come.
Smart grid and distributed energy generation
technologies have become cost-effective alter-
natives. This is why the district and precinct
scale is the appropriate scale for decisions
relating to the relationship between public
space (supporting walkability) and infrastruc-
ture (supporting the provision of sustainable
services).
Adam Greenfield criticises the naivety with
which the smart city is getting embraced,
arguing that the smart city may be neither very
smart nor very city at all. He challenges the
prevalent cultural understanding of the current
deployment and promised possibilities of
networked IT, noting (2013):’ The potential of
the devices now available is rich, but our aware- (Chris Pennell, 2016)
ness of the powerful ways in which these
systems and their use will alter our world – our
policies, economies and built environment – is
limited.’ He argues that not only is the existing infrastructure through an increasing array of
definition of the smart city too narrow, but it
also promotes an undesirable vision of a future
city with centralised computational surveillance
and control, driven by those in power.
Figure 3: The perfect surveillance at Rio de
Janeiro’s Intelligent Operations Centre, created
by IBM, using thousands of CCTV cameras
distributed over the city centre to control and
manage traffic movement, parking and urban
flooding: ‘Permanent control of the entire city,
24/7’ (Image: World Resources Institute, 2013)
Science Target Inc. www.sciencetarget.com
New Citizen-Centric Applications for the
Smart City
City-wide smart services can improve urban
governance and deliver real benefits to the
population. Thus, urban governance is chang-
ing; as Hendriks notes: ‘Governance usually
refers to the steering of service domains or
problem areas characterized by interdepend-
dence among various involved parties and
organizations’ (Hendriks, 2014, p.555).
According to Pennell, 'the term smart city has
grown to collectively address the way in which
policy makers today are harnessing the
digitization of the world to counter challenges
facing citizens living in urban areas; challenges
ranging from the administration of inefficient
citizen services through to securing resources
for future generations and economic growth.'
For most of the time, improving urban areas has
meant modernising or retrofitting existing
digital applications, but developing city-wide
smart services is costly and for many cities not
an option. The smart city concept has recently
been rethought and cities are considering
alternative approaches aimed at delivering the
widest benefit with the most efficient use of
their limited resources. Increasingly, this
approach is being built around citizens, negat-
ing departmental silos in the administration of
cities, and better utilizing the increase of smart
devices and private sensory networks.
Citizens and business are being asked to pay for
this investment through tax increases, while in
exchange, citizens expect instantaneous and
personalized services. Citizens also want to be
considered as active components in the process.
This is leading to the rise of the notion of the
"citizen-centric collaborative city", where
technology is used to leverage citizen’s partici-
pation for urban sensing through the constant
exchange of information between residents and
city institutions. Urban Living Labs (ULLs) have
emerged as a mode of governance that brings
stakeholders together to experiment and
produce solutions in real world settings
(Voytenko, McCormick, Evans and Schliwa
2015; Evans, Karvonen, Raven 2016).