Making the Invisible Visible: Practical Perspectives in Smart Cities

1. Introduction

The invisible has been articulated by researchers in the context of cities and urban areas and regions in terms of the everyday use of infrastructures (Dourish and Bell, 2007), information flows (Schmitt, 2017), the instrumented city and associated discourse (Mattern, 2016), and novel data from a human geography perspective, influencing social processes and experiences (Bian, 2020), to name a few. In exploring how the invisible is being made visible in the context of smart cities and regions, this chapter seeks to identify practical examples in everyday life. As such, this chapter explores how the invisible is being made visible in smart urban environments and regions based on a review of the practice and research literature on the one hand and through exploring with people their experience of the city as smart on the other, using a case study approach. An explanatory correlational design is also used in this chapter to explore the relationship between urban elements such as heightening urban sensibilities and urbanizing, as in, adapting for urban uses. This type of correlation could contribute to greater understandings of the nature of elements and indicators contributing to smart cities and to the success potential for initiatives, interventions, and projects.

Objective: The objective of this chapter is to explore and advance opportunities for people to engage in making the invisible visible in smart urban environments and regions. As such, the key research question posed is – What does making the invisible visible mean in smart cities and why does this activity matter?

2. Background And Overview

Hill (2008) observes that “the invisible becomes visible, as the impact of people on their urban environment can be understood in real time” using the example of “water use patterns” and the turning on of taps. Researchers have articulated the invisible dimensions of cities and smart cities from multiple perspectives (Rickert, 2013; McCullough, 2020; Schmitt, 2015; Orasch, 2019) with Caprotti (2017) claiming invisibility to be a characteristic of smart cities. In defining smart cities, Sáinz-Piña (2011) points to “a city that uses information and communication technologies to make its critical infrastructure, its components, and public services more interactive, efficient and visible to citizens.” Mattern (2014) argues for the importance of considering “the point of engagement where citizens interface with the city’s operating system” noting that, “the zone between person and machine is only the most visible type of interface.” Mattern claims that urban dashboards (2015) “render a city's infrastructures visible and make tangible, or in some way comprehensible, various hard-to-grasp aspects of urban quality-of-life.” Schmitt (2015) highlights the importance of information architecture in that “it visualises the information inherent in a building and thus makes the invisible visible” in the context of “the built environment” in smart cities.

How invisible dimensions of smart cities are being made visible is the focus of this chapter, drawing on insights from the practice and research literature (Caprotti, 2018; Chevalier, 2018; Servières et al., 2017). While intelligent, aware, and increasingly pervasive technologies contribute to making the invisible visible in smart cities (Schmitt, 2017) other elements are also present in the form of how people are interacting with information infrastructures (Dourish and Bell, 2007) and with smart urban initiatives (Mattern, 2020), contributing to emergent opportunities and potentials. While the notion of the invisible in relation to cities is not a new one, addressed as it is in works such as the novel by Calvino (1972; 1974), what is different about this chapter is the notion of making the invisible visible in the context of emerging understandings of smart cities and regions, and the notion of urban visibilities and invisibilities in this work more broadly. As such, this chapter seeks to learn more about people interacting with and experiencing their urban environments and spaces in coming to more dynamic understandings of smart cities and regions. It is worth noting that collaboration figures strongly among ideas for addressing the challenges of global cities (Belanger and Hinchliffe, 2020), as part of a special report on “rethinking the city.”