Page 13 - U4SSC Simple ways to be smart

1 The focus on simple smart interventions

1.1 Smart cities

Over the past three decades, the idea of a “smart city” has been suggested as a means of dealing
with the challenges of urban living and governance. As urban areas grow in number, population
and complexity, old urban challenges such as providing services, maintaining order, supporting
a thriving economy and ensuring a pleasant way of life become more complex and difficult
to address. There are also new urban challenges such as environmental sustainability, shifting
patterns of civic engagement, new health challenges and the need to ensure greater social and
economic inclusivity. To meet these old and new challenges, cities need to transform more rapidly
as incremental development is unlikely to be sufficient.

Smart cities have always advocated the use of technology, initially with a focus on incorporating
new ICTs into city infrastructures, and more recently on the collection and analysis of city data. 1,2,3,4,5
A future is imagined in which widespread technology and software deployment will become key to
managing cities. Technologies that collect and analyse data, as well as communicate between city
actors and infrastructure, can automatically and rapidly respond to situations in the city. This vision
of technological intelligence is central to projects such as the ‘City Brain’ deployed in Hangzhou
and other Chinese cities that combine data from multiple sources to manage traffic flow and
emergency responses in real-time. 6

However, over the decades, the smart city discourse has also been concerned with economic
growth and development, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, service delivery, improved
quality of life, environmental sustainability, the city as an eco-system or “system of systems”, and
shifting approaches to city governance from top-down to consultative. 7,8,9,10 These themes feature in
many of the definitions and programs that have been proposed for smart cities. They are reflected
in the definition that has been adopted by the United Nations initiative known as United for Smart
Sustainable Cities (U4SSC), which describes a smart sustainable city as “an innovative city that
uses information and communication technologies (ICTs) and other means to improve quality of life,
efficiency of urban operations and services, and competitiveness, while ensuring that it meets the
needs of present and future generations with respect to economic, social, environmental as well as
cultural aspects”.
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In the last decade, the role of people , as intelligent agents in the city, has come to the fore. The
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smart city conversation has shifted to emphasize that both the intelligence of smart technologies
and the intelligence of people are needed to successfully address the challenges of twenty-first
century cities. People in the city, in the form of city employees, entrepreneurs, innovators, service
providers, workers, civic activists, residents and visitors configure the smart city through their actions
and use of the city. They are both an important source of ideas, creativity, feedback, energy, skills
and capabilities to bring the smart city into being and also the reason for the smart city to exist.
So, the Smart City increasingly refers to the ability of smart people to devise interventions to solve
urban problems and the mechanisms to facilitate that. 13

U4SSC: Simple ways to be smart 1