Search results

This chapter explores the evolution of smart city thinking in order to have a clear understanding of what is involved in effectively and sustainably implementing a Smart City 4.0 strategy. The chapter illustrates that the concept of smart cities has evolved from the technology driven implementations to Cities as Open Innovation Platforms. These open and participatory platforms facilitate the interaction and collaboration of the city's citizens, government, industry, entrepreneurs, academia, creatives and the social sector so that they can harness their collective intelligence for innovation, experimentation and implementation of solutions that creates real transformational value for the betterment of the city's and its stakeholders. The author also identifies the key dimensions on which a smart city 4.0 concept must be built upon but highlights that depending on the composition of its stakeholder ecosystem, the City will prioritise different dimensions and so each smart city is unique. The chapter builds upon the experience of implementing a Smart City 4.0 project in Waterford, Ireland. Details of the smart city initiatives implemented are illustrates with examples.

Research into the library as place investigates the role of public library buildings as destinations, physical places where people go for various reasons ranging from making use of the library's resources and services or seeking to fulfill an information or reading need to less easily identified reasons that may include using the library's building as a place to make social or business contacts, to build or reinforce community or political ties, or to create or reinforce a personal identity. This study asks: How are one rural US public library system's newly constructed buildings functioning as places? The answer is derived from answers to sub-questions about adult library users, user, and staff perceptions of library use, and observed use of library facilities. The findings are contextualized using a framework built of theories from human geography, sociology, and information studies.

This case study replicates a mixed-methods case study conducted at the main public libraries in Toronto and Vancouver in the late1990s and first reproduced in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2006. It tests methods used in large urban settings in a rural, small-town environment. This study also expands on its antecedents by using thematic analysis to determine which conceptualizations of the role of the public library as place are most relevant to the community under investigation.

The study relies on quantitative and qualitative data collected via surveys and interviews of adult library users, interviews of library public service staff members, structured observations of people using the libraries, and analysis of selected administrative documents. The five sets of data are triangulated to answer the research sub-questions.

Thematic analysis grounded in the conceptual framework finds that public realm theory best contextualizes the relationships that develop between library staff members and adult library users over time. The study finds that the libraries serve their communities as informational places and as familiarized locales rather than as third places, and that the libraries facilitate the generation of social capital for their users.

The transformation from an industrial to a knowledge economy and society are underway. In the knowledge economy, the knowledge of people and organizations—their intellectual capital assets—are the primary factors of production and the source of wealth. This is in contrast to other kinds of capital that fueled the industrial and the agricultural economies. Librarians have understood the knowledge society as one characterized by an increased focus on digital resources and an expanded use of virtual channels to deliver those resources. However, the nature of the knowledge society and economy is far more expansive than a digital environment. A knowledge society is one in which all members of a society engage in knowledge transactions—in the business environment, in the social sphere, in civic activities, and in everyday environmental actions. This view of the knowledge society presents new opportunities for librarians to leverage their intellectual capital. This chapter profiles the intellectual capital assets of librarians, considers how they align with professional competencies, and presents use cases that illustrate the value of these assets. Future scenarios illustrate how traditional functional competencies might shift in the knowledge economy. These also suggest contexts which highlight undervalued or new competencies. Seven observations describe how librarians might prepare for expanded roles in the knowledge society.

This chapter provides an introduction to the smart city and engages with its idea and ideals from a critical social science perspective. After setting out in brief the emergence of smart cities and current key debates, we note a number of practical, political, and normative questions relating to citizenship, social justice, and the public good that warrant examination. The remainder of the chapter provides an initial framing for engaging with these questions. The first section details the dominant neoliberal conception and enactment of smart cities and how this works to promote the interests of capital and state power and reshape governmentality. We then detail some of the more troubling ethical issues associated with smart city technologies and initiatives. Having set out some of the more troubling aspects of how social relations are produced within smart cities, we then examine how citizens and citizenship have been conceived and operationalized in the smart city to date. We then follow this with a discussion of social justice and the smart city. In the fifth section, we explore the notion of the “right to the smart city” and how this might be used to recast the smart city in emancipatory and empowering ways. Finally, we set out how the book seeks to answer our questions and extend our initial framing, exploring the extent to which the “right to the city” should be a fundamental principle of smart city endeavors.

This chapter explores if alternative participatory co-creation approaches have the potential for deploying an emancipatory urbanism that is able to contest the urban dynamics of (digital) capitalism. It does so by focusing on the Barcelona case. Barcelona fully embraced a “smart citizen” approach in 2011 to become a European referent in smart urban strategies. However, in 2015, with the arrival of a new municipal government, Barcelona has situated itself contesting the “smart city” and at the forefront of alternative possibilities with its “technological sovereignty” strategy. This shift aims to remake the smart city agenda for citizens through the advancement of the right to information and guarantees to open, transparent, and participatory decision-making through new digital and platform technologies. The chapter argues, first, that “technological sovereignty” has been instrumental in re-politicizing the notions of (smart) citizenship and technology, deploying initiatives aimed at regaining public control on data and citizens participating in policy-making. Second, Barcelona’s technological sovereignty strategy, though framed as locally and bottom-up, is based on a global comprehension and diagnosis of the global dynamics of digital capitalism. However, sometimes, there still remains an over-optimistic stance concerning digital technology. Thus, for any alternative to the neoliberal smart city, it is necessary to decenter the debate from the technologies themselves or the local, and recognize that any emancipatory strategy is also about acknowledging that technology-led solutions are not autonomous of broader relations of production and complex political economy geographies.

Studies of the city traditionally posit a division between a city’s economy and its culture, with culture subordinate in explanatory power to “work.” However, post-industrial and globalizing trends are dramatically elevating the importance of culture. Cultural activities are increasingly crucial to urban economic vitality. Models to explain the growth of cities from the era of industrial manufacturing are outmoded. Loss of heavy industry impacts the dynamics of urban growth, increasing the relative importance of the city both as a space of consumption and as a site for “production” which is distinctly symbolic/expressive. Some have seen globalization, the wired city, and electronic communication as destroying cities as proximity should decline in importance. This may be correct for some production concerns, but this in turn raises questions about consumption versus production decisions affecting urban growth and dynamics. Even in a former industrial power like Chicago, the number one industry has become entertainment, which city officials define to include tourism, conventions, restaurants, hotels, and related economic activities. Citizens in the postindustrial city increasingly make “quality of life” demands, treating their own urban location as if tourists, emphasizing aesthetic concerns. These practices impact considerations about the proper nature of amenities that post-industrial cities can sustain. The city increasingly becomes an Entertainment Machine, leveraging culture to enhance its economic well being. The entertainment components of cities are actively and strategically produced through political and economic processes. Entertainment becomes the work of many urban participants. We elaborate this theme in general and illustrate its force with case study materials from Chicago and a national study of U.S. mayors in cities over 25,000 in population.

Since the 1950s, and the steadily growing mobility of people and production (economic activity) as a result of the shift to road traffic, especially in North America, suburban areas have grown rapidly as residential areas and places of (post-industrial) economic activity (Hoffmann-Axthelm, 1998). People moved from ‘the country’ and, especially, the established central cities to the more spacious and cheap to develop peripheral locations. In Europe, differences have emerged on the basis of established planning law and thus availability of land for development, and of historic legacies in the relationship between ‘city’ and ‘country’. Thus, for instance, while in Germany cities were distinctly separate from their surrounding areas in legal terms and land ownership, in Italy, cities have been viewed as ‘owning’ or controlling the surrounding areas to the extent that these are subservient to the cities’ developmental needs (Heitkamp, 1998).