Smart Cities

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Smart City is an integrative approach to utilize the opportunity of digitalization and new technologies to overcome urban issues. Despite the integrative approach, most practices in cities globally focus on mobility management and security. However, smaller scale initiatives also show efforts to boost local communities, citizen based data experiments and impact analysis and more performance based interventions. Issues focused on by Smart City projects is climate change mitigation (energy transition, sustainable mobility), Accessibility (smart mobility, mobility management) and even climate change adaptation and health. Smart City approaches often include a learning curve where data is gathered before and after a spatial intervention, and subsequent interventions are planned or adjusted

General introduction to approach

The paradigm of smart cities is not without critique. It is often believed that Smart Citie adepts focus to much on finding technologies for complex socio-economicial and environmental problems. Whilst technology has a big role to play in climate change mitigation and adaptation, and data based solutions for smart cities can contribute a great deal in lowering emmissions, smog and polution, the root causes are often behavioural, economical and political. Consequently, Smart Cities is an approach that is subject to scrutiny as it a technology based approach that lacks a clear vision or political colour (see also Hollands, 2008). In extreme form, the appproach can even result in missuse of new technological possibilities leading to privacy issues or even empowering private tech companies or (non democratic) governments. At the same time, there are examples where technology empores citizens and marginalized groups. Citizen based science projects in real urban environments can create to new forms of learning, empoering and co-creating urban space. It is the latter opportunity of the approach that brings us opportunities of bridging the gap between government, private companies and citizens in adressing environmental and justice issues progressivaly. When we use 'Smart City Technology' in this way, we are indeed Smart about cities, as the title of Hajer & Dassen (2014) book states.

Shapes, sizes and applications

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Relation to Urbana themes: Cities, sustainability, and justice

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Narrative of change

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Transformative potential

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Summary of relevant approaches

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References

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