Overview

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.

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Reviews

The global rise of smart urban initiatives over the past decade has been impossible for any individual scholar to keep up with. Smart discourse has been widely critiqued but actually-existing and emergent smart spaces have received only patchy attention. Taking us inside and around a world of smart cities, Karvonen, Curugullo and Caprotti have assembled a volume that will be widely appreciated within, and well beyond, the academy. - Tim Bunnell, Professor of Human Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore As the smart city idea is moving from rhetoric to reality, this collection of essays provides a unique and indispensable investigation into the variegated instantiations of the smart city narrative in cities of the Global North and South. If you want to understand what `smart' does to cities around the world, Inside Smart Cities is a must read. - Ola Soederstroem, Professor of social and cultural geography, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland Inside Smart Cities is a welcome addition to and a sorely needed collection of curated case studies of the evolving model of urban development that applies digital technologies to the design and deployment of contemporary urban infrastructure. Multi-scalar, interdisciplinary, and global in scope, the collection provides a panoptic view of this evolving practice of urban planning, enabling readers to internalize key consequences of what until now has been encapsulated into stories that were both fragmentary and idiosyncratic in scope. Inside Smart Cities makes clear the ambivalent nature of this technological innovation and puts the responsibility of its consequence squarely in the hands of the user. Adopters therefore bear the responsibility to ensure that principles of distributive justice serve as discerning benchmarks in deployment schemes. - Amy Glasmeier, Professor of Economic Geography and Regional Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Inside Smart Cities provides a timely analysis of the ways in which smart city development is unfolding globally. Its critical contribution lies in bringing together a diverse portfolio of cases - each of them rich in interrogating how smart city discourse is reshaping urban realities. Moving beyond discursive critiques, this volume is a must-read for anyone, from students and scholars to practitioners and policy actors, interested in grasping the state-of-the-art in smart urban development practices around the world. - Professor Rob Raven, Monash Sustainable Development Institute (Melbourne), Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development (Utrecht) In Inside Smart Cities, Andrew Karvonen, Federico Cugurullo, and Federico Caprotti have assembled an impressive collection of smart city case studies, authored by a diverse group of leading smart city scholars. Looking at cases around the world, the authors compellingly demonstrate not only the diversity of smart city initiatives, but also the diverse issues these initiatives pose. Smart cities must always be understood contextually, in relationship to other urban processes, as contested as well as supported, and affecting different groups differently. This nuanced and insightful collection raises at least as many questions as it answers, as it should. - Byron Miller, Professor of Geography and Urban Studies Program Coordinator, University of Calgary

The global rise and rise of smart urban initiatives over the past decade has been impossible for any individual scholar to keep up with. Smart discourse has been widely critiqued but actually-existing and emergent smart spaces have received only patchy attention. Taking us inside and around a world of smart cities, Karvonen, Curugullo and Caprotti have assembled a volume that will be widely appreciated within, and well beyond, the academy. - Tim Bunnell, Professor of Human Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore As the smart city idea is moving from rhetoric to reality, this collection of essays provides a unique and indispensable investigation into the variegated instantiations of the smart city narrative in cities of the Global North and South. If you want to understand what the `smart' does to cities around the world, Inside Smart Cities is a must read. - Ola Soederstroem, Professor of social and cultural geography, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland Inside Smart Cities is a welcome addition to and a sorely needed collection of curated case studies of the evolving model of urban development that applies digital technologies to the design and deployment of contemporary urban infrastructure. Muti-scalar, interdisciplinary, and global in scope, the collection sums to a panoptic view of this evolving practice of urban planning, enabling readers to internalize key consequences of what until now has been encapsulated into stories that were both fragmentary and idiosyncratic in scope. Inside Smart Cities makes clear the ambivalent nature of this technological innovation and puts the responsibility of its consequence squarely in the hands of the user. Adopters therefore bear the responsibility to ensure that principles of distributive justice serve as discerning benchmarks in deployment schemes. - Amy Glasmeier, Professor of Economic Geography and Regional Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Inside Smart Cities provides a timely analysis of the ways in which smart city development is unfolding globally. Its critical contribution lies in bringing together a diverse portfolio of cases - each of them rich in interrogating how smart city discourse is reshaping urban realities. Moving beyond discursive critiques, this volume is a must-read for anyone, from students and scholars to practitioners and policy actors, interested in grasping the state-of-the-art in smart urban development practices around the world. - Professor Rob Raven, Monash Sustainable Development Institute (Melbourne), Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development (Utrecht) In Inside Smart Cities, Andrew Karvonen, Federico Cugurullo, and Federico Caprotti have assembled an impressive collection of smart city case studies, authored by a diverse group of leading smart city scholars. Looking at cases around the world, the authors compellingly demonstrate not only the diversity of smart city initiatives, but also the diverse issues these initiatives pose. Smart cities must always be understood contextually, in relationship to other urban processes, as contested as well as supported, and affecting different groups differently. This nuanced and insightful collection raises at least as many questions as it answers, as it should. - Byron Miller, Professor of Geography and Urban Studies Program Coordinator, University of Calgary

Author Information

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.

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