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6 Insightful Books on Smart Cities
Smartness is a means to an end: improving the quality of urban life.
David C. 6 Insightful Books on Smart Cities，September 10, 2020https://biblio-fiend.com/smart-cities/Since the concept of smart cities was first proposed, it has been embraced by cities and technology companies around the world. Cities across world have launched numerous smart city projects. The novel-corona virus pandemic this year has accelerated the widespread use of tracking technologies and applications, which raises concerns about over-collection of personal information and invasion of privacy. We need to learn more about the drawbacks and benefits of smart cities. Here is a list of recommended books about smart cities compiled by biblio-fiend.com.
1. Smart Cities by Germaine Halegoua
Smart Cities provides a comprehensive introduction to the topic for readers of all backgrounds. Beginning with a thorough review of the prevailing terminology used in academia and the broader media to discuss key concepts and associated ideas, Prof. Halegoua moves on to provide an overview of three important templates for smart city development; smart-from-the-start, retrofitted, and social cities, respectively. It covers technologies and methods, including sensors, public wi-fi, big data, and smartphone apps, and discusses how developers conceive of interactions among the built environment, technological and urban infrastructures, citizens, and citizen engagement. Smart Cities enables the reader to quickly grasp important issues of debate within the urban development field, as well as understand the historical context of smart cities within urban studies as a whole. While reviewing important technologies and how urban developers look to incorporate them into urban environments of the future, Prof. Halegoua’s work never forgets the focus of smart city design; making cities more livable, more communal places for their citizens. Smart city developers should work more closely with local communities, recognizing their preexisting relationship to urban place and realizing the limits of technological fixes. Smartness is a means to an end: improving the quality of urban life.2. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. TownsendSmart Cities explores the history of urban development up to the current phase of introducing large-scale networking and big data into the toolbox of urban management. From Beijing to Boston, cities are deploying smart technology―sensors embedded in streets and subways, Wi-Fi broadcast airports and green spaces―to address the basic challenges faced by massive, interconnected metropolitan centers. Using numerous real-world case studies to illustrate both the benefits and drawbacks of this unprecedented technological steroid binge, Dr. Townsend provides a balanced account of the rationales behind the broad adoption of technology solutions in urban management. Smart Cities provides insights from industry, government and academia to produce a detailed introduction to the most pressing issues in the development of smart cities; what has worked previously, and what needs further refinement to improve urban environments for the population of the future.3. The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life by Carlo Ratti & Matthew Claudel
Since cities emerged ten thousand years ago, they have become one of the most impressive artifacts of humanity. But their evolution has been anything but linear; cities have gone through moments of radical change, turning points that redefine their very essence. In this book, a renowned architect and urban planner who studies the intersection of cities and technology argues that we are in such a moment.The authors explain some of the forces behind urban change and offer new visions of the many possibilities for tomorrow‘s city. Pervasive digital systems that layer our cities are transforming urban life. The authors provide a front-row seat to this change. Their work at the MIT Senseable City Laboratory allows experimentation and implementation of a variety of urban initiatives and concepts, from assistive condition-monitoring bicycles to trash with embedded tracking sensors, from mobility to energy, from participation to production. They call for a new approach to envisioning cities: futurecraft, a symbiotic development of urban ideas by designers and the public. With such participation, we can collectively imagine, examine, choose, and shape the most desirable future of our cities.4. Smart Cities, Digital Nations: Building Smart Cities in Emerging Countries and Beyond by Caspar Herzberg
When thinking about our cities’ futures, it’s easy to assume that we are talking about urban environments in developed countries alone. Not so. As Herzberg, a former Cisco consultant who worked on several digital urban projects in developing countries during his career, reveals in Smart Cities, Digital Nations, past projects seeking to incorporate digital technologies into urban spaces in the developing world form important case studies and guides for how more developed economies can introduce similar systems while avoiding known pitfalls. From the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, to King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, Herzberg criss-crosses the developing world to reveal for his readers the ways in which big data and networked systems are being leveraged to radically change urban lifestyles of the future across the globe. While emphasizing the importance of dialogue and co-operation between diverse stakeholders, ranging from citizens’ groups to city planners, tech companies and the bureaucracies of both local and national government, Herzberg acknowledges the potential dominance of tech titans in the growing urban development space. Smart Cities, Digital Nations provides thoughtful insight on how the evolution of urban spaces can be mediated between competing interest groups to produce beneficial outcomes for citizens, governments, and investors alike.
5. Uneven Innovation: The Work of Smart Cities by Jennifer Clark
Uneven Innovation is a warning to smart city boosters. It directs particular focus towards the tech sector, which stands to reap handsome rewards from the broad role out of smart city policies. In Uneven Innovation, Jennifer Clark considers the potential of these emerging technologies as well as their capacity to exacerbate existing inequalities and even produce new ones. She reframes the smart city concept within the trajectory of uneven development of cities and regions, as well as the long history of technocratic solutions to urban policy challenges. Clark argues that urban change driven by the technology sector is following the patterns that have previously led to imbalanced access, opportunities, and outcomes. The tech sector needs the city, yet it exploits and maintains unequal arrangements, embedding labor flexibility and precarity in the built environment. Without regulations to restrain labor market volatility and limit the predatory nature of many gig economy platforms, smart cities risk simply inauguring a future of even wider inequality, both economic and social. Technology development, Uneven Innovation contends, is the easy part; understanding the city and its governance, regulation, access, participation, and representation, all of which are complex and highly localized is the real challenge. Clarks critique leads to policy prescriptions that present a path toward an alternative future in which smart cities result in more equitable communities.6. The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future by Ben Green
Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself.In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to technology: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.CityReads ∣Notes On Cities"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat,
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