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Developmentalist smart cities? the cases of Singapore and Seoul
Abstract
Governments and companies across the globe are promoting smart cities, and their developments usually reflect both globally shared ideas and locally specific agendas and implementations. This paper examines the smart cities of Singapore and Seoul – two key global cities in Asia with legacies of state-led developmentalism. It discusses the two cities’ latest smart city endeavors, trajectories, and policy motivations. In particular, it explores the role of smart city policy in governments’ local and global agendas for development and argues that the two acclaimed cases can be interpreted as globally-oriented neo-developmentalist smart cities. In doing so, this paper also explains that the typically assumed developmentalist feature becomes much more complicated as it intermixes with the global cities’ international outlooks and aspirations as well as the changing demands from citizens in the post-developmental era.
• Highlights
• I examine the two ‘actually-existing’ global smart cities in Asia.
• I explore the role of smart city policy in local and global agendas for development.
• Singapore and Seoul reflect globally-oriented neo-developmentalist smart cities.
• Singapore and Seoul are not hardware-driven developmentalist smart cities.
... This paper focuses on the unfolding of smart urbanism in Hungary under the authoritarian Orba´n regime that attempts to manage dependent capitalism in the context of the 'multi-level strategic game' (Jessop, 2010: 42) of the European Union (EU) and, more broadly, that of intensifying pressures of competitiveness and digitalisation. At first sight, Hungary's top-down urban policymaking and the Orba´n government's attempts to give central state steering to smart city development might seem reminiscent of a putative Asian '(neoliberal-)developmentalist' cases of smart urbanism that have been variously labelled as 'state-steered' (Zhang, et al., 2022) or 'government-led' (Joo, 2023). Indeed, the series of smart city-related government decrees issued from 2015 have been interpreted by some (Jo´zsa and Kneisz, 2019) as a strong commitment to state-steered smart city development: the first decree tasked the Lechner Knowledge Centre Nonprofit Limited Company (LKC), the background institution the Department of Spatial Planning and Urban Management of the Prime Minister's Office (DSPUM) in the fields of architecture, spatial planning and related IT services, with coordinating the country-wide introduction of smart city services; another was on the 2017 revision of the government decree on local level planning documents defined what the smart city 'is'. ...
... Although not always explicitly deployed under the provincialising label, several accounts of smart urbanism in the Asian context have shown the added value of such a comparative approach by sketching the contours of a 'neoliberal-developmental' smart urbanism in the Global South that is in (seeming) contrast to a 'neoliberal-entrepreneurial' Global North/Western smart urbanism (e.g. Chang et al., 2021;Ho, 2017;Joo, 2023;Zhang et al., 2022). While smart city development in the Global North has generally been shaped by dominant transnational ICT corporations and complemented by state-induced austerity measures (Chang et al., 2021;Pollio, 2016), examples of Asian smart urbanism have often emerged as part of an explicit, overarching top-down state economic and urban development strategy, discursively framed as broader state modernisation in the globalising, digital age (Das, 2020;Ho, 2017;Zhang et al., 2022). ...
... While smart city development in the Global North has generally been shaped by dominant transnational ICT corporations and complemented by state-induced austerity measures (Chang et al., 2021;Pollio, 2016), examples of Asian smart urbanism have often emerged as part of an explicit, overarching top-down state economic and urban development strategy, discursively framed as broader state modernisation in the globalising, digital age (Das, 2020;Ho, 2017;Zhang et al., 2022). In terms of implementation, steering by (national and local) government and state agencies through, amongst others, heavily funded state-initiated projects, living labs and pilots (Das, 2020;Hu, 2019;Joo, 2023;Zhang et al., 2022) and measures of standardisation (see e.g. Das, 2020;Zhang et al., 2022) has been significant across the region, and has often (by far) surpassed the generally more modest, facilitating role of the state in the Global North. ...
This paper aims at advancing recent attempts, within the ever-expanding critical scholarship on ‘smart cities’, to ‘provincialise’ smart urbanism. First, it proposes to do so empirically by extending the scope of the provincialising agenda to the (relationally conceived) ‘Global Easts’ through a conjunctural analysis of Hungary’s smart urbanism. Second, by focusing on how the state-steered character of Hungary’s smart urbanism differs from that of much-discussed Asian examples of neoliberal-developmental urbanism, the paper develops a state-focused relational lens that draws on scholarship on new state capitalism concerned with how relations between state and capital and shifting configurations of political and economic power constitute smart urban development. This lens helps to direct our attention to the market-orienting (or -distorting) actions of the solidifying authoritarian state capitalist Orbán regime in the narrowly conceived field of smart city policymaking, and to how creeping centralisation-through-digitalisation and the expansion of the state-dominated capitalism in the IT sector shape the actualisation of smart urbanism, albeit weakened by the broader political-economic (il)logics of the regime. Given worldwide trends of ever-more assertive state intervention shaping post-smart urbanism driven by artificial intelligence, the paper underlines the broader relevance of a context-sensitive provincialising approach with a state-focused approach devoid of orientalist inclinations.
... This active role contrasts with most European and North American cases discussed in existing smart city literature, where local governments typically lead. East Asian experiences, such as those in Singapore, China, South Korea, and Taiwan, in smart city development emphasize the more prominent role of the state in shaping and participating in smart city policies (Chang, Jou, & Chung, 2021;Hu & Zheng, 2021;Joo, 2023). Among these, Taiwan's central government spearheads smart city development, while local governments in many cities play a more passive role. ...
... Cases in East Asia show a multi-scalar collaboration between local and central governments. The state's support for smart city policies has been proven to be essential, which also reflects the enduring effects of developmentalism in most of the developed Asian economies, four Asian tigers, like Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan (Chang et al., 2021;Joo, 2023;Shin, Park, & Sonn, 2015). The case of Singapore is an exception to multi-scalar governance because the scale of the country enables the state to govern the city-state smart nation directly. ...
... The case of Singapore is an exception to multi-scalar governance because the scale of the country enables the state to govern the city-state smart nation directly. Its Prime Minister's Office directly supervises the national smart city policy, Smart Nation, aiming to secure the country's leading place in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Joo, 2023). The city governments of Seoul and Taipei pursue smart city development with the same purpose: facilitating the growth of local small-to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), small ICT firms, and startups. ...
When studies on smart city policies discuss governments’ efforts to facilitate smart city development, they primarily emphasize the local government’s role, as they are stakeholders in those policies. However, these studies often undervalue the significance of state industrial policies in facilitating technological innovation for smart city development. Accordingly, this research aims to answer the question of how state-driven industrial policy enables smart city development by fostering technological innovation within industries. The case study for this research is Taiwan because its state implements the ‘Smart City Taiwan’ policy to involve industries in smart city development actively. I examine this case from a developmental state perspective and reveal that its central government follows the mindset of a developmental state to couple the smart city vision with the national industry goal. The Taiwanese central government assigned local governments of every city to be the initial clients of firms developing smart city technologies. Meanwhile, its central government incentivised firms’ engagements in smart city projects with public resources, such as funding, state-business networks, a cross-agency negotiation platform, etc. This research shows that under the developmental legacy, the smart city policy led by the state can effectively facilitate collaboration between local governments and industries, enabling the widespread use of smart city technologies and benefiting industries.
... Focusing on the analysis of the four selected cities, Table 1 presents the distribution of the retrieved papers by city. [3,11,12,25,26,28,34,43,52,56,62,74,75,[77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93] Barcelona was featured in 40% of the retrieved documents, Singapore in 37%, Helsinki in 17%, and Medellin in 6%. This suggests that Barcelona and Singapore have significant in-volvement and leadership in SC initiatives. ...
... In terms of collaboration, the Singapore Government and the private sector are working together to enhance and position Singapore as a more attractive and competitive destination [11]. In Singapore, living labs like Smart Nation have played a crucial role in promoting smart governance and fostering collaboration among global companies, high-tech startups, and public institutions [84]. Lastly, the city is engaged in several transnational development projects, including the ASEAN Smart Cities Network (ASCN), which Singapore promoted to enhance environmental sustainability and strengthen regional collaboration [12,91]. ...
... However, several challenges restrict the effectiveness of smart people initiatives, including a governmental top-down approach, an aging society, and the complexities of a mixed-race population. First, the Smart Nation strategies have been based on a top-down approach controlled by the government [26,43,84]. The strategy encourages citizens to participate in envisioned SC initiatives, but does not allow them to truly shape these initiatives [26]. ...
Highlights
Smart city initiatives are varied but primarily focus on governance and environment, with less attention to other critical dimensions needed for sustainable urban practices.
Smart city initiatives heavily rely on ICT for managing urban operations but lack comprehensive and inclusive assessment studies on their sustainable and social benefits.
Implications of the Main Findings:
The findings highlight the need for more holistic frameworks in smart city approaches to efficiently address urban sustainability challenges and improve urban practices.
Standardized assessment methods are needed for evaluating the benefits of smart technologies on sustainable development and urban practices.
Abstract
Urbanization growth poses various challenges, such as congestion, pollution, and resource consumption, prompting city planners and governments to adopt smart systems to manage these issues more efficiently. Despite widespread adoption, there is no consensus on the defining attributes of smart cities, particularly regarding their role in urban sustainability and contemporary urbanism. This paper provides a literature review to understand the implications of smart city initiatives for sustainable urban planning, focusing on practices in Singapore, Helsinki, Barcelona, and Medellin. Based on 71 publications surveyed from Scopus and Web of Science, this paper evaluates smart, sustainable initiatives undertaken in these four cities across six smart domains: mobility, governance, environment, people, living, and economy. This review shows that most studies focus on Barcelona and Singapore, particularly in the domains of smart environment and governance. Despite differing urban contexts, the notion of “smart” is closely tied to using information and communication technologies to drive urban operations. This analysis identifies a lack of assessment studies on the benefits of smart cities in terms of urban sustainability and a lack of holistic approaches to address the complex challenges cities face in achieving sustainable development.
... Smart cities, as outstanding examples of digital transformation for sustainable economic and social development, have been promoted by governments and businesses around the world [60]. Although the digital transformation problem studied in this paper is based on the enterprise level, and a smart city is the digital transformation at the city level, enterprises, as an important stakeholder of smart city, play a non-negligible role in the urban digital transformation. ...
... DTE is not only limited to influencing internal green innovation, but also has an impact on other innovation entities in the region. Because Singapore and the European Union (EU) are relatively successful representatives of smart city development on a global scale [60][61][62], the smart city construction in Singapore and the European Union is selected for the case study. ...
... Singapore's smart city construction mainly includes two aspects: smart city infrastructure construction and digital economy ecosystem construction. After the formulation of the strategic plan for the construction of smart cities, the Singapore government has actively promoted the development of digital economy, built digital infrastructure and a digital industry ecosystem, provided opportunities for regional green innovation with urban digital transformation, and promoted the sustainable development of regional economy [60]. Although the smart city is promoted by the government, it is found in the process of Singapore's smart city construction that if you want to achieve sustainable development through smart cities, you need the joint efforts of the government, enterprises, and all parties in society. ...
Under the dual pressure of economic development and environmental protection, it is urgent that we improve the efficiency of green innovation. Enterprise digital transformation brings opportunities to improve the efficiency of green innovation. However, most current studies focus on the relationship between the two from the micro level, ignoring the impact of enterprise digital transformation on the green innovation of other innovation entities within the region, and have not yet described it in detail from the perspective of digital capabilities. Therefore, based on Chinese data, this paper studies the impact of enterprise digital transformation on regional green innovation efficiency from the perspective of digital capability, and provides a theoretical reference for improving regional green innovation efficiency. The research shows that (1) the digital capabilities of enterprise digital transformation include digital acquisition capability, digital utilization capability, and digital sharing capability, which have significant promoting effects on regional green innovation efficiency; (2) strengthening information resources, knowledge resources, R&D funds, and human resources are the role channels indicated by mechanism analysis; (3) heterogeneity analysis shows that the promotion effect is not related to geographical location, but the disadvantaged areas of enterprise digital transformation and regional green innovation efficiency have a greater impact. Further, the applicability of the research conclusions is extended through case studies in other countries. This study enriches the research perspective of the relationship between enterprise digital transformation and green innovation, and provides a new path for regional sustainable development.
... Reverse knowledge spillover theory of public sector entrepreneurship tive approach, user-centered design, and rapid prototyping techniques to overhaul federal platforms (Mergel, 2016). Similarly, the Singapore government, through its Smart Nation initiative, strategically drew upon private sector innovations to advance its public sector capabilities in smart city technologies (Joo, 2023; SNDGO, 2018). By utilizing its close proximity to cutting-edge tech firms and leading universities, the Singapore government integrated data analytics tools and IoT solutions into public services to develop smart traffic management systems and real-time environmental monitoring (Kong & Woods, 2018). ...
... KSTE principles are evident as the initiative leveraged Singapore dense urban environment and geographical proximity to knowledge-intensive organizations to spur entrepreneurial opportunities (Kong & Woods, 2018). By applying open innovation strategies, the Smart Nation initiative built a collaborative ecosystem where private technology firms, research institutions, and government agencies co-created solutions for smart urban living, such as intelligent transportation systems and advanced public health platforms (Joo, 2023). In alignment with PSE, Singapore transformed its public agencies into entrepreneurial actors capable of integrating and adapting private sector innovations to meet public needs. ...
Existing research has emphasized that public sector knowledge is conducive to stimulating entrepreneurship. This article shifts the focus and extends the Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship (KSTE) by introducing a theoretical framework for reverse knowledge spillovers (RKS), which explores how private sector knowledge catalyzes entrepreneurial activity within the public sector. Drawing on KSTE, open innovation theory, and public sector entrepreneurship literature, we delineate key elements of RKS (such as actors, types of innovation, dimensions of proximity, and transfer mechanisms), and examine the relationships between these elements. This study highlights the practical and policy implications of RKS, advocating for more dynamic interactions between private and public sectors. By fostering these interactions, this research aims to inform strategic management and policy-making, ultimately strengthening and enhancing entrepreneurial ecosystems.
... Thereafter, the vision of becoming a smart city was established in 2014. Over the past decades, Singapore has devised plans and policies and progressively pushed for different stages of digitalisation to increase its productivity and efficiency [17]. Moreover, urban planning and governance approaches are continuously revised to keep up with technological advancements and achieve the vision of becoming a smart city. ...
... In view of an increasingly digitised and knowledgebased economy, the Smart Nation Initiative (SNI) was launched in November 2014 to enhance living, strengthen communities, and create more opportunities for all. Building upon the previous major technology-enabled initiatives [17], SNI reflects a broader digital transformation that aims to digitise all aspects of urban life through the widespread deployment of smart technologies in different building types [18]. With the involvement of main stakeholders, technology-enabled solutions are co-created for and with ICTs, big data and networks [12]. ...
The development of smart and sustainable cities (SSCs) is a global focus to ensure cities remain resilient in a challenging environment. In Singapore, various initiatives have been introduced to maintain its competitiveness as an SSC. This study investigates the drivers and barriers affecting the receptiveness of young Singaporeans (aged 18 to 35) towards smart features in public residential buildings (SPRBs). Questionnaires were distributed to young Singaporeans, and 213 valid responses were collected over three months in 2023. It is worth noting over 40% of the respondents are 25 years old and below, classified as Generation Y. The results showed that among 80.3% of respondents who were familiar with SPRBs in Singapore, 68.1% of them either had a minimal or moderate understanding of SPRBs. The top five drivers were ease of access, safety-related factors, and psychological needs, while the top five barriers included cyberattacks, privacy and security concerns, overdependence, and task perception. Research findings have presented meaningful insights for relevant stakeholders to understand different perspectives of young Singaporeans arising from the implementation of SPRBs. It is hoped that public authorities will use this study to assess the feasibility of SPRBs and improve the concept to meet the evolving needs of future homebuyers in Singapore.
... No obstante, estudios que examinan la transformación de los Developmental States bajo la neoliberalización señalan que, en el marco del reescalamiento que los Estados-nación atravesaron a fines de la década de 1990 y principios del 2000 (Brenner, 2004), comenzaron a aplicarse diversas medidas de descentralización estatal y promoción de la competitividad regional que desafiaron dicho esquema de intervención (Hill et al., 2012;Park, 2013). Este reescalamiento implicó que las escalas estatales regionales y locales asumieran un perfil «desarrollista» similar al de sus gobiernos centrales, con una mayor injerencia en la gestión de las políticas, a fin de mejorar el posicionamiento global de sus territorios (Chen & Keng, 2017;Joo, 2021;Tsukamoto, 2012 nacionales o implementar los propios, con perspectivas de que sean emulados por el gobierno central (Diegues et al., 2023;Hielman et al., 2013). ...
Las capacidades del Estado han probado ser un factor clave en el éxito de las experiencias de desarrollo reciente basadas en el cambio estructural. Esta tesis de maestría analiza la construcción de capacidades estatales en Argentina y la provincia de Entre Ríos en el ámbito de la política industrial entre los años 2010 y 2022. El estudio se centra en la configuración organizativa y la cohesión interna del aparato estatal, atendiendo a: (i) la evolución de las estructuras organizacionales; (ii) la gestión de recursos financieros para el fomento de la actividad industrial; y (iii) la presencia de mecanismos de centralización y coordinación de acciones a nivel horizontal y escalar. A partir de este análisis, se identifican una serie de limitaciones que atentaron contra la construcción de capacidades estatales para impulsar el desarrollo industrial en el período señalado.
... This forward-thinking approach ensures that Seoul remains at the cutting edge of smart city developments, ready to integrate more advanced technologies as they become available. This data effectively shows how 5G deployment has transformed the urban communication landscape in Seoul, significantly elevating user experiences and network efficiency (Mendonça et al., 2022;Joo, 2023). ...
Chapter 6 of the manuscript illuminates the transformative journey from 5G to 6G technologies and their integration into the fabric of smart cities, highlighting a substantial evolution in wireless communication. This evolution is marked by a leap from the already impressive capabilities of 5G, with its enhanced speeds and reduced latency, to the even more advanced 6G technology, which promises unprecedented improvements in data transmission rates, network reliability, and application potential. The narrative begins by contrasting the foundational technologies behind 5G and 6G. 5G, characterized by its use of New Radio (NR) technology across sub-6 GHz and mmWave bands, already supports a myriad of smart city applications, from augmented reality to intelligent transportation systems, through advancements like Massive MIMO and sophisticated beamforming. However, 6G is set to expand these horizons dramatically by harnessing higher frequency bands in the terahertz spectrum, enabling data transmission volumes and speeds previously unimaginable, and minimizing latency to virtually zero. This leap in technology underpins more than just an incremental improvement; it paves the way for revolutionary applications such as holographic telepresence and ultra-precise automated industries, which require the ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) that 6G aims to provide. Moreover, 6G anticipates integrating AI deeply into its core, optimizing network operations through predictive analytics and autonomous decision-making. This integration represents a paradigm shift Deep Science Publishing https://doi.org/10.70593/978-93-49307-08-7_6
... However, the mainstream research approach to smart cities is characterized by territoriality and locality, and its policy framework focuses more on internal characteristics without a global city perspective [10]. Local policy agendas that are uninformed about the structure of global city networks are likely to fail to attract resources such as talent, innovation, information, and business collaborations, which may affect the development trajectory of smart cities locally [7,11,12]. Therefore, the traditional research method of considering cities as independent systems is no longer applicable to smart cities, and it is particularly necessary to recognize and understand the resilience of smart cities from the perspective of complex networks. ...
The mobility and openness of smart cities characterize them as particularly complex networks, necessitating the resilience enhancement of smart city regions from a network structure perspective. Taking the Chengdu–Chongqing urban agglomeration as a case study, this research constructs economic, information, population, and technological intercity networks based on the complex network theory and gravity model to evaluate their spatial structure and resilience over five years. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) subnetworks exhibit a ‘core/periphery’ structure with a significant evolution trend, particularly the metropolitan area integration degree of capital cities has significantly improved; (2) the technology network is the most resilient but was the most affected by COVID-19, while the population and information networks are the least resilient, resulting from poor hierarchy, disassortativity, and agglomeration; (3) network resilience can be improved through system optimization and node enhancement. System optimization should focus more on improving the coordinated development of population, information, and technology networks due to their low synergistic level of resilience, while node optimization should adjust strategies according to the dominance, redundancy, and network role of nodes. This study provides a reference framework to assess the resilience of smart cities, and the assessment results and enhancement strategies can provide valuable regional planning information for resilience building in smart city regions.
... The adoption of IoT technology and significant investments in digital infrastructure were necessary for Seoul to become a smart city. [21] The city prioritized raising public safety, advancing sustainable practices, and boosting citizen services. The experience of Seoul emphasizes the value of effective government leadership and public-private sector cooperation. ...
Silk city - Rajshahi, recognized as the cleanest city of Bangladesh, has been implementing diversified initiatives to transform the city into a smart one aligning with the government's Smart Bangladesh 2041 vision. Bangabandhu River City, Sheikh Russel City Park, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Hi-Tech Park, roads, flyovers, secondary transfer stations etc. underscore the city's commitment to progress. Recently, the Rajshahi City Corporation (RCC) has formulated a comprehensive master plan to guide the implementation of the Smart Rajshahi City initiative. This research analyzes the challenges, opportunities and their impacts that will come up during Rajshahi's smart transformation journey and provide valuable insights and recommendations. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the research utilizes questionnaires and surveys for data collection. The qualitative and quantitative data undergo thorough analysis, incorporating statistical methods to derive meaningful insights.
... Despite its geographical and natural resource constraints, Singapore has substantial regional influence and takes a leading role in ASEAN Smart City Network Li et al., 2022;Saguin & Sha, 2023) -making it an influential and relevant case for our analysis. Previous studies on smart city development in Singapore focus on its definitional stages (Hoe, 2016), comparative studies on public sector innovation and participatory strategies (Shamsuzzoha et al., 2021;Ang, -Tan & Ang, 2022), the role of smart city policies in developmentalist states (Woo, 2018;Shamsuzzoha et al., 2021;Joo, 2023), and the use of smart technologies to manage the Covid-19 pandemic (Woo, 2020b;Woo, 2020a;Das & Zhang, 2021). We, instead, take a comprehensive lens to the Smart Nation program to understand the different policy packages, their constituent policy goals, policy instruments, and interactions contributes to inclusive smart cities. ...
In the last two decades, cities have embraced advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, information and communications technology-based systems, internet of things, and big data analytics as a key component of the urban environment. These ‘smart cities’ use technological and digital solutions to enhance quality of life, increase access to and utilisation of urban services, and improve resource management. However, adopting advanced technologies is fraught with uncertainty and unpredictability which presents several challenges in designing inclusive smart city policies. In this study, we identify and advance synergies needed for designing policies for inclusive smart cities. We analyse policy design components of Singapore's Smart Nation program – goals, instruments, and their interactions in policy packages. We demonstrate how policymakers pursue policy goals for inclusive development while balancing technological transformation. Results indicate the need for developing adaptive spaces for policy design in smart cities that respond and adjust to the uncertainties associated with adopting advanced technologies while retaining the desired policy objectives for inclusive development. These spaces are shown to have a large variation in policy instruments combined with synergistic and facilitative interactions between them. Our findings further the discussion on adaptive policy design and their role in smart city governance.
... This platform collects data from multiple sources, including IoT sensors and cameras, to provide real-time parking information. The system supports electronic payments and dynamic pricing to manage parking demand effectively [13,[24][25][26]. ...
The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has profoundly transformed urban life, particularly in the realm of parking management. Smart parking systems harness the capabilities of IoT to optimize parking space utilization, alleviate congestion, and elevate user experience. This chapter delves into the intricate process of data collection within IoT-enabled smart parking environments, with a specific emphasis on the seamless integration of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. By conducting a comprehensive analysis of various data sources, machine learning algorithms, and AI technologies, this chapter elucidates how smart parking systems leverage intelligent data collection and analysis to enhance operational efficiency and effectiveness. Through the convergence of IoT, machine learning, and AI, smart parking systems are poised to revolutionize urban mobility and drive sustainable urban development.
... Smart cities are rapidly emerging as a transformative model for urban living, capitalizing on cutting-edge technologies to improve the well-being of residents (Joo, 2023). At the core of a smart city infrastructure, smart services and applications are being developed with interoperability in mind, enabling seamless communication and collaboration among diverse systems and devices (Choi, 2022;Kirimtat, Krejcar, Kertesz, & Tasgetiren, 2020). ...
... Take Singapore, for example. The government has implemented policies to promote the development of the smart economy in smart city projects, as evidenced by the Smart Nation Initiative, which aims to transform Singapore into a smart city and smart country through the use of digital technology and a thriving smart economy (Smart Nation and Digital Government Office [SNDGO], 2018;Joo, 2023). This initiative affects overall economic benefits, having a positive impact on the local economy and creating new job opportunities in various sectors (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development [UNCTAD], 2021). ...
The smart economy integrates smart technologies across all aspects of life, driving digital economic growth, enhancing security, and fostering competitiveness (Kumar & Dahiya, 2017). In Thailand, the concept of smart cities has been embraced, holding the potential for improved urban living (Thinphanga & Friend, 2023). This research provides a framework to guide Thailand’s smart city development, aiming to enhance economic growth and residents’ quality of life. Employing qualitative methods, this study engaged eight key informants through purposive sampling to understand the dynamics of Thailand’s smart cities and economy. Utilizing content analysis and NVivo software, the research identified essential elements for the success of smart cities in Thailand. Critical is the development of digital infrastructure like high-speed Internet and cloud services for nationwide access. Additionally, adopting technologies such as Big Data Analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) is vital for improving services and enhancing life quality. Effective public-private partnerships (PPPs) and addressing digital gaps, skill shortages, cybersecurity threats, and regulatory challenges are also crucial. The study underscores the importance of digital education and skills for future readiness. Ultimately, Thailand’s shift towards smart cities could significantly improve economic and social outcomes, provided these strategic areas are addressed.
... Similarly, India's initiatives like the National AI Strategy underscore stakeholder empowerment, skilling and ethical guardrails (Chatterjee, 2020). Singapore's pioneering Model AI Governance Framework is another example that details institutional vehicles for responsible AI deployment ( Joo, 2023). Such exemplars provide useful policy templates for Nigeria to consider and localise. ...
This paper examines the potential for using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to boost civic participation in Nigeria’s developing e-government ecosystem. Emerging generative technologies like ChatGPT demonstrate intriguing capabilities to make governance more interactive and engaging through conversational interfaces. Thoughtfully implemented AI tools could increase access and understanding of e-government, particularly for underserved groups. However, risks around bias, privacy, security and capability limitations pose challenges for public sector applications. Additionally, Nigeria’s substantial digital divides and defective trust in government institutions hamper e-government participation currently. This paper analyses opportunities and limitations for applying generative AI to advance civic engagement given Nigeria’s unique socio-cultural context. Findings suggest that while AI holds promise, targeted strategies focused on inclusion, accessibility, education and institutional legitimacy building are critical to realise benefits. Cautious optimism, human-centric design and responsible governance frameworks are needed to employ generative systems successfully. If challenges are addressed, AI could open innovative possibilities for energising civic participation. But further research and controlled pilot applications are required to determine optimal implementation.
... Yet, the technological underpinnings of Singapore's islandness have caused others to suggest that 'Singapore was technically already a smart city' (Joo, 2021, 6-7, emphasis added) that boasted a number of forms of technological augmentation designed to improve the quality of life for residents. What the Smart Nation did usher in was a bureaucratic reorganisation, with two agenciesthe Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO) and GovTech (the technical implementation arm of the government) being formed to implement various initiatives according to a 'whole-of-government' approach (Hoe, 2016;Joo, 2021;Kong & Woods, 2018). ...
This paper foregrounds the importance of underlying territorial formations in realising a vision of the smart city. It argues that as a political technology of the state, territory should be understood as a platform upon which data works and the smart city unfolds. In this view, island territories – of which bordered city-states like Singapore provide paradigmatic examples – provide an integral, yet hitherto unexplored, component in the realisation of urban “smartness”. We illustrate these theoretical arguments through an analysis of how the territorial constraints that characterise Singapore’s island platform enable the state to accurately and effectively realise its vision of a smart city. As both an island city and a city-state, Singapore’s territory is a political technology that is just as important in realising the state’s vision of smartness as the adoption of digital technologies and the management of data. Drawing on 27 interviews with 31 architects of Singapore’s Smart Nation, we empirically explore the integration of data, city and territory through the platform; the “hardness” of data and the “softness” of the city; and the hyper-terrestrialisation of “smartness” in Singapore. Overall, we demonstrate how the idea of territory as a platform provides a generative counterpoint to critiques of platform urbanism.
... Despite large differences in the degree and type of SC development around the world, one commonality is that SCs should be people-centric: that is, they should recognize and meet the needs and desires of citizens for their well-being and quality of life (El Barachi et al., 2022;Ji et al., 2021;Lehtiö et al., 2022;Leung & Lee, 2023;B.W. Wirtz et al., 2021;Yeh, 2017). People-centric development has become a global trend (Francisco et al., 2022), as evidenced by citizen participation in urban planning in the EU (Cortés-Cediel et al., 2021), citizen-centric governance structures in the US (Hu & Zheng, 2021), and citizen-driven SC development in Singapore and Seoul (Joo, 2021). ...
The development of sustainable smart city (SC) services is often carried out with limited resources, but there is little discussion about the strategic priority of promoting SC development from the citizens’ perspective. This study developed a decision-making approach to determine the supply and demand priority of SC services using utility and need theories, with Hong Kong as a case study. The results show that smart environment services should be prioritized for all population groups, while the differences in priority among older adults, people with lower digital literacy, and people with lower income were relatively small. On the one hand, the supply of SC services should be prioritized for those that are closely linked to citizens’ daily lives, have a long-term impact on communities, and are targeted to large user groups. On the other hand, priority should be given to those services that meet citizens’ demands for physiological, safety, and self-actualization needs. This study enriches the theoretical framework of people-centric SC research through the innovative integration of Bradley-Terry and rank-ordered logit models for determining the development priority for SC services, which can serve as a practical decision-making tool for policy makers to effectively allocate resources for sustainable SC development.
... This system also empowers local actors to apply their expertise to local smart government projects. Despite being state-steered, this approach combines authoritarian logics with the sociopolitical dynamics of the "neoliberalism-asdevelopmental" strategy (Ho, 2017), resulting in a more trust-based local collaboration ecosystem while avoiding the detrimental effects of neoliberal practices, such as surveillance and data colonialism (Joo, 2023;Kong & Woods, 2018). ...
... The Singaporean government wants to offer a wide range of smart services to the general public, but their journey is still in its early stages because the majority of these services were only recently launched (many of them as trials) in the early 2010s, and many more are still in the planning stages in preparation for implementation in conjunction with crosscutting Smart Nation initiatives. Joo [12] explains that the smart cities of Singapore and Seoul, are two important Asian metropolises with a history of state-led developmentalism. It analyses the most recent smart city initiatives, trajectories, and policy goals of the two cities. ...
The motivation of smart cities is to improve the standard of living of citizens and enhance the use of technology in sustainable city services. A city’s sustainability can be measured using various sets of smart indicators. This study will analyse urban sustainability indicators as a research problem for ten smart cities. The review of smart cities will focus on the Internet of things (IoT), Mobile devices, and Artificial intelligence technologies (Sensors in street lights, smart homes) that help our citizens transform from rural to urban areas towards sustainability. This research uses a qualitative framework for the taxonomy of the literature for the terms “smart city” and “sustainability” Further, the characteristics, critical technology, and IOT application for mobility are elaborated upon. Finally, we discuss ten smart city review proposals reports, based on their sustainability indicators around the world. Concluding and Future studies could focus on using sustainable indicators for developing smart cities in India.
... Once located, users can unlock the bikes using a mobile app or a membership card. These bikes are designed for easy riding and typically come equipped with features like adjustable seats, baskets, and built-in GPS systems (Joo, 2023). ...
... Once located, users can unlock the bikes using a mobile app or a membership card. These bikes are designed for easy riding and typically come equipped with features like adjustable seats, baskets, and built-in GPS systems (Joo, 2023). ...
... However, there is a lack of research on how real-time spatial-temporal movements of the population affect micro mobility ridership in the pandemic. As Seoul as one of leading smart cities collects data related to urban mobility servicesusages of bus ridership, metro ridership, and micro mobility at each station levelin addition to mobile phone-based floating population data and provides them as open data (Joo, 2021;Lee et al., 2018;Lim et al., 2018), the changes of micro mobility usages in response to COVID-19 and the role of micro mobility in post-COVID can be accessed. To address these gaps and the importance of micro mobility as an alternative public transportation solution during and after COVID-19 in urban areas, this research aims to study how COVID-19 affects bike-sharing services and how other factors impact bike-sharing ridership in Seoul without nationwide lockdown during the pandemic. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing restrictions have had a significant impact on urban mobility. As micro mobility offers less contact with other people, docked or dockless e-scooters and bike-sharing have emerged as alternative urban mobility solutions. However, little empirical research has been conducted to investigate how COVID-19 might affect micro mobility usage, especially in a major Asian city. This research aims to study how COVID-19 and other related factors have affected bike-sharing ridership in Seoul, South Korea. Using detailed urban telecommunication data, this study explored the spatial-temporal patterns of a docked bike-sharing system in Seoul. Stepwise negative binomial panel regressions were conducted to find out how COVID-19 and various built environments might affect bike-sharing ridership in the city. Our results showed that open space areas and green infrastructure had statistically significant positive impacts on bike-sharing usage. Compared to registered population factors, real-time telecommunication floating population had a significant positive relationship with both bike trip count and trip duration. The model showed that telecommunication floating population has a significant positive impact on bike-sharing trip counts and trip duration. These findings could offer useful guidelines for emerging shared mobility planning during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
... Singapur'un güçlü ve müdahaleci devleti, 1959'dan beri iktidarda kalan PAP (People's Action Party)'ın siyasi liderliği altında egemenliğini sürdürmektedir. Ayrıca, küçük bir kent devleti olarak Singapur'un ulusal kalkınma hedefleri, o zamandan beri küresel kent olma ve yerel kentsel gelişim arayışları ile yakından uyumludur (Joo, 2021). Uyguladığı başarılı politikalar ile Singapur, büyük bir küresel ticaret, finans ve ulaşım merkezine dönüşmüştür. ...
Teknolojik gelişmelere paralel olarak kentler hızlı bir dönüşüm sürecine girmiştir. Bu dönüşümle birlikte, kentte yaşayanların talepleri ve beklentileri de sürekli güncellenmiştir. Yöneticilerin, politika üretim sürecine bakış açısı, vatandaşlar ile kurduğu ilişki, paydaşları karar mekanizmalarına katma süreci ve hizmet sunum biçimi değişimlerden bazılarıdır. Kentlerde yaşanan bu değişim ve dönüşümün yansıması olarak akıllı kent kavramı son yıllarda popüler tartışma konusu haline gelmiştir. Bağımsızlığını 1991 yılında kazanan Estonya, gerek blok zincir teknolojisini kullanarak gerekse dijital vatandaşı oluşturmaya yönelik çalışmalar yürüterek başarı sağlamıştır. Asya kıtasının en güneyinde yer alan, doğal kaynaklar yönünden fakir olan ancak günümüzde dünyanın önemli ticaret merkezi konumunda bulunan Singapur örnek bir dijital dönüşüm performansı sergilemiştir. Bu yönüyle bu iki ülke incelemeye değer örnek olarak seçilmiştir. Estonya’nın ve Singapur’un nasıl bir dijital dönüşüm yaşadığı ve kısa sürede gerçekleşen bu dönüşümde, diğer kentlere ilham olabilecek uygulamaların neler olduğu sorularına yanıtlar aranmıştır. Estonya’da, özelikle Tallinn kentinde, akıllı kentin akıllı ekonomi, akıllı hareketlilik, akıllı çevre, akıllı insan, akıllı yönetişim ve akıllı yaşam bileşenlerine yönelik olarak projeler gerçekleştirilmiştir. Estonya’nın öne çıkan akıllı ve dijital projeleri arasında; temassız mobil ödeme, otonom araç, Üç Boyutlu Kentsel Bilgi Modeli, SmartEnCity Girişimi, dijital imza, mobil kimlik kartı, e-ikamet, DigiDoc, e-kabine, e-kanun, e-vergi, e-okul, çevrimiçi oylama, x-road veri katmanı ve Telliskivi Loomelinnak Dönüşüm Projesi yer almaktadır. Singapur’un gerçekleştirdiği akıllı projeler ise; Lab on Wheels ve SkillsFuture programları, HealthHub, OneService, SafeEntry, MyTransport.SG mobil uygulamaları, Auto Rider Otonom Aracı ve üç boyutlu baskı merkezidir. Çalışmanın temel amacı, Singapur ve Estonya’da gerçekleştirilen akıllı veya dijital uygulamaları saptayarak geliştirilen projeler üzerinden karşılaştırmalı değerlendirme yapmaktır. Çalışmada, nitel araştırma yöntemlerinden biri olan örnek durum incelemesi yöntemi kullanılmıştır.
... Singapur'un güçlü ve müdahaleci devleti, 1959'dan beri iktidarda kalan PAP (People's Action Party)'ın siyasi liderliği altında egemenliğini sürdürmektedir. Ayrıca, küçük bir kent devleti olarak Singapur'un ulusal kalkınma hedefleri, o zamandan beri küresel kent olma ve yerel kentsel gelişim arayışları ile yakından uyumludur (Joo, 2021). Uyguladığı başarılı politikalar ile Singapur, büyük bir küresel ticaret, finans ve ulaşım merkezine dönüşmüştür. ...
Estonia, which gained its independence in 1991, has carried out studies to create a digital citizen by using blockchain technology. Singapore, which is located in the southernmost part of the Asian continent and is poor in terms of natural resources, but is now an important trade center in the world, has shown a successful digital transformation performance. In this respect, these countries have been chosen as examples worth examining. Answers were sought to the questions of what kind of digital transformation Estonia and Singapore are going through and what practices that can inspire other cities in this transformation that took place in a short time. In Estonia, especially in Tallinn, projects have been carried out for the smart economy, smart mobility, smart environment, smart people, smart governance and smart life components of the smart city. Estonia's prominent smart and digital projects; contactless mobile payment, autonomous vehicle, 3D Urban Information Model, SmartEnCity Initiative, digital signature, mobile identity card, e-residence, DigiDoc, e-cabinet, e-law, e-tax, e-school, online voting, x- road data layer is the Telliskivi Loomelinnak Transformation Project. Smart projects realized by Singapore are; Lab on Wheels and SkillsFuture programs, HealthHub, OneService, SafeEntry, MyTransport.SG mobile apps, Auto Rider Autonomous Vehicle and 3D printing center. The main purpose of the study is to make a comparative evaluation on the projects developed by identifying smart or digital applications realized in Singapore and Estonia. In the study, the case study method, which is one of the qualitative research methods, was used.
Every year the list lengthens of cities with some sort of 'smart city' public policy. In some, it emerges as the latest in a long line of urban digital and information communication policies. In others, the introduction of the notion of the 'smart city' marks a departure from past approaches to public policy. Additionally, the more studies emerge of actual smart city policies, then the less definitional agreement there seems to be. Nevertheless, that we have witnessed in the last two decades the 'repeated instance' of smart cities emerging in cities around the world seems incontrovertible. Like so much urban public policy in the current era, how a city arrives at, and makes up, its own version of the 'smart policy' often involves comparison and referencing. This is the work of actually existing urban comparisons, those comparisons performed by urban policy makers. This paper draws upon an international comparative research project involving the cases of Barcelona, Calgary, Singapore, Seoul, Taipei, and Toronto. It argues that it is hard to overestimate the place of cities in the world and the world in cities when understood through the lens of smart city public policymaking. In the cases of the six cities, comparison and referencing of other smart city policies constituted a mode of governance and shaped each city's policies, as informational infrastructures promoted inter-urban comparisons. This demands we attend to both the routes (their journeys)-and the the roots (their origins) dialectically present in any particular city's smart city public policy.
This article explores the strategic role of digital marketing in enhancing the sustainable attractiveness of smart cities, with a specific focus on Casablanca, Morocco. By integrating digital technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics, and artificial intelligence, Casablanca aims to address urban challenges related to sustainability, including transportation, waste management, and energy efficiency. This study employs a mixed-method approach, combining qualitative interviews with urban planners and digital marketing experts, alongside quantitative analysis of smart city performance indicators. Five smart cities across different continents were selected to provide comprehensive insights and contextualize the findings for Casablanca. The results demonstrate that targeted digital marketing strategies, when well-implemented, play a crucial role in improving citizen engagement, environmental awareness, and resource optimization, while reinforcing Casablanca's position as a sustainable smart city in Africa.
Giderek artan kent nüfusu, kaynakların verimli kullanılmasını zorunlu hale getirmiştir. Bunu sağlamak için ise teknolojinin etkin bir şekilde kullanıldığı “akıllı kent” kavramı günümüzde önem kazanmıştır. Akıllı kent kapsamında ekolojik, sosyo-kültürel ve ekonomik parametrelerin etkin yönetimi kentler için artık bir ihtiyaç haline gelmiştir. Akıllı kentlerde bu yönetim ihtiyacını karşılayan akıllı yönetişim hem etkin bir yönetim fırsatı sunmakta, hem de uygulamaları ile kentlerin sürdürülebilirliği ve insani gelişimi açısından da önemli bir rol oynamaktadır. Bu çalışmada sürdürülebilirlik açısından akıllı yönetişim uygulamalarının akıllı kentlerdeki rolünün ve insani gelişime olan etkisinin değerlendirilmesi amaçlanmaktadır. Çalışma kapsamında birer akıllı yönetişim uygulamaları olan e-belediye, akıllı şebeke, coğrafi bilgi sistemleri, akıllı ulaşım yönetim sistemleri ve sosyal medya platformları incelenmiş ve sürdürülebilirliğin üç boyutu olan ekolojik, sosyo-kültürel ve ekonomik açılardan incelenmiştir. Buna göre vatandaşların çoğu hizmet tiplerinde kurumlara fiziki gidiş zorunluluğunu ortadan kaldırdığı, dolayısıyla sağlanan yakıt ve zaman tasarrufu nedeniyle e – belediye uygulaması, kentlerin her geçen gün artan enerji ihtiyaçlarını etkin bir şekilde izleyip yönetilmesini sağlayan akıllı şebeke uygulaması, kentlerin sağlıklı bir şehir planı oluşturulmasına imkân tanıyan ve çevrimiçi uygulamalara altyapı sunan coğrafi bilgi sistemleri, vatandaşların daha rahat ve hızlı yolculuk yapmasına olanak tanıyan akıllı ulaşım yönetim sistemleri, son olarak vatandaşlar ve yerel yönetim arasında şeffaf bir iletişim kanalı kurulmasında önemli bir rol oynayan sosyal medya platformları ekolojik, sosyo-kültürel ve ekonomik açıdan akıllı kentlerin sürdürülebilirliğini ve insani gelişimini etkilemektedir.
The study examines the evolution of the urban environment in the context of the third and, in the XXI century, the fourth industrial revolution. Special attention is paid to the changes taking place in big cities under the influence of digitalization, modern information technologies and social needs of society. The work describes the formation of communities and communities that arise in the virtual space and are transferred to the urban environment. Exhibitions, as part of the fundamental space of large cities, are a public metamodern filled with cultural and innovative capitalist forms. For the first time, the concept of the chronotope and its role as a driving force uniting time and space in the formation of culture, public life and the development of urban spaces is used. The study highlights changes in social connections, the emergence of new forms of communication and the impact of technological progress on urban dynamics. In general, the paper analyzes the evolution of the urban environment and exhibition activities under the influence of modern technologies, socio-cultural changes and identifies key trends and challenges facing modern cities.
The concept of a smart city is synonymous with the enhancement and enrichment of quality of life. Smart city holds the promise of digitization of a city’s systems and processes, revolutionizes the green city concept, and has the potential to revert the global warming phenomenon. It ensures democratizing the data securely. Although smart city projects vary in their scopes and scales across the globe, in general, the fundamental building blocks of a smart city are consistent. In this chapter we review the common blocks and discuss challenges to be addressed in the future.
Smart cities have become the future of the world. The development of a smart city is dependent on the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) to serve the needs of its citizens efficiently. This paper provides an overview of how data analytics and IoT is implemented in Smart City and how energy consumption can be reduced through this implementation of data analytics. The paper also discusses the challenges that need to be addressed when integrating various domains in the smart city ecosystem.
In the era of rapid urbanization and technological progress, smart cities offer a promising solution to multifaceted global challenges, leveraging advanced technologies to optimize resources and enhance the quality of life; however, this interconnectedness also exposes them to novel vulnerabilities, particularly in the face of natural and man-made disasters, necessitating inventive strategies to ensure resilience against cyber threats and extreme weather events. This article delves into the exploration of smart cities’ diverse aspects and the categories of disasters they face, followed by an analysis of strategic mitigation approaches and their underlying criteria; it subsequently introduces the Multi-Criteria Decision-Making methodology, particularly Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), as a robust tool for systematic evaluation and prioritization of disaster management strategies in the increasingly complex landscape. The study’s analysis of relative weights underscores the pivotal role of Resilience Enhancement and Communication Redundancy as primary considerations in evaluating disaster management strategies for smart cities, while other criteria such as Accuracy and Timeliness, Scalability and Adaptability, Cost-effectiveness, Ethical and Privacy Considerations, and Training and Skill Requirements assume varying degrees of importance in supporting roles, providing valuable insights into the decision-making process. The assessment of alternative strategies highlights their prioritization in effective disaster management for smart cities, with notable emphasis on Citizen Engagement and Education, Early Warning Systems, and data analytics; further strategies such as Integrated Communication Systems, Resilient Infrastructure Design, Drones and Robotics, Artificial Intelligence Algorithms, and IoT-enabled Sensors and Monitoring exhibit varying degrees of significance, offering insights into their roles and potential contributions to disaster management strategies based on their weighted sums. This research has practical significance, guiding stakeholders like urban planners, policymakers, and disaster management professionals to enhance smart city resilience and prioritize strategies based on critical factors, ultimately enabling effective disaster management in smart cities amid 21st-century challenges.
Smart business is the advances and applications that are utilized to gather, coordinate, analyze, and show commerce within the organization. The smart business may be profound and comprehensive information of components such as customers, competitors, financial environment, operations, and organizational processes, which influence the quality of administration choices within the organization. Smart management enables all of an organization's senior managers to make informed decisions about everything from research and development, marketing, and investment tactics to long-term strategies. Therefore, the success of smart businesses in the new era of success depends on various parameters that should be paid special attention to. For this reason, the most important key indicators of success in smart organizations have been evaluated in this research. In order to analyze the results, a fuzzy decision-making method has been used. The results show that adequate budget and infrastructure growth is the most important critical success factor in developing smart businesses.
The use of ICT to optimize urban processes, activities, efficiency and effectiveness of services turns cities into smart. Smart cities make it necessary to plan, monitor and analyze the city, except for the routine functions of the city. The study examined what smart city research projects are in five representative smart cities (London, New York, Singapore, Barcelona, and Istanbul) and whether there are similarities or differences in background assumptions. The literature used has a global reach; cities around the world have been chosen for comparison. By evaluating the existing literature, it has been evaluated that smart cities are the most successful and the weakest issues. Despite the centrality of New York and London's smart city policies ; they are fairly superior in economic competition. Public participation in smart city projects is already weak in Singapore and Istanbul. Barcelona has a more participatory policy than other cities, but it needs to develop a smart governance perspective. The study concludes with how the smart city ideology achieves its goals. The study adds value to smart city research by a critical look at the subject. Combining the results of practical smart city initiatives, it concludes the practicality and usefulness of smart city development.
This special issue contributes to deepening and nuancing our understanding of smart cities – as they actually happen -–by paying particular attention to the continuities of smart city projects and especially the socio-spatial specificities that both define and are defined by constructed environments. The articles in this special issue are not inattentive to discontinuities. Smart city projects can lead to shifts, changes, and disruptions in existing trajectories by moving attention and resources to new or hitherto underprioritized services and neighbourhoods. Smart city projects may also reinforce existing inequalities both politically, economically, and spatially. In this sense, smart city as a policy and practice does not differ much from other urban development concepts that come and go. What matters is what happens when it takes root in a particular locality. How does the smart city insert itself, adapt to and alter existing practices and ways of thinking about urban development? Are existing relations of power reinforced or reconfigured? Does the introduction of the smart city concept alter spatial relations between centre and periphery?
Concepts like 'creative city', 'world city', and 'eco city' arrive with loud celebration, but fade in just a few years. In recent years, 'smart city' has been a buzzword. As each fad emerges, urbanists debate its meaning and implications. However, why so many urban concepts circulate at all is rarely focused on. This study attempts to answer this question based on the Marxian view of the built environment as a fixed capital. We focus on the differences between the built environment and other types of fixed capital, and show how these differences render capital circulation in the built environment sector more fragile. We claim that such fragility cannot be fixed within the circuit of capital, so external intervention is necessary and deployment of catchy urban concepts is a resorted method of such intervention.
Seoul has become one of the most wired and tech-savvy cities on earth and a leader in the smart city movement. It has the highest broadband penetration rates and fastest Internet speeds of all major cities. Seoul’s e-governance system (including expansive online government services, free access to vast databases, and opportunities for electronic citizen engagement) is commonly rated as the world’s most advanced. In 2020, Seoul Metropolitan Government pledged to advance the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” by installing 50,000 new Internet of Things (IoT) sensors in bridges, roads, railways, and buildings, in addition to installing nearly 20,000 CCTV cameras with state-of-the-art communicative capacity so they could automatically alert police or firefighters of dangerous situations. Seoul’s vision is of a digitally interconnected city, bristling with sensors on a 5G network (already transitioning to 6G) that can effectively manage public health, fire, traffic, safety, and environmental conditions. This hyperconnected smart city is designed to support innovations ranging from widespread commercialization of autonomous vehicles, remote monitoring of vulnerable senior citizens, remote real-time visualization of the entire city in 3D to help emergency responders, early warnings of impending structural failures, and even helping drivers check for open street parking spaces before they arrive at a destination.
The diversity of smart city case studies presented in this special issue demonstrates the need for provincialised understandings of smart cities that account for cities’ worlding strategies. Case studies drawn from North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia show that ‘the smart city’ takes very diverse forms, serves very diverse objectives, and is embedded in complex power geometries that vary from city to city. Case studies are a critical strategy for understanding phenomena in context, yet they present their own epistemological and ontological limitations. We argue for a more-than-Global-North smart city research agenda focused on the comparative analysis of smart cities, an agenda that foregrounds the conjunctural geographies of relationships and processes shaping these cities.
Despite its growing ubiquitous presence, the smart city continues to struggle for definitional clarity and practical import. In response, this study interrogates the smart city as a global discourse network by examining a collection of key texts associated with cities worldwide. Using a list of 5,553 cities, a systematic webometric exercise was conducted to measure hit counts produced by searching for ‘smart city’. Consequently, 27 cities with the highest validated hit counts were selected. Next, 346 online texts were collected from among the top 20 hits across each of the selected cities, and comprehensively analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively using AntConc software. The findings confirm, on one hand, the presence of a strong globalising narrative which emphasises world cities as ‘best practice’ models. On the other, they reveal the smart city’s association – beyond the quest for incremental, technical improvements of current urban systems and processes – with a pronounced transformative governance agenda. The article identifies five critical junctures (interlocking discourses) at the heart of the evolving smart city discourse regime; these shed light on the ongoing boundary work in which the smart city is engaged and which contain significant unresolved tensions. The paper concludes with a discussion of resulting implications for research, policy and practice.
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-one 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 digitising the built environment.
Collectively, the practices of smart urbanism raise fundamental questions about the sustainability, liveability and resilience of the 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.
Over the past decade, much has been written about the potential of smart urbanism to bring about various and lasting forms of betterment. The embedding of digital technologies within urban infrastructures has been well documented, and the efficiencies of smart models of urban governance and management have been lauded. More recently, however, the discourse has been labelled ‘hegemonic’, and accused of developing a view of smart technology that is blinkered by its failure to critique its socio-political effects. By focusing on the case of Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ initiative, this paper embraces the paradoxes at the heart of smart urbanism and, in doing so, interrogates the tension between ideology and praxis, efficiency and control, access and choice, and smart governance and smart citizenship. It also demonstrates how such tensions are (re)produced through ‘fourthspace’ – the digitally enabled spaces of urbanism that are co-created, and that contribute to an expansion and diffusion of social and political responsibility. It ends by suggesting how such spaces have the potential to radically transform not just the urban environment, but also the role of government and citizens in designing urban futures.
Reacting to critiques that the smart city is overly technocratic and instrumental, companies and cities have reframed their initiatives as ‘citizen-centric’. However, what ‘citizen-centric’ means in practice is rarely articulated. We draw on and extend Sherry Arnstein’s seminal work on participation in planning and renewal programmes to create the ‘Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation’—a conceptual tool to unpack the diverse ways in which the smart city frames citizens. We use this scaffold to measure smart citizen inclusion, participation, and empowerment in smart city initiatives in Dublin, Ireland. Our analysis illustrates how most ‘citizen-centric’ smart city initiatives are rooted in stewardship, civic paternalism, and a neoliberal conception of citizenship that prioritizes consumption choice and individual autonomy within a framework of state and corporate defined constraints that prioritize market-led solutions to urban issues, rather than being grounded in civil, social and political rights and the common good. We conclude that significant normative work is required to rethink ‘smart citizens’ and ‘smart citizenship’ and to remake smart cities if they are to truly become ‘citizen-centric’.
Growing practice interest in smart cities has led to calls for a less technology-oriented and more citizen-centric approach. In response, this article investigates the citizenship mode promulgated by the smart city standard of the British Standards Institution. The analysis uses the concept of citizenship regime and a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to discern key discursive frames defining the smart city and the particular citizenship dimensions brought into play. The results confirm an explicit citizenship rationale guiding the smart city (standard), although this displays some substantive shortcomings and contradictions. The article concludes with recommendations for both further theory and practice development.
This communication explores the unique challenge of contemporary urban problems and the technologies that vendors have to solve them. An acknowledged gap exists between widely referenced technologies that city managers utilize to optimize scheduled operations and those that reflect the capability of spontaneity in search of nuance–laden solutions to problems related to the reflexivity of entire systems. With regulation, the first issue type succumbs to rehearsed preparation whereas the second hinges on extemporaneous practice. One is susceptible to ready-made technology applications while the other requires systemic deconstruction and solution-seeking redesign. Research suggests that smart city vendors are expertly configured to address the former, but less adept at and even ill-configured to react to and address the latter. Departures from status quo responses to systemic problems depend on formalizing metrics that enable city monitoring and data collection to assess “smart investments”, regardless of the size of the intervention, and to anticipate the need for designs that preserve the individuality of urban settings as they undergo the transformation to become “smart”.
As visions of smart urbanism gain traction around the world, it is crucial that we question the benefits that an increasingly technologised urbanity promise. It is not about the technology, but bettering peoples’ lives, insist smart city advocates. In this paper, I question the progressive potential of the smart city drawing on the case of Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative. Using the case studies of the smart home and ‘learning to code’ movement, I highlight the limits of such ‘smart’ interventions as they are stunted by the neoliberal-developmental logics of the state, thereby facilitating authoritarian consolidation in Singapore. As such, this paper distinguishes itself from previous works on the neoliberal smart city by situated smart urbanism within the socio-political dynamics of neoliberalism-as-developmental strategy. For smart urbanism to better peoples’ everyday lives, technological ‘solutionism’ needs to be replaced with more human-centric framings and understandings of urban challenges.
This article discusses the idea of city as a platform. The analysis focuses on the forms and implications of citizen involvement in publicly-supported participatory innovation platforms that facilitate urban economic development in the welfare society context. The discussion opens with a review of the smart city discourse, which in the context of economic development policy translates into cities’ need to support innovativeness by creating smart environments. Participatory innovation platform is a prime example of such an environment. The empirical section discusses three cases, those of the Finnish cities of Helsinki, Tampere, and Oulu. The analysis shows that platformization in the first half of the 2010s became a strategic focal area supported by national and EU programs. Platforms are used to support both urban revitalization and economic development, of which the former is based on representative and the latter on instrumental modes of participation. Platforms are well integrated with city governments, even though they vary greatly in terms of organizational forms and scopes. Democratic culture, welfarism, and redistributive policy provide contextual support for platformization by strengthening social inclusion, taming the growth machine, and easing the tensions between pro-growth and anti-growth coalitions.
The Korean government, like many in Asia, is actively building green cities from scratch—the most famous being Sejong, Songdo, and Cheongna. All these are considered models of green cities and are characterized by similar networked smart technological systems. This research builds on recent scholarly discourse by Anthony Townsend on smart technologies and urban planning, and Sofia T. Shwayri and Simon Joss on the “ubiquitous-eco-city” phenomena in Korea. In particular, it aims to extend Shwayri's hypothesis that the model is developed for export by uncovering the goals of the green city model actors. By tracing the national government's economic growth ICT strategy—“IT839”—and its key industry stakeholders, KT Telecommunications, this paper illuminates how Korea's green city model is being driven by an agenda of horizontal technology transfer in which the government has aimed to extend its traditional markets, and create a new paradigm for economic growth.
This study approaches the politics of urban development from within the framework of the emergence of a new multi-scalar growth regime and the path-dependence of the Korean developmental state. Through a case study of the Songdo New City development in South Korea, this study looks at how the scalar division of labor among various actors has interacted with the emergence of a multi-scalar growth regime. We focus on the logic by which different scales of governmental and non-governmental actors cooperate and, at the same time, compete with one another for authority over economic development. Our findings demonstrate, first, that the new regime resulted from the emergence of downward state-rescaling to the local scale and of private business as a key actor. Second, the regime actors have been involved in scalar tensions and have constantly negotiated the scalar divisions of labor among them. This research provides a contextualized example of a spatio-temporal logic in which statehood has been transformed into a network. KEY WORDS: growth regime, the politics of urban development, rescaling, Songdo New City, scalar tension Introduction This paper analyses the politics of urban development of the Songdo New City in South Korea under the lens of regime theory, 1 teasing out the complex and evolving
Smart urbanism is emerging at the intersection of visions for the future of urban places, new technologies and infrastructures. Smart urbanism discourses are deeply rooted in seductive and normative visions of the future where digital technology stands as the primary driver for change. Yet our understanding of the opportunities, challenges, and implications of smart urbanism is limited. Research in this field is in its infancy, fragmented along disciplinary lines and often based on single city case studies. As a result, we lack both the theoretical insight and empirical evidence required to assess the implications of this potentially transformative phenomenon. Given the significant implications of smart urbanism there is an urgent need to critically engage with why, how, for whom and with what consequences smart urbanism is emerging in different urban contexts. The aim of this review is to unpack the different logics and rationales behind smart urbanism discourses and proposals, and in this way understand the ways by which imaginaries of urban futures are currently being constructed, along with their socio-technical and political implications for future research priorities.
Despite the ongoing discussion of the recent years, there is no agreed definition of a ‘smart city’, while strategic planning in this field is still largely unexplored. Inspired by this, the purpose of this paper was to identify the forces shaping the smart city conception and, by doing so, to begin replacing the currently abstract image of what it means to be one. The paper commences by dividing the recent history of smart cities into two large sections – urban futures and the knowledge and innovation economy. The urban futures strand shows that technology has always played an important role in forward-looking visions about the city of the future. The knowledge and innovation economy strand shows that recent technological advancements have introduced a whole new level of knowledge management and innovation capabilities in the urban context. The paper proceeds to explicate the current technology push and demand pull for smart city solutions. On one hand, technology advances rapidly and creates a booming market of smart city products and solutions around it. On the other hand, there is demand on the side of cities that seek to address the problems of efficiency and sustainability, making the ground fertile for a smart city product economy. The research route of this paper eventually allows the identification of the underlying – and often forgotten – principles of what it means to be ‘smart’ in an urban context and yields conclusions about strategic planning for the development of smart cities today.
Driven by the profit motive of global high-technology companies, in collusion with the trend towards city governance being
wedded to a competitive form of ‘urban entrepreneurialism’, has left little room for ordinary people to participate in the
smart city. The article seeks to make a two-fold critical intervention into the dominance of this corporate smart city model.
It does this by first looking at how we currently understand the smart city and critiques the growing trend towards corporate
and entrepreneurial governance versions. A second form of intervention concerns considering smartness from different perspectives
emanating from small-scale and fledgling examples of participatory and citizen-based types of smart initiatives.
This commentary characterises and critiques research on smart cities. I argue that much of the writing and rhetoric about
smart cities seeks to appear non-ideological, commonsensical and pragmatic. More critically orientated scholarship, while
making vital conceptual and political interventions, presently has four shortcomings that inhibit making sense of and refashioning
the smart city agenda: the lack of detailed genealogies of the concept and initiatives, the use of canonical examples and
one-size fits all narratives, an absence of in-depth empirical case studies of specific smart city initiatives and comparative
research that contrasts smart city developments in different locales and weak collaborative engagement with various stakeholders.
These shortcomings are elaborated, accompanied with suggestions for addressing them.
This paper grounds the critique of the ‘smart city’ in its historical and geographical context. Adapting Brenner and Theodore’s
notion of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’, we suggest a greater attention be paid to the ‘actually existing smart city’,
rather than the exceptional or paradigmatic smart cities of Songdo, Masdar and Living PlanIT Valley. Through a closer analysis
of cases in Louisville and Philadelphia, we demonstrate the utility of understanding the material effects of these policies
in actual cities around the world, with a particular focus on how and from where these policies have arisen, and how they
have unevenly impacted the places that have adopted them.
This chapter examines the experience of making Songdo City, a much discussed global model of eco- and smart urbanism in recent years. By examining the development history and the role of main stakeholders, the chapter ascertains that Songdo City represents the territorial manifestation of the legacy of the Korean developmental state that has been internalizing the neoliberal logics of capital accumulation. In Songdo City, green and smart urbanisms have conjoined to produce entrepreneurial and speculative urbanisation that centers on real estate speculation and state-led investment in the built environment, which are the key characteristics of developmentalist urbanisation in Korea. Songdo City presents a segregated and exclusive space, catering for the needs of the rich and the powerful and becoming their own version of an urban utopia. However, the heavy reliance of Songdo City on real estate investment would turn out to be its own weakness.
On 4 November 2011, the trademark ‘smarter cities’ was officially registered as belonging to IBM. This was an important milestone in a struggle between IT companies over visibility and legitimacy in the smart city market. Drawing on actor-network theory and critical planning theory, the paper analyzes IBM's smarter city campaign and finds it to be storytelling, aimed at making the company an ‘obligatory passage point’ in the implementation of urban technologies. Our argument unfolds in three parts. We first trace the emergence of the term ‘smart city’ in the public sphere. Secondly, we show that IBM's influential story about smart cities is far from novel but rather mobilizes and revisits two long-standing tropes: systems thinking and utopianism. Finally, we conclude, first by addressing two critical questions raised by this discourse: technocratic reductionism and the introduction of new moral imperatives in urban management; and second, by calling for the crafting of alternative smart city stories.
‘Smart cities’ is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the former and, drawing on a number of examples, details how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’. Such data, smart city advocates argue enables real-time analysis of city life, new modes of urban governance, and provides the raw material for envisioning and enacting more efficient, sustainable, competitive, productive, open and transparent cities. The final section of the paper provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism, examining five emerging concerns: the politics of big urban data, technocratic governance and city development, corporatisation of city governance and technological lock-ins, buggy, brittle and hackable cities, and the panoptic city.
In Pacific Asia, the globalisation of trade, production and finance underlies an accelerated urban transition focusing on a limited number of mega-urban regions. Intercity competition for world city status among these regions has intensified following the 1997 economic crisis. With governments compelled to devote greater amounts of public resources to creating a built environment to host global investment, a number of key policy issues are emerging. These include demands for inclusive governance and more livable cities; the appearance of new forms of urban poverty; low economic resilience in the face of growing global economic turbulence and the spatial unevenness of global economic growth. With the rise of civil society as a political force, addressing these issues calls for a sharper focus on cities not simply as economic agglomerations or collectivities of consumers in the world market, but also as arenas for the formation of political communities.
Debates about the future of urban development in many Western countries have been increasingly influenced by discussions of smart cities. Yet despite numerous examples of this 'urban labelling' phenomenon, we know surprisingly little about so-called smart cities, particularly in terms of what the label ideologically reveals as well as hides. Due to its lack of definitional precision, not to mention an underlying self-congratulatory tendency, the main thrust of this article is to provide a preliminary critical polemic against some of the more rhetorical aspects of smart cities. The primary focus is on the labelling process adopted by some designated smart cities, with a view to problematizing a range of elements that supposedly characterize this new urban form, as well as question some of the underlying assumptions/contradictions hidden within the concept. To aid this critique, the article explores to what extent labelled smart cities can be understood as a high-tech variation of the 'entrepreneurial city', as well as speculates on some general principles which would make them more progressive and inclusive.
Creativity management is a management practice that jump-starts the innovation process by encouraging officials to act and respond with increased creativity and initiative. This article describes recent practices of a major metropolitan city, Seoul Metropolitan Government (the world's eighth-largest city), to increase initiative through modification of existing reward, management, and training systems. Detailed descriptions are provided. Results of a multimethod study show that during a two-year period, employees and managers proposed 62,666 ideas, of which 13 percent were selected for implementation. Survey results among 1,194 managers and employees also show that the percentage of officials who now view their divisions as innovative doubled in a two-year period, from 16 percent to 33 percent, thus providing further evidence of jump-starting innovation. Creativity management is presented as an effective approach for encouraging new ideas and solutions and broadening innovation practices in public organizations.
We introduce key concepts that have guided the diverse case studies of this special issue on smart cities. Calling into question Global North conceptions of the smart city, nine different articles analyse smart city projects around the world, with particular attention paid to the need to provincialise our understanding of these projects as well as to consider their relationship to worlding strategies. These case studies demonstrate the diversity of what smart cities can be and the need to consider, through comparative analysis, the broader power geometries in which they are imbedded.
In recent years, urban governance has become increasingly preoccupied with the exploration of new ways in which to foster and encourage local development and employment growth. Such an entrepreneurial stance contrasts with the managerial practices of earlier decades which primarily focussed on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations. This paper explores the context of this shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in urban governance and seeks to show how mechanisms of inter-urban competition shape outcomes and generate macroeconomic consequences. The relations between urban change and economic development are thereby brought into focus in a period characterised by considerable economic and political instability.
This article contributes to the politicisation of smart urbanism and data-driven governance by making visible some of the potential inequalities emerging from these transitions through a provisional risk-class analysis. To pursue this analysis, it focuses on the case of smart urbanism and its associated process of data-driven governance in China. It looks specifically at the manner in which Chinese smart urbanism, in terms of its security measures, including widespread use of facial recognition and the roll-out of social credit scoring, is affecting inequalities. This article proposes risk-class analysis as a toolbox that can pose new questions in the search for what types of potential risks and inequalities emerge from the smart urbanism and data-driven governance being rolled out in the Chinese context.
Since the term smart city was coined, theories and practices of smart cities have flourished. Regarding the theoretical aspect, user-driven innovation has been discussed in studies on the innovation ecosystems of smart cities. Smart cities have been built in various countries around the world in recent years, including in Japan, which has experienced the same global trends in smart cities since 2010. Four smart community projects run by the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy between 2010 and 2014 followed such trends. The present study addressed user-driven innovation using the quadruple helix model as an analytical framework for the four smart community projects, and the outcomes of the projects were evaluated. In conclusion, the smart community projects were evaluated as successful. However, it was revealed that these projects were not completely conducive to user-driven innovation.
Smart city can be seen as a glocal phenomenon, as it is characterised by both global and local aspects. Smart cities are a global phenomenon because they spread all over the world and emerge with similar features and interdependencies at the global level. In the meantime, smart cities are a local phenomenon, because each city is unique, has different problems and should address them with specific solutions. The aim of this work is to better understand smart cities as a glocal phenomenon, considering their universal features together with the local aspects influencing their implementation. Through a research based on a Qualitative Data Analysis, the present work suggests a novel way to examine the smart city, to support a better understanding of this glocal trend promising enormous benefits for citizens and growing revenues in all five continents, but not equally distributed. In particular, the paper analyses and compares Italy and China to verify that smart city is a glocal urban strategy, depending both from global, standard drivers and local contingencies. The methodology and results can be generalised to other cities and countries.
The convergence of technology and the city is commonly referred to as the 'smart city'. It is seen as a possible remedy for the challenges that urbanisation creates in the age of global climate change, and as an enabler of a sustainable and liveable urban future. A review of the abundant but fragmented literature on smart city theories and practices, nevertheless, reveals that there is a limited effort to capture a comprehensive understanding on how the complex and multidimensional nature of the drivers of smart cities are linked to desired outcomes. The paper aims to develop a clearer understanding on this new city model by identifying and linking the key drivers to desired outcomes, and then intertwining them in a multidimensional framework. The methodological approach of this research includes a systematic review of the literature on smart cities, focusing on those aimed at conceptual development and provide empirical evidence base. The review identifies that the literature reveals three types of drivers of smart cities-community, technology, policy-which are linked to five desired outcomes productivity , sustainability, accessibility, wellbeing, liveability, governance. These drivers and outcomes altogether assemble a smart city framework, where each of them represents a distinctive dimension of the smart cities notion. This paper helps in expanding our understanding beyond a monocentric technology focus of the current common smart city practice.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify the key characteristics and propose a working definition of a smart nation.
Design/methodology/approach
A case study of Singapore through an analysis of the key speeches made by senior Singapore leaders, publicly available government documents and news reports since the launch of the smart nation initiative in December 2014 was carried out.
Findings
Just like smart cities, the idea of a smart nation is an evolving concept. However, there are some emerging characteristics that define a smart nation.
Research limitations/implications
The paper provides an initial understanding of the key characteristics and definition of a smart nation at the nascent stage and a foundation for further research on the topic.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the existing smart cities and smart nation literature by providing insights to the key characteristics of smart nation and proposing a working definition of the term.
The smart city encompasses a broad range of technological innovations which might be applied to any city for a wide variety of reasons. In this article, I make a distinction between local efforts to reshape the urban landscape, and a global smart city imaginary which those efforts draw upon and help sustain. While attention has been given to the malleability of the smart city concept at this global scale, there remains little effort to interrogate the way that the future is used to sanction specific solutions. Through a critical engagement with smart city marketing materials, industry documents, and consultancy reports, I explore how the future is recruited, rearranged, and represented as a rationalization for technological intervention in the present. This is performed amidst three recurring crises: massive demographic shifts and subsequent resource pressures, global climate change, and the conflicting demands of fiscal austerity that motivate the desire of so many cities to attract foreign direct investment and highly skilled workers. In revealing how crises are pre-empted, precautioned, and prepared for, I argue that the smart city imaginary normalizes a style and scale of response deemed appropriate under liberal capitalism.
In recent years, "smart cities" have rapidly increased in discourses as well as in their real number, and raise various issues. While citizen engagement is a key element of most definitions of smart cities, information and communication technologies (ICTs) would also have great potential for facilitating public participation. However, scholars have highlighted that little research has focused on actual practices of citizen involvement in smart cities so far. In this respect, the authors analyse public participation in Japanese "Smart Communities", paying attention to both official discourses and actual practices. Smart Communities were selected in 2010 by the Japanese government which defines them as "smart city" projects and imposed criteria such as focus on energy issues, participation and lifestyle innovation. Drawing on analysis of official documents as well as on interviews with each of the four Smart Communities' stakeholders, the paper explains that very little input is expected from Japanese citizens. Instead, ICTs are used by municipalities and electric utilities to steer project participants and to change their behaviour. The objective of Smart Communities would not be to involve citizens in city governance, but rather to make them participate in the co-production of public services, mainly energy production and distribution.
Smart city initiatives have been adopted by cities worldwide, proposing forward-looking, technological solutions to urban problems big and small. These policies are indicative of a digitized urban condition, where social and economic exchange rely on globalized telecommunications networks, and governance strategies follow suit. Propelled through events such as IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge, the smart city acts as a data-driven logic urban change where widespread benefit to a city and its residents is proposed, masking the utility of these policies to further entrepreneurial economic development strategies. In this article, I present a case study of the Digital On-Ramps initiative that emerged from IBM’s policy-consultation in Philadelphia. The initiative proposed a social media-style workforce education application (app) to train up to 500,000 low-literacy residents for jobs in the information and knowledge economy, but even as the city’s mayor declared the project a success, it did not meet expectations. This essay argues that the rhetoric of intelligent, transformative digital change works much more to “sell” a city in the global economy than to actually address urban inequalities.
This study aims to shed light on the process of building an effective smart city by integrating various practical perspectives with a consideration of smart city characteristics taken from the literature. We developed a framework for conducting case studies examining how smart cities were being implemented in San Francisco and Seoul Metropolitan City. The study's empirical results suggest that effective, sustainable smart cities emerge as a result of dynamic processes in which public and private sector actors coordinate their activities and resources on an open innovation platform. The different yet complementary linkages formed by these actors must further be aligned with respect to their developmental stage and embedded cultural and social capabilities. Our findings point to eight ‘stylized facts’, based on both quantitative and qualitative empirical results that underlie the facilitation of an effective smart city. In elaborating these facts, the paper offers useful insights to managers seeking to improve the delivery of smart city developmental projects.
This paper explores IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge as an example of global smart city policymaking. The evolution of IBM's smart city thinking is discussed, then a case study of Philadelphia's online workforce education initiative, Digital On-Ramps, is presented as an example of IBM's consulting services. Philadelphia's rationale for working with IBM and the translation of IBM's ideas into locally adapted initiatives is considered. The paper argues that critical scholarship on the smart city over-emphasizes IBM's agency in driving the discourse. Unpacking how and why cities enrolled in smart city policymaking with IBM places city governments as key actors advancing the smart city paradigm. Two points are made about the policy mobility of the smart city as a mask for entrepreneurial governance. (1) Smart city efforts are best understood as examples of outward-looking policy promotion for the globalized economy. (2) These policies proposed citywide benefit through a variety of digital governance augmentations, unlike established urban, economic development projects such as a downtown redevelopment. Yet, the policy rhetoric of positive change was always oriented to fostering globalized business enterprise. As such, implementing the particulars of often-untested smart city policies mattered less than their capacity to attract multinational corporations.
Ambitious eco-city initiatives of the 21st century are commonly branded as carbon-neutral, low-carbon, smart-eco, sustainable, ubiquitous-eco and zero-carbon emphasising their sustainability niches. This study focuses on one of these brands—ubiquitous-eco-city (u-eco-city). The principal premise of a u-eco-city is to provide a high quality of life and place to residents, workers and visitors with low-to-no negative impacts on the natural environment with support from the state-of-the-art technologies in their planning, development and management. The paper aims to put this premise into a test and address whether u-eco-city is a dazzling smart and sustainable urban form that constitutes an ideal 21st century city model or just a branding hoax. It, first, explores the recent developments and trends in ubiquitous technologies, infrastructures, services and management systems, and their utilisation and implications for the development of u-eco-cities. It, then, places Korean u-eco-city initiatives under the microscope, and critically discusses their prospects in forming a smart and sustainable urban form and becoming an ideal city model.
The paper analyses the concept of the smart city in critical perspective, focusing on the power/knowledge implications for the contemporary city. On the one hand, smart city policies support new ways of imagining, organising and managing the city and its flows; on the other, they impress a new moral order on the city by introducing specific technical parameters in order to distinguish between the 'good' and 'bad' city. The smart city discourse may therefore be a powerful tool for the production of docile subjects and mechanisms of political legitimisation. The paper is largely based on theoretical reflections and uses smart city politics in Italy as a case study. The paper analyses how the smart city discourse proposed by the European Union has been reclassified to produce new visions of the 'good city' and the role of private actors and citizens in the management of urban development.
Building cities from scratch has continued unabated since the latter half of the twentieth century despite some of these planned cities achieving global infamy for their failures. These endeavors are, in part, due to a persistent belief by governments that newly constructed cities can set their nations on a fast path to the future. Today, challenges posed both by global climate change and increased urbanization have widened this platform from projects almost exclusively of developing nations to include those in the developed world. Today we talk of the eco-city, a local solution to a global crisis. If completion is successfully fast-tracked, the resultant eco-city will position its respective nation at the forefront of innovation in what is effectively a global race: the resultant city can be exported as a model both locally and globally. In this regard, the envisioning and building of Songdo in South Korea may not be unique. Songdo is a city underway on flat land created from wetland reclamation. As part of the Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ), Songdo's development has benefited from opportunistic circumstances that has led to its pursuit of becoming a “Ubiquitous Eco-City.” The green infrastructure of the new city is to be enhanced by the provision of extra services that combine information and communication technologies as well as digital networks to ideally create harmony among the environment, society, and technology. Songdo, as planned, will position South Korea among a group of leading nations, and possibly at the forefront of new city development, potentially producing a model for export.
The paper traces the development of Singapore as an 'intelligent' island through an identification of the various social policy arrangements which have harnessed new information technology modes in their delivery. At home, at work, on the road, in public service and in the court room, the emergence of new IT arrangements is a matter of fact in Singaporean lives. Attention is drawn to the 'unencumbered' character of IT policy-making in Singapore, a characteristic which is the outcome of little or no strong political opposition in parliament.
The 'world city paradigm' assumes a convergence in economic base, spatial organisation and social structure among the world's major cities. However, Tokyo, capital of the world's second-largest national economy and the world's largest urban agglomeration, departs from the world city model on most salient dimensions. Seoul, centre of east Asia's second OECD member and the region's second-largest metropolis, exhibits the same anomaly. Tokyo and Seoul's departure from the world city hypothesis stem from late industrialisation and especially the relationship between industrial policy and finance institutionalised in a developmental state. Understanding Tokyo and Seoul necessitates a different conception of the world system from the globalist version of the world city argument. World cities differ from one another in many salient respects because they are lodged within a non-hegemonic and interdependent world political economy divided among differently organised national systems and regional alliances.
In recent years, urban governance has become increasingly preoccupied with the exploration of new ways in which to foster and encourage local development and employment growth. Such an entrepreneurial stance contrasts with the managerial practices of earlier decades which primarily focussed on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations. This paper explores the context of this shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in urban governance and seeks to show how mechanisms of inter-urban competition shape outcomes and generate macroeconomic consequences. The relations between urban change and economic development are thereby brought into focus in a period characterised by considerable economic and political instability.