Smart & the City

From Smart City to Smart Citizen: mapping the Smart City, empowering the Smart Citizen.

Smart City is the fusion of the Urban and the Digital Age.

Ubiquitous digitalisation together with the increasing complexity of global challenges demand for interdisciplinary co-designing processes, involving society at large.

Urban Research Smart & the City @ Embassy Kingdom of the Netherlands Berlin, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Kingdom of the Netherlands, The Hague, 2 February 2014

Urban Age
+
Digital Age
=
Smart City

Driven by climate change, demographic explosion and urban growth, our world is in an accelerating process of transformation.

Accelerating
Growth

The accelerating growth of megacities worldwide demands for optimization of limited resources in limited space and for the integration of many separate technical resources into one sustainable system of urban metabolism.

Energy
Processes
&
Flows

As information-communication networks becomes ubiquitous in the Internet of Things (IoT), Smart City applications are developed with the goal of improving the management of urban flows and allowing for real time responses to urban challenges.

Designing
Energy
City

Smart City offers urban informatics- and intelligent energy infrastructure-solutions aiming at improving the quality of urban life and supporting sustainable urban lifestyles.

Climate
Challenges

Due to global warming extreme weather conditions with intense precipitations and floods force us to restructure our cities.

Participatory
Climate
Adaptation

The increasing complexity of global challenges such as sustainability and climate adaptation demands for interdisciplinary approaches and co-designing processes.
Such a co-design process involves the public from the start.

Co-Creating
Water
City

Providing creative instruments to map and understand these complex interrelated challenges enables the public to co-design the water cycles of the Circular City.

Smart
Green

Smart City governance should involve the Smart Citizens, addressing quality of air.

Addressing
Sustainability

Society needs to define the challenges and to process the ideas and solutions that address these challenges.

Co-creating
Green City

Smart City solutions should be more transparent engaging citizens in participatory processes of expert/user co-creation.

Efficiency
&
Monitoring

The Smart City debate is still too much data driven, focusing on technology, efficiency and control.

Smart City
as a
Social Process

Smart Social

The digital revolution supports the transition from centralized to distributed and interactive social networks. Social splintering, disruptive technologies and ‘permachange’ demand flexibility and a human oriented system.

Participatory
City

Smart City governance should involve the Smart Citizens, addressing issues such as “who owns the data?”, “who sets the optimization criteria?”, “what are the residents’ needs?”, and “what is our Smart City’s social vision?”

Smart
Citizen