The well-informed city - A decentralized, bottom-up model for a smart city service using information and self-organization

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Smart Cities, a concept widely growing in popularity, describes cities that use digital technology, data analysis and connectivity to create value. The basic abstraction of a Smart City service includes collecting data about an urban issue, transmitting it to a central decision making process and "improving" the city with the insights generated. This model has spurred much critique, claiming Smart Cities are undemocratic, discriminatory and cannot significantly improve citizen's quality of life. But what if the citizens were active in the process? It was Jane Jacobs who said "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." In this paper we lay a conceptual groundwork to envision "The Well-Informed City" - a decentralized, self-organizing Smart City service, where the value is created by everybody. The agents, who are the citizens of the city, are the ones who use the data to create value. We base the model on the cities' feature of Self-Organization as described in the domain of Complexity Theory of Cities. We demonstrate its theoretical possibility, describe a short case study and finish with suggestions for future empirical research. This work is highly significant due to the ubiquitous nature of contemporary mobile based information services and growing open data sets.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIEEE 2nd International Smart Cities Conference
Subtitle of host publicationImproving the Citizens Quality of Life, ISC2 2016 - Proceedings
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781509018451
DOIs
StatePublished - 30 Sep 2016
Event2nd IEEE International Smart Cities Conference, ISC2 2016 - Trento, Italy
Duration: 12 Sep 201615 Sep 2016

Publication series

NameIEEE 2nd International Smart Cities Conference: Improving the Citizens Quality of Life, ISC2 2016 - Proceedings

Conference

Conference2nd IEEE International Smart Cities Conference, ISC2 2016
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityTrento
Period12/09/1615/09/16

Keywords

  • Bottom up
  • Complexity
  • Information
  • Open data
  • Self-organization
  • Smart city

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The well-informed city - A decentralized, bottom-up model for a smart city service using information and self-organization'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this