Digital urban nature

Abstract

Within policy and research debates on the smart city, the urban environment has become an arena of contestation. Claims that digitalisation will render the city more resource-efficient are countered by criticism of the tensions between smart and sustainability practices. Little attention has been paid, however, to the role of nature in digitally mediated urban environments. The flora, fauna and habitats of a city are a void in research and policy on digital urbanism. This paper provides one of the first conceptually grounded, empirical studies of 'digital urban nature' in practice. Taking the empirical example of Berlin, the paper demonstrates how a single city can spawn a rich variety of digital nature schemes, develops from this a typology to guide future research and analyses two schemes in depth to illustrate the aspirations and limitations of digital technologies targeting urban nature. The empirical findings are interpreted by bringing into dialogue pertinent strands of urban research: first, between smart environments and urban nature to explore ways of representing nature through digital technologies and, second, between digital and urban commons to interpret changes in the collective and individual use of urban nature. The paper reveals 2 City XX-X that digital platforms and apps are creating new ways of seeing and experiencing nature in the city, but often cling to conventional, anthropocentric notions of urban nature, with sometimes detrimental effects. More broadly, it suggests that exploring practices of digitalisation beyond the remit of conventional smart city policy can enrich scholarship on digitally mediated human-nature relations in the city.

The digital peregrine: A technonatural history of a cosmopolitan raptor

“…What does this rethinking offer geographers interested in complex relations between society, ecology, and technology? And how are digital technologies altering human relations with nonhuman life, particularly in the context of urban ecologies (see Moss et al, 2021)? We now turn briefly to the wider geographical fields to which this paper contributes, before elaborating our development of technonatural history.…”

Digital placemaking, health & wellbeing and nature-based solutions: A systematic review and practice model

“…Only Edwards et al (2020) and van Houwelingen-Snippe et al (2021) referred to the use of technology as a potential benefit for future research, whereas Grace et al (2020) 'smart-natural' city interface briefly mentions placemaking as one of the spaces in this interface without understanding on how to implement it or the effect of this specific characteristic in the community. Moss et al (2021) present how nature has been absent in most smart cities' strategies, therefore being essential to understand how it is addressed in the urban digitalisation, what part nature plays in this context and what goal is targeted. These authors describe urban nature as being mediated by technological devices, even if it has not been acknowledged in literature and policies.…”

“…Digital placemaking is the implementation of technology in placemaking practices, from using mobile games to explore the environment (Hjorth and Richardson, 2017;Qabshoqa, 2018) to the role of social media in allowing communities to connect in digital and analogue ways with their surroundings (Breek et al, 2018). Digital placemaking has the potential to benefit communities by adding value to public spaces, economic growth, cultural wealth, and overall better community life (Morrison, 2021). It could reconvert urban areas into community hubs, revitalising its heritage and experiences through social media and place branding (Soedarsono et al, 2021;Sugangga et al, 2021).…”

The Image of the Smart City: New Challenges

“…In other words, although the term Smart City is widely used today [18][19][20], still no full light has been shed on its full meaning, and different research contributions were realized on the topic [21][22][23]. We can certainly state that the Smart City is the outcome of an evolution of the thought and reasoning of the city with reference to sustainability, civic participation, and the rapid evolution of technology (Digital City, Computable City and Virtual City) [24,25], whereas recently, the debate moved towards more humanistic and naturalistic views [22,26].…”

“…Such projects and initiatives often suffer from a very strong influence of the private component at the level of investments, and therefore of "orientation" in the political-urban planning choices of the city towards technological solutions [23,24]. Furthermore, public-private partnerships linked to Smart Cities are often closely linked to technological components, and poorly integrated with urban policies [25,26]. From the point of view of the denomination, there are many cities that refer to the "Smart City" label within their organization, and with reference to the projects explicitly funded on this item.…”