Understanding Sensor Cities: Insights from Technology Giant Company Driven Smart Urbanism Practices

Abstract

The data-driven approach to sustainable urban development is becoming increasingly popular among the cities across the world. This is due to cities’ attention in supporting smart and sustainable urbanism practices. In an era of digitalization of urban services and processes, which is upon us, platform urbanism is becoming a fundamental tool to support smart urban governance, and helping in the formation of a new version of cities—i.e., City 4.0. This new version utilizes urban dashboards and platforms in its operations and management tasks of its complex urban metabolism. These intelligent systems help in maintaining the robustness of our cities, integrating various sensors (e.g., internet-of-things) and big data analysis technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence) with the aim of optimizing urban infrastructures and services (e.g., water, waste, energy), and turning the urban system into a smart one. The study generates insights from the sensor city best practices by placing some of renowned projects, implemented by Huawei, Cisco, Google, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Alibaba, under the microscope. The investigation findings reveal that the sensor city approach: (a) Has the potential to increase the smartness and sustainability level of cities; (b) Manages to engage citizens and companies in the process of planning, monitoring and analyzing urban processes; (c) Raises awareness on the local environmental, social and economic issues, and; (d) Provides a novel city blueprint for urban administrators, managers and planners. Nonetheless, the use of advanced technologies—e.g., real-time monitoring stations, cloud computing, surveillance cameras—poses a multitude of challenges related to: (a) Quality of the data used; (b) Level of protection of traditional and cybernetic urban security; (c) Necessary integration between the various urban infrastructure, and; (d) Ability to transform feedback from stakeholders into innovative urban policies.

Responsible Urban Innovation with Local Government Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda

“…This is also the case with many local government agencies [84]. According to Wirtz et al [85], the most common AI applications in government agencies are as follows: AI offers urban innovation opportunities to generate novel solutions to the problems of our cities [86,87]. It has the potential to create a great impact on the way citizens experience and receive services and interact with their government, as recent advances in AI have resulted in an increasing number of decisions being handed over to algorithms [88,89].…”

The Evolution of City-as-a-Platform: Smart Urban Development Governance with Collective Knowledge-Based Platform Urbanism

“…Although there is no single meaning for smart cities that is specific and widely recognized in academia, the literature on smart cities has gradually been configured in a balance between social intelligence and digital technologies. Smart cities are not just a network of sensors and data and communication connections [28], but mainly those where citizens are interested in engaging and collaborating to define guidelines for the planning and functioning of cities, in order to add public value to a common good, becoming an essential part of the process [29].…”

Fostering IoT Service Replicability in Interoperable Urban Ecosystems

“…In spite of the large amount of literature related to smart cities, we focus on those pieces of work related to smart city architectures and interoperability. In this regard, we do not focus on data collection, the reader may refer to [1] for an in depth analysis sensing possibilities for smart cities. Similarly, the literature review does not tackle urban services, which would be deployed on top of the smart city architectures.…”