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Creating Smart Cities; edited by Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans, Liam
Heaphy and Rob Kitchin
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17
REFRAMING, REIMAGINING AND
REMAKING SMART CITIES
Rob Kitchin
Introduction
A principal aim of this book has been to critically examine the creation of smart cities
and to try and formulate new visions of smart urbanism that seek to gain the promises
of smart cities while minimizing their perils; to explore the various critiques of smart
city rhetoric and deployments and to suggest social, political and practical interventions
that would enable better designed and more equitable and just smart city initiatives. Of
course, producing a form of smart urbanism that realizes promises while curtailing
perils is no easy task –and is perhaps impossible at a deep ideological level given the
many stakeholders and vested interests involved and their differing politics, approaches,
aims and ambitions. Nonetheless, trying to negotiate across these interests and ambi-
tions is necessary if critique is to transition, even if in partial and limited ways, into the
reframing, reimagining and remaking of smart cities so that they are more emancipa-
tory, empowering and inclusive. It is also required if the present adoption gap for smart
city technologies, wherein solutions are not being taken up by city administrations as
hoped and expected by the smart city advocacy coalition, is to be overcome (Kitchin
et al. 2017). In this concluding chapter, I contend that the reframing, re-imagining and
remaking of smart city thinking and implementation needs to occur in at least six
broad ways. Three of the transitions concern normative and conceptual thinking with
regards to goals, cities and epistemology; and three concern more practical and poli-
tical thinking and praxes with regards to management/governance, ethics and security,
and stakeholders and working relationships.
Recasting normative and conceptual concerns
Goals
At one level, the goals of creating smart cities are already established –to improve
quality of life and create more efficient, productive, competitive, sustainable and
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resilient cities (see Table 1.2). At a more profound, normative level, however, the
goals of smart cities are less well defined and cogently established (Luque-Ayala and
Marvin 2015). Beyond addressing instrumental concerns (e.g., optimizing traffic
flows, reducing energy consumption, lowering crime rates, making service delivery
more efficient), for whom and what purpose are smart cities being developed? Are
smart cities primarily about –or should be about: creating new markets and profit,
facilitating state control and regulation, addressing their anticipatory logics (demo-
graphic shifts, global climate change, fiscal austerity; Merricks White 2016) or
improving the quality of life of citizens? Or are they about all of these, but with
varying emphases depending on local context? And if they are about all of these
goals, then how are these framed conceptually and ideologically?
The fundamental question of ‘what kind of cities do we want to create and live
in?’is largely reduced to the instrumental level within smart city discourse, in
which it is assumed that tackling such issues is inherently of universal benefit. More
profound framings with respect to fairness, equity, justice, citizenship, democracy,
governance and political economy are either ignored or are understood in a prag-
matic way within a neoliberal framing that renders them post-political in nature –
that is, commonsensical and beyond challenge and contestation (Swyngedouw
2016; Cardullo and Kitchin 2018). And yet, each of these framings can be under-
stood and practised in a variety of ways –for example, there are many theories of
social justice (e.g., egalitarianism, utilitarianism, libertarianism, communitarianism,
contractarianism, etc.; Smith 1994) and which one someone subscribes to makes a
big difference to whether a particular approach to, or action in, the smart city is
seen as being just (Smith 1994). Adopting an approach to smart cities rooted in the
notion of ‘The Right to the City’(Lefebvre 1996) will produce a very different
kind of smart city to one rooted in the ideas and ideals of the free market and
entrepreneurial urbanism (Hall and Hubbard 1997).
Rather than start with these kinds of fundamental, normative questions and then
formulating a strategy to realize its principles, the impression one gains from
encountering many smart city initiatives is that the starting point is the technology.
Then there is an attempt to think about what the technology might be applied to
(e.g., reducing traffic) and then a move to frame the approach with respect to a
core issue (e.g., sustainability, safety, security, economic competitiveness). In other
words, the means is post-justified by ends, rather than the ends shaping the means.
In so doing, the core issue is framed and understood in a shallow, limited sense. For
example, developers might state that a technology can make a system more sus-
tainable, without saying what ‘being sustainable’means beyond instrumental tar-
gets. Like social justice, there are many conceptions of sustainability, and adopting
the principles of different positions might lead to the development of alternative
solutions.
Similarly, developers might say that the technology is ‘citizen-focused’, but as
Shelton and Lodato (this volume) have highlighted the citizen is often an empty
signifier, reduced to a vacuous notion of a generic figure which is served through
stewardship or civic paternalism. This generic figure is presupposed to hold certain
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characteristics, such as digital literacy and middle-class sensibilities (Datta, this
volume). Even as an archetypal generic smart citizen, Cardullo and Kitchin (2018)
show through their unpacking of citizen participation in smart cities that citizens
almost exclusively occupy passive positions in smart city initiatives –they are data
points, users, recipients, consumers, testers and players; occasionally they provide
feedback, but are rarely creators, decision-makers or leaders. In other words, ‘citi-
zen-focused’simply means citizens are the target audience or supposed beneficiaries
in systems designed and administered by state bodies and companies. Smart citi-
zenship, Cardullo and Kitchin (2018) conclude, is underpinned by a neoliberal
ethos that favours consumption choice and individual autonomy within a frame-
work of constraints that prioritize market-led solutions to urban issues; it is not
grounded in civil, social and political rights and the common good. A smart city
framed by alternative notions of citizenship would then be quite different with
respect to how they were implemented, as the recent re-orientation of Barcelona
from a neoliberal approach to one underpinned by the concept of technological
sovereignty is making clear (Galdon 2017; March and Ribera-Fumaz 2017).
Grappling with more normative questions is important because they set the
wider framework within which smart city agendas and initiatives are formulated,
deployed and run. At present, few cities or companies can coherently articulate
their smart city vision and goals in normative terms beyond technical, aspirational
statements (e.g., Dublin will be ‘open, connected, engaged’; Cork will be ‘inno-
vating, creating, connecting’). Instead, smart cities are somewhat haphazard, unco-
ordinated and opportunistic –what Dourish (2016: 37) refers to as the accidental
smart city, wherein
the city becomes smart …[in a] piecemeal, gradual, disparate manner …little
by little, one piece at a time, under the control of different groups, without a
master plan, and with a lot of patching, hacking, jury-rigging and settling.
In cases where a more fully realized strategy has been formulated it can be con-
tradictory with respect to other urban policies. City administrations, in particular, as
the core bodies driving and implementing smart city initiatives need to start the
process of divining their smart city agenda and strategies by considering these nor-
mative questions, not simply by holding workshops to consider which urban pro-
blems to prioritize for smart city solutions.
Cities
For the most part, smart city advocates frame the city as a technical entity which
consists of a set of knowable and manageable systems (or system of systems) that act
in largely rational, mechanical, linear and hierarchical ways and can be steered and
controlled through technical levers, and that urban issues can be solved with tech-
nical solutions (see Kitchin et al. 2015; Mattern 2017). Moreover, ‘the city’is
treated as a generic analytical category, meaning a solution developed for one city
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can be transferred and replicated elsewhere. While cybernetic approaches recognize
the complexity and emergent qualities of city systems, they are still understood as
being machinic and largely closed and bounded in nature. Such a view of cities is
limited and limiting; not only does this narrow, technical view fail to capture the
full complexity of cities, but it also constrains the potential benefits that smart city
technologies might produce by creating solutions that are not always attuned to the
wider contexts in which urban problems are situated. Indeed, such technical
interventions can often be ‘sticking plaster solutions’. For example, technical solu-
tions to traffic congestion usually seek to optimize flow or re-route vehicles; they
do not address the deep-rooted problem that there are too many vehicles using the
road system, or provide a solution that shifts people onto public transport or
encourages more cycling and walking.
Cities are not simply technical systems that can be steered and controlled in the
same way that a car or plane can be. Nor can urban issues be simply solved with
technical solutions. Cities are complex and ever-evolving, jam-packed with a
multitude of inter-dependent, contingent and relational actors, actants, processes
and relationships. Cities have a range of different, often competing, actors and sta-
keholders –government bodies, public sector agencies, companies, nongovern-
mental bodies, community organizations and so on –that have different goals,
resources, practices and structures and are trying to address and manage various
issues. Cities are full of culture, politics, competing interests and wicked problems.
No two cities hold the same qualities, having different histories, populations, cul-
tures, economies, politics, legacy infrastructures and systems, political and adminis-
trative geographies, modes of governance, sense of place, hinterlands,
interconnections and interdependencies with other places, and so on. In other
words, cities are places not simply systems. Consequently, their messiness is not
well captured in computational logic and is difficult to model, predict, and manage
through technocratic governance.
Understanding cities from a relational, place-based perspective, it is clear that
smart city technology will not be a silver bullet to solve urban issues. Yet,
while intrinsically city administrations know that cities are complex, open,
multiscalar, contingent and relational, when they pursue a smart city agenda
they often practise a form of strategic essentialism, seeking to tackle urban issues
through narrow technical fixes that ignore wider interdependencies. Likewise,
companies developing smart city technologiesperformthesamestrategic
essentialism, though they often have less appreciation of the full complexities,
processes, practices and politics of managing and governing a city (I have been
asked several times by companies to explain how cities and city administration
work). For smart city initiatives to work well they need to be conceptualized
and contextualized within a broader and richer understanding of what a city is
and how it works in practice. In other words, smart city advocates need to
recognize and accommodate a more nuanced, relational understanding of cities
andtoappreciateandtakeintoaccountthe diversity and complexity of cities
in their formulations. This also requires smart city advocates to recognize that
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their technical solutions will not work on their own and need to be positioned
alongside and integrated with other solutions that are more social, political,
legal, fiscal and community-orientated, and they should articulate and promote
what that suite of solutions might be.
Epistemology
How can we know the city? To understand and explain it? And then act on this
knowledge? These are epistemological questions. In general, smart city technolo-
gies, and associated rhetoric and science (urban science and urban informatics) are
founded on big data analytics (Kitchin 2014). In short, this means algorithms are
used to process vast quantities of real-time data in order to dynamically manage a
system and to make future predictions. There are two issues with this approach.
The first is that these data are typically quantitative and one-dimensional in nature,
limited in scope (e.g., sensor readings, camera images, clickstreams, admin records),
and do not provide a full, multispectral picture of the city. They provide a very
narrow, selective view of city systems and life, prioritizing data that are machine-
readable and excluding far more information than they include (Mattern 2013).
The second is that the scientific approach adopted for data generation, analysis (e.
g., statistics and modelling) and communication (e.g., data visualizations via urban
dashboards) is reductionist, mechanistic, atomizing, essentialist and deterministic in
how it produces knowledge about cities (Kitchin et al., 2015). It is an approach
that decontextualizes a city and its systems from history, its politics and political
economy, its culture and communities, the wider set of social, economic and
environmental relations that frame its development, and its wider interconnections
and interdependencies that stretch out over space and time. Moreover, with its
claims to objectivity and neutrality, such an approach tends to marginalize and
replace other ways of examining the city (such as through focus groups, interviews,
surveys, etc.) and other forms of knowing such as phronesis (knowledge derived
from practice and deliberation) and metis (knowledge based on experience)
(Kitchin et al., 2015).
This is not to say that this approach does not produce useful or valuable
knowledge. If it did not, I would not have co-developed the Dublin Dashboard
and Cork Dashboard for those respective cities.
1
Rather it is to recognize that such
knowledge is partial, based on a narrow realist epistemology and instrumental
rationality, and that it needs, on the one hand, to reframe its epistemology to
openly acknowledge its situatedness, positionality, contingencies, assumptions and
shortcomings, and on the other hand, to complement such knowledge with other
forms of knowing, such as phronesis and metis (Kitchin et al., 2016). Such an
epistemological move dovetails with the reframing of cities to recognize their
multiple, complex, interdependent nature. Without this change in epistemology,
the underlying scientific rationalities of smart city technologies and approach will
remain anaemic, partial and open to significant underperformance and failure
(Flood 2011).
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Recasting practical and political concerns
Management/governance
Smart city technologies enact algorithmic governance and forms of automated
management –city systems are measured, analysed, and outcomes assessed and
acted upon in an automatic, automated and autonomous fashion (Kitchin and
Dodge 2011). Such automated management facilitates and produces instru-
mental and technocratic forms of governance and government, that is, rote,
procedural, rule-driven, top-down, autocratic means of managing how a system
functions and how it processes and treats individuals within those systems.
Algorithmic governance is a technically-mediated means to manage a city,
wherein there is a belief that the city can be steered and controlled through
algorithmic levers. For its advocates, such a data-driven, algorithmic approach
ensures rational, logical and impartial governance and optimal performance. It is
a means to objectively and impartially nudge, steer, discipline and control
people to act in certain ways.
Such algorithmic, technocratic forms of governance have been critiqued in a
number of ways. The use of algorithmic systems that generate and process streams
of big data greatly intensifies the extent and frequency of monitoring people and
shifts forms of governance from regimes of discipline towards social control
(Kitchin and Dodge 2011; Gabrys 2014; Sadowski and Pasquale 2015). In control
regimes, people become subject to constant modulation through software-medi-
ated systems in which their behaviour is directed explicitly or implicitly reshaped,
rather than being (self)disciplined. Governance is modified so it is no longer solely
about moulding subjects and restricting action, but about modulating affects,
desires and opinions, and inducing action within prescribed comportments (Braun
2014; Krivy 2018). Calculative regimes of control are more distributed, interlinked,
overlapping and continuous, enabling institutional power to creep across technol-
ogies and pervade the social landscape (Martinez 2011). At the same time, the
technological systems underpinning them are narrow in scope and reductionist and
functionalist in approach; that is, they ignore wider cultural, social and political
contexts and processes and simplify complex phenomena into code rather than
taking a more holistic or negotiated approach to managing an issue (Kitchin 2014).
The smart city thus produces a particular form of governmentality, what Vanolo
(2014) terms ‘smartmentality’. Relatedly, the exhaustive and indexical nature of
data generation converts every city system adopting such technologies into a sur-
veillance machine, with the interlinking of such systems and the processing and
analysing of such data raising a number of ethical concerns (Kitchin 2016). As such,
far from being impartial and objective, smart city technologies have built-in nor-
mative values and judgements about how systems should perform, and how they
assess and manage outcomes, with these hardcoded into the underlying software.
And they have normative effects in terms of how they are deployed to shape and
modify systems, citizens, and institutional behaviour.
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Far from creating a more democratizing landscape of governance, smart city
systems are mostly top-down, centrally-controlled and managerialist in orienta-
tion, and are produced and deployed for government by companies. For many
criticsthisraisesanumberofconcernsabout the process of introduction within
cities and the corporatization of urban governance. Within city administrations
smart city initiatives are often introduced by bureaucrats rather than elected
officials or being developed in conjunction with local communities. Indeed,
local communities (and depending on location, politicians) are often little con-
sulted in decision-making processes concerning smart city technologies and
their form, implementation and operation (and certainly not as they would be
with respect to planning and development plans). In terms of the corporatiza-
tion of city governance there are three concerns. First, it actively promotes a
neoliberal political economy and the marketization of public services wherein
city functions are administered for private profit (Hollands 2008). Second, it
creates a technological lock-in that leaves cities beholden to particular techno-
logical platforms and vendors (Hill 2013) and creates a corporate path depen-
dency that cannot easily be undone or diverted (Bates 2012). Third, it leads to
‘one size fits all smart city in a box’solutions that take little account of the
uniqueness of places, peoples and cultures and thus works sub-optimally
(Townsend et al. n.d.).
Just as cities need to be conceptualized in a broader and more synoptic way by
smart city advocates, so does city management and governance. While it is
undoubtedly the case that many smart city technologies do enable more efficient
and effective management of city systems, and provide convenience and improve
services, they are not sufficient solutions on their own to the diverse range of issues
facing cities and themselves cause some concerns. Instead, they need to be intro-
duced and implemented through processes of co-creation and co-production
between city administrations, companies and citizens; be open and transparent in
their formulation and operation, including using open platforms and standards
where possible; and be used in conjunction with a suite of aligned interventions,
policies and investments that seek to tackle issues in complementary ways, blending
technical, social, political and policy responses. Not enough work has been done to
consider how best to achieve such a blended, open, and co-produced form of
urban management and governance, though the approaches being undertaken by
cities such as Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Barcelona (Spain), Bristol (UK), and
Medellín (Colombia) provide some examples.
Ethics and security concerns
Smart city technologies generate huge quantities of data about systems and people,
much of them in real-time and at a highly granular scale. These data can be put to
many good uses; however, generating, processing, analysing, sharing and storing
large amounts of actionable data also raise a number of concerns and challenges.
Key amongst these are privacy, predictive profiling, social sorting, anticipatory
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governance, behavioural nudging, control creep, data protection and data security.
Indeed, many smart city technologies capture personally identifiable information
and household level data about citizens –their characteristics, their location and
movements, and their activities –link these data together to produce new derived
data, and use them to create profiles of people and places and to make decisions
about them. As such, there are concerns about what a smart city means for people’s
privacy and what privacy and predictive privacy harms might arise from the shar-
ing, analysis and misuse of urban big data (Kitchin and Dodge 2011; Baracos and
Nissenbaum 2014; Edwards 2016; Kitchin 2016; Taylor et al. 2016; Leszczynski
2017; Murphy, this volume, Evans, this volume). In addition, there are questions as
to how secure smart city technologies and the data they generate are from hacking
and theft and what the implications of a data breach are for citizens (Cerrudo 2015;
Dodge and Kitchin, this volume).
To date, the approach to these issues has been haphazard, uncoordinated and
partial. As suggested with respect to city management and governance in general,
addressing privacy and security issues requires a multi-pronged set of interventions
that ideally are coherently aligned and implemented in conjunction with one
another. In a recent report for the Irish Government’s Data Forum I outlined such
an approach, suggesting four types of intervention, each consisting of a number of
mediations (Kitchin 2016). First, market-driven solutions: including the develop-
ment of industry standards, stronger self-regulation, and the reframing of privacy
and security as a competitive advantage. Second, technological solutions: including
end-to-end encryption, access controls, security controls, audit trails, backups, up-
to-date patching, and privacy enhancement tools. Third, policy, regulatory and
legal solutions: including revised fair information practice principles, privacy by
design, security by design, and education and training. Fourth, governance and
management solution at three levels: vision and strategy –smart city advisory
boards and published strategies; oversight of delivery and compliance –smart city
governance, ethics and security oversight committees; and day-to-day delivery –
core privacy/security teams, smart city privacy/security assessments, and computer
emergency response teams.
Using these solutions together would provide a balanced, pragmatic approach
that enables the rollout of smart city technologies and initiatives, but in a way that
is not prejudicial to people’s privacy, actively work to minimize privacy and pre-
dictive privacy harms, curtail data breaches, and tackle cybersecurity issues. They
also work across the entire life-cycle (from procurement to decommissioning) and
span the whole system ecology (all its stakeholders and components). Collectively
they promote fairness and equity, protect citizens and cities from harms, and enable
improved governance and economic development. Moreover, they do so using an
approach that is not heavy handed in nature and is relatively inexpensive to
implement. They are by no means definitive, but would enable a more ethical,
principle-led approach to the design and implementation of smart cities. Failing to
tackle these issues will undermine and curtail smart city initiatives and public sup-
port for them.
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Stakeholders and working relationships
As detailed in Chapter 1, smart city protagonists are often divided into those who
develop, implement and promote smart city technologies and initiatives, and those
who critique such endeavours. While the former have been starting to respond to
critique, albeit in rather limited ways, and the latter have started to make more active
interventions, there is still much more work to be done to bring different stake-
holders into dialogue and working relationships. There is certainly a lot of learning
that needs to be done: by city administrations with respect to developing smart city
strategies and procuring and deploying smart city technologies; by companies with
respect to how cities are managed and function and balancing private gain with
public good; by communities involved in or living with smart city initiatives; and by
researchers and consultants who are seeking to understand what is unfolding in dif-
ferent cities and contexts. This learning will progress most effectively through co-
creation and co-production, with stakeholders working together.
This requires all stakeholders to be open to working and learning from one another
for the common purpose of improving the quality of lives for citizens and how cities
are managed and governed. With respect to academia, this means critical scholars have
to become more applied in orientation: to give constructive feedback and guidance
and to set out alternatives and to help develop strategies, not just provide critique. This
does not mean that critique is not valuable in and of itself. Nor does it mean dumbing
down or abandoning a critical position or emancipatory politics or ‘getting into bed
with the enemy’. It means putting principles into action –to translate them into
practical and political outcomes. Our own endeavours on The Programmable City
project have demonstrated that smart city stakeholders are open to robust exchanges
and are prepared to rework initiatives and change direction, especially if we are willing
to work with them and others to realize any reframing, reimagining and remaking
involved. That said, not all city administrations or companies want such collaborations,
or it might be very difficult to align differing ideological beliefs, in which case external
critique might be the only option. However, in my view, such critique ideally also
needs to suggest alternatives –whether ideological or practical –and to support the
work of other oppositional groups (such as local communities or NGOs).
Conclusion
The purpose of this chapter has been to set out some of the key shortcomings,
challenges and risks associated with smart city technologies and initiatives and to
suggest how smart city thinking and implementation might be productively
reframed, reimagined and remade in six ways. The aim has not been to be defini-
tive or comprehensive, but rather to provide some initial ideas and contentions –
some more conceptual and philosophical, some more practical and political –that
act as provocations for discussion and debate. As such, while the six interventions
detailed offer a set of initial entry points, my hope is that they are creatively
reworked and extended by those working in smart city endeavours.
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How likely such a recasting of smart cities is is an open question. The smart
cities epistemic community and advocacy coalition remains strong, with a reason-
ably coherent and stable narrative, and many city administrations are deploying
smart city solutions in a largely pragmatic, instrumental way rather than it being
underpinned by a strategy rooted in normative concerns and principles. That said,
there is a persistent adoption gap in the take up of smart city technologies, with
many deployments remaining at the experimental stage or being confined to ‘smart
districts’or city centres rather than being rolled out across entire urban areas. As
outlined in Kitchin et al. (2017) there are good reasons for this gap including:
a lack of momentum, with government being somewhat like an oil-tanker and
difficult to shift direction;
an aversion to risk, with city administrations charged with providing stability,
certainty and reliability in delivery of city services not unproven disruption
with solutions that are not mature;
a lack of trust that new initiatives will work, with city administrations cognisant
of previous investments that failed;
a lack of clarity on value for money, return on investment, finance models and
when to enter the market;
a set of competing demands that all require investment, so if a proposed solution
is not aimed at a critical problem it will find it difficult to compete for atten-
tion and resources;
a set of procedural issues concerning regulations regarding procuring services and
technologies and working with other bodies;
a body of inertia and resistance within city administrations, with already existing
practices and legacy systems and internal politics, fiefdoms, competing interests,
and siloed departments and systems;
weak staffing and skills capacity with respect to implementing smart city tech-
nologies; and,
a fragmented local administration landscape, with cities divided up into
autonomous municipalities causing coordination and economy of scale issues.
Overcoming these issues requires flexibility in approach and a more convincing
argument –one that addresses the kinds of criticism detailed in this chapter and
across the entire volume –that a smart cities approach is the answer to urban issues.
Corporations and cities did change their narrative in relation to critique concerning
citizen participation and focus. However, while the rhetoric shifted in tone to
declare the focus was now to create citizen-orientated smart cities, the underlying
logic, ethos and position of citizens was little changed (Kitchin 2015). In other
cases, cities have moved beyond lip-service to take a more proactive approach to
reimaging, reframing and remaking smart cities, actively engaging with deeper,
more normative notions of what kind of smart city they want to create and the
principles underpinning this: for example, Barcelona’s‘technological sovereignty’
(Galdon, 2017) and Medellín’s‘social urbanism’(Talvard, this volume; McLaren
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and Agyeman, this volume). The chapters in this book collectively illuminate the
many issues that still plague the drive towards smart cities, but also suggest ways to
address them and alternative visions. The challenge is to realize these alternative
visions to create ethical and principled smart cities that serve all citizens.
Note
1http://www.dublindashboard.ie and http://www.corkdashboard.ie.
Acknowledgements
The research for this paper was funded by a European Research Council Advanced
Investigator grant, The Programmable City (ERC-2012-AdG-323636).
References
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