Growing Smart Cities

Abstract

As the world's population becomes increasingly urbanised the problems of building sustainable cities also grows. Using Susan Stepney's response, "Mighty Oaks from Little Acorns Grow", to a science fiction story by Adam Marek titled "Growing Skyscrapers", this chapter looks at what a living city of the future might look like, and how that might solve some of the problems of the control and development of cities. There is a long history of the application of systems thinking, cybernetics, and complex systems and the growth and control of cities. However, many problems still remain in the deployment and applications of these frameworks and methodologies, and in the potential consequences of their use. However, perhaps many of these could be solved by the development of a living city.

Modelling and Implementing Smart Universities: An IT Conceptual Framework

“…Numerous imponderables need to be overcome, including the huge financial investment required in many different domains (urban, technological, training, informative, etc.) [42,43]; the complicated, costly and cumbersome nature of conducting urban planning projects in consolidated cities [44,45]; the numerous changing or immature technologies on which these proposals are still based; the large number of actors involved throughout the value chain [46]; and the huge task of finding skilled labour.…”

“…Moreover, we sought previous works directly related to our hypothesis according to which the existence of a global framework, that includes a methodology for adding new services to a smart university platform and guarantees both ease of integration and strategic alignment, would make it easier to realise these types of projects. In this field, we found models focusing mainly on evaluating the relevance of end-services and their alignment [39][40][41], and other more technical proposals concentrating on valid architectures for smart city platforms [45][46][47][48][70][71][72][73]. This led to the identification of the second problem: although many potential pieces of the smart university puzzle already exist, they are dissociated.…”

E-Government Insights to Smart Cities Research: European Union (EU) Study and the Role of Regulations

“…A challenge for the development of sustainable and smart cities are the social inequalities faced by many urban areas. This highlights the need to create living cities through the application of systems thinking and cybernetics [2]. Even if a smart city tackle urban prosperity and sustainability issues mostly through the technology solutions, there are some conceptual frameworks to assist cities and their public administrations in understanding this urban development paradigm [3].…”