Urbanities and Smart Cities: An Introduction

1. Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an introduction to the urbanity concept from a variety of perspectives and in the context of smart cities. A key element characterizing the emergence of smart cities (Hernández-Muñoz et al., 2011; Schaffers et al., 2011; Batty et al., 2012; Chourabi et al., 2012) is the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Nam and Pardo, 2011a; Nam and Pardo, 2011b; Caragliu, Del Bo, and Nijkamp, 2011; Naphade et al., 2011) and other pervasive and aware technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT) (Zanella et al., 2014) providing a space for the exploration of new understandings of urbanity (Lévy, 2011; 2013; 2015). The increasing presence of aware technologies in combination with more aware people enables the conceptualization and formulation in this work of an ambient urbanities framework for smart cities. Guided by this framework, the chapters that follow provide an exploration of the challenges and opportunities for each dimension of the ambient urbanities framework with Chapter 2 focusing on sensing; Chapter 3 on infrastructures; Chapter 4 on culture, economies and everything as ambient; Chapter 5 on digital literacies; Chapter 6 on smart information architectures, data, and governance; Chapter 7 on the need for new methodologies and theoretical spaces; Chapter 8 on innovating privacy; Chapter 9 on measuring ambient urbanities; Chapter 10 providing a synthesis of perspectives on ambient urbanities; and Chapter 11 concluding with a look beyond for ambient urbanities going forward.

• Objectives: The key objectives of this chapter are to: a) provide evolving perspectives on urbanity; b) contribute insight into emergent understandings of urbanities in the context of smart cities; and c) articulate an ambient urbanities framework for 21^st century urban environments.

2. Background And Context

The interweaving of several key forces in 21^st century urban environments provides the background and rationale for this chapter. Namely, the rapid growth of cities (Chourabi et al., 2012); the swift uptake and evolving nature of information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Nam and Pardo, 2011a) and other aware technologies including the Internet of Things (IoT) (Hashem et al. 2016); interest in smart cities as a strategy for cities to innovate (Komninos, 2015; Nam and Pardo, 2011b); and the emergence of smart cities as a new urban agenda to handle complex and unprecedented challenges (Gil-Garcia, Pardo, and Nam, 2016). This interweaving of forces represents the coming together of people, technologies, and cities in ways unique to the needs and requirements of healthy and sustainable 21^st century urban environments for living, working, and learning (Garau and Pavan, 2018; McKenna, 2017). This work argues that the synergistic people, technologies, and cities dynamic gives rise to the opportunity for rethinking, reimaging, and coming to new understandings of urbanity (Lévy, 2015; Lévy, 2013) in the context of smart cities. While Neirotti et al. (2014) found there to be “no unique global definition” of the smart city (SC) concept, they argue that, “current trends and evolution patterns of any individual SC depend to a great extent on the local context factors.” However, Lara et al. (2016) argue that although “widely used”, the smart cities concept is “highly fuzzy” such that “the fuzziness hinders our understanding” of “the benefits of its adoption” while serving to “explain” some of the “fragmented or distorted views” of smart cities.