Urbanizing the Ambient: Why People Matter So Much in Smart Cities

2. Background And Context

This chapter is motivated by the need for engaging people in more meaningful discussions about smart city phenomena. In response to the unprecedented challenges associated with rapid urban growth in the 21^st century (Charoubi et al., 2012), Nam and Pardo (2011) articulate the smart cities concept as a way for cities to innovate themselves using information and communications technologies (ICTs). Gil-Garcia, Pardo, and Nam (2016) advance smarter as the new urban agenda while Ojo, Dzhusupova, and Curry (2016) identify current gaps in the smart cities research literature. Relevant to this chapter are the research gaps (Ojo et al, 2016) pertaining to the dimensions of education and of people and the research approach of living lab, as in real world everyday life. The smart city topic is present on the agenda of policy-makers, technology companies, and academics, yet city inhabitants do not seem to be involved in meaningful discussion about the concept and its implications for surveillance, privacy, inclusion and many other issues (Craglia & Granell, 2014). Further, the smart cities concept is said to be unfamiliar to more than 61% of the 1000 surveyed by Frost & Sullivan (Gamble, 2014). The concept has emerged as contested and controversial in the smart cities research literature (Greenfield, 2013) with utopian and dystopian visions (Townsend, 2014; Marvin, Luque-Ayala, and McFarlane, 2016, Hollands, 2016) and is articulated in terms of tensions and implications by futures researchers (IFTF, 2011). Smart cities have been evolving over the last decade (Scholl, 2016) yet Brandt (2015) notes a kind of obliviousness in the United Kingdom where “nearly 100 percent do not notice smart cities growing around them.”