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Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering
Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira Editor
How Smart Is Your City? Technological Innovation, Ethics and Inclusiveness
Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering Volume 98
Series Editor Kimon P. Valavanis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA Advisory Editors P. Antsaklis, University of Notre Dame, IN, USA P. Borne, Ecole Centrale de Lille, France R. Carelli, Universidad Nacional de San Juan, Argentina T. Fukuda, Nagoya University, Japan N. R. Gans, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA F. Harashima, University of Tokyo, Japan P. Martinet, Ecole Centrale de Nantes, France S. Monaco, University La Sapienza, Rome, Italy R. R. Negenborn, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands António Pascoal, Institute for Systems and Robotics, Lisbon, Portugal G. Schmidt, Technical University of Munich, Germany T. M. Sobh, University of Bridgeport, CT, USA C. Tzafestas, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering book series publishes books on scientific, engineering, and technological developments in this interesting field that borders on so many disciplines and has so many practical applications: human-like biomechanics, industrial robotics, mobile robotics, service and social robotics, humanoid robotics, mechatronics, intelligent control, industrial process control, power systems control, industrial and office automation, unmanned aviation systems, teleoperation systems, energy systems, transportation systems, driverless cars, human-robot interaction, computer and control engineering, but also computational intelligence, neural networks, fuzzy systems, genetic algorithms, neurofuzzy systems and control, nonlinear dynamics and control, and of course adaptive, complex and self-organizing systems. This wide range of topics, approaches, perspectives and applications is reflected in a large readership of researchers and practitioners in various fields, as well as graduate students who want to learn more on a given subject. The series has received an enthusiastic acceptance by the scientific and engineering community, and is continuously receiving an increasing number of high-quality proposals from both academia and industry. The current Series Editor is Kimon Valavanis, University of Denver, Colorado, USA. He is assisted by an Editorial Advisory Board who help to select the most interesting and cutting edge manuscripts for the series: Panos Antsaklis, University of Notre Dame, USA Stjepan Bogdan, University of Zagreb, Croatia Alexandre Brandao, UFV, Brazil Giorgio Guglieri, Politecnico di Torino,Italy Kostas Kyriakopoulos, National Technical University of Athens, Greece Rogelio Lozano, University of Technology of Compiegne, France Anibal Ollero, University of Seville, Spain Hai-Long Pei, South China University of Technology, China Tarek Sobh, University of Bridgeport, USA Springer and Professor Valavanis welcome book ideas from authors. Potential authors who wish to submit a book proposal should contact Thomas Ditzinger ([email protected]) Indexed by SCOPUS, Google Scholar and SpringerLink.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/6259
Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira Editor
How Smart Is Your City? Technological Innovation, Ethics and Inclusiveness
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Editor Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa Universidade de Lisboa Lisbon, Portugal
ISSN 2213-8986 ISSN 2213-8994 (electronic) Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering ISBN 978-3-030-56925-9 ISBN 978-3-030-56926-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To the diligent anonymous that sustain the colony
Preface
Cities are like dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a desire or its reverse, a fear. Italo Calvino
The idea of questioning the role of technological development, namely AI and Robotics, in the construction of real intelligent urban environments capable of turning the City into a sustainable friendly space—with the capacity for (i) providing the well-being of every urban dweller and for (ii) fostering individual and collective flourishing and prosperity—was born in the “How Smart is your City?” Workshop, held during the 4th International Conference on Robot Ethics and Standards-August 2019—at London Southbank University. The humanistic values and the multidisciplinary approach that embodied that workshop are reflected in the substance and in the organization of the present book that, counting with the participation of academia, municipalities and industry, adopts a human-centered, age- gender- and culture- responsive stance to urban development and technological innovation. By posing the question “How Smart is your City?, the book aimed to focus on the potential benefits that the so called “smart technologies” have been bringing to the urban reality and to the management and governance of the city, simultaneously highlighting the necessity for its responsible and ethically guided deployment, respecting the essential humanistic values of western societies, namely those substantiated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all the subsequent related formulae. Each city is a specific universe and contextual differences, namely distinct levels of socioeconomic development, determine the domains/sectors to prioritize when deploying intelligent urban systems, whether those relative to the satisfaction of very basic needs, such as housing, water or energy supply, health and education … or other equally important, but not so essentially basic.1 Acknowledging this fact and in order to reflect on the initial motto in an even basis, the book took as a 1
The European approach to urban development assumes the fundamental role played by the city’s unique spatial, social, cultural and institutional characteristics.
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standpoint the experience withdrawn from the deployment or experimentation of smart technologies in Europe and North America. We believed that contrasting case studies would certainly allow foreseeing the potential benefits that ICT technologies associated to robotics/automation and artificial intelligence could bring to the quality of the daily life of urban dwellers. We also hoped to foster the discussion around some pressing topics as that of the need for universal digital literacy to guarantee the inclusiveness of all citizens and the ethical problems raised by invasive data collecting. The sudden outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemics, in China with its massive spreading at light speed, in the first months of 2020, to capitals, cities, regions, entire nations all over the world, taking away thousands of lives, causing overspread illness, misery, fear and sorrow, constitutes a historical fact with huge and still mostly unpredictable consequences for society in general and for the city in particular. Though most of the chapters of this book were already written by March 2020, this overwhelming event has inevitably left a trace on it. We could say that “ How Smart is Your City?” due to the coincidence of the punctual overlap of its own genesis with the pandemics outbreak, came to embody both the initial dream and desire of an intelligent City place of innovation, development and equity—a dream translated in the initial motto and present in most of the chapters—and the fear not just of the pandemics per se, but of the terrible consequences that this may have for the character of the intelligent city and for the nature of its relationship with its dwellers that, like a mother, it is supposed to nurture, shelter and protect. Cities are us, as history has been showing up since immemorial times and as the multiple photographs of empty streets, squares, parks … in deserted capitals, throughout the lockdown times of the Covid-19 pandemics, have made everyone aware of. Presently more than 4 billion people—about half the global world population— live in cities2 and the United Nations predicts that, by 2050, about 69% will be urban, i.e., 7 out of 10 people in the world will live in cities. As Lefebvre pointed out in 1970, society is becoming completely urbanized “[…] this urbanization is virtual today, but will become real in the future.” 3 In the introduction to The Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development4 we read: “We, the Heads of State and Government and High Representatives, meeting at United Nations Headquarters in New York from 25 to 27 September 2015 […] have decided today on new global Sustainable Development Goals. On behalf of the peoples we serve, we have adopted a historic decision on a comprehensive, far reaching and people centered set of universal and transformative Goals and targets.” Acknowledging that “We are meeting at a time of immense challenges to 2
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/urbandevelopment/overview. Henri Lefebvre, (1970) La Revolution Urbaine, Éditions Galimard. The Urban Revolution. Translation by Robert Bononno. (2003) University Minesota. US. Press available at https:// joehooverdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/henri-lefebvre-the-urban-revolution.pdf. 4 https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/21252030%20Agenda%20for%20 Sustainable%20Development%20web.pdf. 3
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sustainable development as billions of citizens continue to live in poverty and are denied a life of dignity,” the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development dedicates Goal 11 to the City in order to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.” The Covid-19 sanitary crisis has made even more urgent this need for an inclusive, safe and resilient urban space that is simultaneously ecologically and economically sustainable. Smart technologies have been proving to be essential tools in what concerns ecological sustainability and economic growth. Throughout the pandemics they have been also showing their potential to foster the city’s safeness and resilience when ethically deployed. The city’s inclusive character, which should be prior, depends on the options made by governance and the way it relates to each individual and to the community. The concept of smart city has integrated urban planning strategies, evolving from a mere techno-centric interpretation to a human-centric perspective of ICT-driven urban innovation and development where contextual variance (its physical environment, its productive/economic model, the demographics and social and cultural specificity and diversity) has to be taken into account. A perspective indispensable to reach the Goals that the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development established5 while preserving each city’s specific nature and identity. The 14 European Smart Cities and Communities projects, running in 2019, dedicated to the development of the concept of [smart city] in the so called Lighthouse Cities with their respective replicates and the more than a hundred conferences, workshops and summits approaching this theme by that time6 show how fundamental this concept has become not only for cities and city dwellers, but for humanity in general. In fact, the urban ecosystem has been, in the last decades, the locus to where the most advanced forms of technological innovation converge, recently creating intelligent management platforms meant to produce models of energy, water consume, mobility/transportation, waste management, … efficient cities. In Jonathan Reichental words, using technology to improve liveability, workability and sustainability.7 It is presently assumed that contextual variance is determining when planning urban intelligence and that all the options have to be citizen-centered, human driven, i.e., local human needs have to be objectively assessed and the well-being of all citizen segments and cohorts taken into account. However, we know that the specificities of significant cohorts, namely those of the most vulnerable populations are usually forgotten even by the “smart policies” and that urban governance strategies are, as they always have been, designed for mainly targeting an abstract citizen, a prototypical end-user, whose standard profile could be broadly defined as
5
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/21252030%20Agenda%20for%20 Sustainable%20Development%20web.pdf. 6 cf urbanicity.org. 7 https://cointelegraph-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/cointelegraph.com/news/talking-digital-futuresmart-cities/amp.
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that of a “physically fit male worker”.8 The awareness of this fact has given origin to initiatives as the G3ict, The Global Initiative for Inclusive ICTs9 aiming to promote the rights of people with disabilities in the digital age and to many other movements from the civil society attempting to promote the rights of people of the so-called vulnerable populations. The initial question posed by the book cannot be dissociated from that of what kind of world do we want us to live in, what kind of economic and social model do we favor, which ties/bonds and values do we cherish and prioritize, what kind of being in the world do we wish for us, do we dream for our children? This initial question gains particular relevance at a time Humanity is urged to rethink their own existence, their present prevailing values, their present economic and social models, the role of technology … their relation with the Other, their respect towards their fellow species, towards Nature. In the chapter “The Smart City: The Exponent of a Civilization Transition in the Context of a Global Crisis”, M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira refers that in the course of their historical and existential narrative, human beings have come to define, in their physical environments, particular settlements—cities. These settlements-stars of multiple constellations-embodying the specific relations of production of their historical times—have always been dynamos of innovation, development and economic, social and cultural evolution. The author claims that we are presently on the verge of a civilization transition featured by the so called Smart Cities. This transition started long ago with the first industrial revolution and went on with the introduction of electricity, the development of computational power and digitization, the ubiquity of the Internet and information exchange, the world geographical displacement of people and means and/or modes of production, allowed by high speed global mobility and, last but not the least, the development and changes that are being introduced by automation, namely robotics, and AI. This transition has accelerated substantially in the two last decades, though remaining nearly unnoticed by the average citizen who has been progressively incorporating technological innovations in their daily routines, in their lifestyles. Usually adopting them acritically, even alienating themselves from reality with their excessive use, while adapting their social behaviors, their physical and social interactions to the new nature of the physical, economic, social and cultural reality they are embedded in. According to Aldinhas Ferreira, it is exactly at the verge of this transition that the Covid-19 outbreak, with its consequent overwhelming sanitary crisis, disrupts urban communities, unveiling the essential inequities and fragilities that are present in every city, even in the intelligent candidates, and by freezing the city’s normal dynamics, brutally shakes the citizens’ massive alienation. The author points out that this huge unexpected disruption will lead either to a more self-aware, ethically regulated, sustainable resilient city, where governance plays a fundamental According to the Ernst and Young Report “Cities for Citizens”—The present reality is that comparatively few cities across the world are building for a future aligned with an ambitious vision that meets the needs of all their stakeholders, especially citizens. 9 https://g3ict.org/publication/smart-cities-for-all-a-vision-for-an-inclusive-accessible-urban-future. 8
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regulatory role, or will cause it to be even faster driven by the powerful force of an economy ruled by global markets and by huge global economic interests. These forces aiming at a speedy recovery from the crisis inflicted by Covid-19 on the economy, will not hesitate, to have the most recent technological assets massively deployed, even those whose effect on society is not yet clearly envisaged—as it is the case of the adoption of massive regular online work—or the deployment of ethically questionable forms of systems surveillance and control of individual health status, endangering, this way the inalienable rights to privacy and freedom. In the chapter “The Right to the City: The Right to Live with Dignity”, M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira addresses Lefebvre’s famous claim to “The Right to the City” by reviewing the Aristotelian concept of [Citizen] and highlighting how the core primitive semantic features defining the concept have always embodied its successive reformulations, throughout different historical times, always keeping its initial noninclusive character, a nonholistic view of those that inhabit the city. Observing that from its inception the very concept is inherently associated to the notion of a physically fit, active, male individual, the text analyses how this fact has determined, throughout history, not only the cast off, from active social participation, of all the other urban dwellers—namely the children, the elderly, the impaired, the jobless/homeless (and not so long ago the women), but has also determined the particular architectural features that cities have been assuming, their built reality. Imagined for an idealized standard citizen, cities have always been spaces of differentiation, discrimination, exclusion, physical and psychological suffering … for a significant part of their population. This population is frequently sympathetically called “vulnerable” forgetting that their vulnerability is most of the times not an inherent state or condition per se, but a consequence of the aggressiveness of a physically unsuitable urban environment, of the inexistence of proper living conditions, of the absence of basic health and social care systems, of proper education, of a fair job market, of erased affective bonds, of fragile or inexistent real social networks, a context that fosters segregation, exclusion and inequity. As pointed out in Urban Policies and the Right to the City(1), although there are encouraging initiatives being taken by key players in various cities and countries, there is not yet a consolidated approach to inclusive urban policy and governance. Aldinhas Ferreira, M. I. refers that the Covid-19 pandemics has totally unveiled the city’s frailty, its lack of capacity to anticipate sudden generalized crises and its difficulty to cope with them, be they a terrorist attack or a sanitary emergency. It has also unveiled the ugly reality of exclusion and segregation, even in those cities that claim to be citizen-centered, even in those that aim to be inclusive, friendly and intelligent. But this crisis has also, according to the author, showed up the incredible potential for good of an urban intelligence, its enormous economic, strategic and political relevance. It has highlighted the urge to endow the city with intelligent infrastructures with the capacity to respond in to the citizens’ needs and expectations, especially in extreme situations, as the one caused by Covid-19. A lattice of distributed intelligence capable of triggering out the coordinated action of all the systems involved, capable of responding efficiently and in real time to a generalized state of emergency. The key role to be played by IT’s, AI and
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automation building a responsive resilient city that respecting the citizen’s individual rights remains a space of freedom while being a home that provides comfort, care and protection to each and all its dwellers. Colin Ellard in the chapter “There’s More Than One Kind of “Smart”: Big Data, Affect and Empathy in the City”, takes as a topic for discussion the controversial project of Quayside that came to be abandoned as a consequence of the Covid-19 crisis. The author refers that most conceptions of the smart city envision uses of technology that improve urban efficiencies, such as control of environmental variables and urban infrastructure. However when smart city algorithms venture into areas related to the measurement and control of human behavior, popular responses are often fractious. In this chapter, the author discusses the reasons for such visceral responses and, in the context of Albert Borgmann’s “device paradigm,” offers one potential positive use of the collection and use of such data to inject affective human context into the urban fabric and thereby to improve collective empathy and compassion. In the chapter “Acting Smart: An Experimental Approach to Architecture, Performance Art and ICT”, Maria da Piedade Ferreira highlights the embodied nature of human cognition, i.e., the fundamental role played by our physical body in the way we shape the world, assign meaning, interact with it and move around. Presenting the Corporeal Architecture project, the author refers that more than ever, a designer is someone who conceives a space priorizing the well-being of its users and aiming to provide places where meaningful experiences happen. Piedade Ferreira points out that the increased focus on the topic of well-being in design comes primarily as a natural response to the demands of an ageing population as well as to a number of stress-related health conditions which affect society as a whole. According to the author the work hypothesis presented in this chapter is that by training design and architecture students to be able to tune into their own corporeal awareness using techniques from performance art and technology, their spatial, sensorial and perceptual skills will expand, develop and refine and, consequently, their creativity and sensitivity as designers will improve. The Corporeal Architecture project here described takes place in the context of design education, exploring the relationship between body, space and object, with a focus on embodiment. The methodology it proposes combines the somatic practices of performance art with emotion measurement tools and encourages the active creative participation of students in the design, fabrication and performance with body extensions, body restrictions, pieces of furniture and installations. In the chapter “Leveraging the Use of Digital Technologies to Activate Public Areas and Foster Creativity”, Martina Mazzarello and Carlo Ratti describe some of the research work and experiments that have been carried out at the MIT Senseable City Lab, in collaboration with Lab Campus. The authors point out that dealing with the context of the design, development, and management of public spaces, creates a new goal of investigation on the relationship between human behavior and physical space mediated by digital technologies. The present chapter focuses precisely on how the merge of physical and digital layers of space can enhance new forms of interaction (both serendipitous encounters and/or other types
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of collaboration) between the urban dwellers and the microcosm they are embedded in and how the distinct overlapping layers (physical, digital, human) can be turned into systems to foster new dynamics of innovation, collaboration for urban public spaces’ future growth. The work aims to present an overview of the impact of the environment and digital technology in the forms people aggregate and interact, in order to stimulate innovation, creativity, and the creation of new knowledge. To better introduce a dialogue on this field, scenarios of connecting people and spaces through technology are presented with a selection of the MIT Senseable City Lab’s research projects. In the chapter “Algorithmic Cities: A Dystopic or Utopic Future?”, Miguel de Castro Neto and Tiago de Melo Cartaxo refer that the new reality of a “Smart City” is naturally potentiated by the Internet of everything (as interconnected systems, sensors and people), information management, and data science capabilities existent in the territory of the city. In order to develop urban intelligence that ensures resource usage efficiency, more sustainable and inclusive cities, and concurrently, promotes economic development, by boosting entrepreneurship and technological start-ups, an inescapable challenge must be overcome. This challenge is city data, the true fuel of urban intelligence that should be collected or linked for release in the form of “Open Data”—data that can be used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose10 Creating the capacity for collecting citizens behavior is of extreme importance, given that people are in fact the true owners of the city to whom local governments must provide quality of life. This most relevant dimension of citizen involvement consists of adopting crowd sourcing processes to collect people’s active or passive data in order to better understand a city’s immediate reality and its metabolism. Active collective intelligence supports the possibility of taking advantage of citizens engagement through active participation using informal mechanisms fostered by social networks and ICTs to collect their input. Nowadays, we can find a significant number of new processes and tools that allow citizens to be active actors of the city planning and management by providing the city with their “wishes” and concerns. On the other hand, the idea of the citizens as sensors is becoming mainstream since the sheer number of people who live or work in cities with mobile phones generating location data is increasingly accepted as a valuable resource for a wide range of purposes, from traffic modeling (people and/or vehicles), urban planning, management of interventions, public health policies, creation of business opportunities… Neto and Cartaxo highlight that it is at this point that ethics is paramount in order to develop AI as “a tool for the good of humanity and the planet” In the chapter “Robots in Smart Cities”, Matthew E. Studley and Hannah Little describe the first challenge of the Smart Cities Robotic Challenge (European Robotics League), held in Milton Keys, UK, in September 2019. Prior to 2018, the European Robotics League, funded by the European Commission to advance research, development and innovation in robotics and artificial intelligence, has run 10
(Open Knowledge Foundation 2018).
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in three categories: consumer (previously service), emergency and professional (previously industrial) service robots. Now teams from all three categories will meet every two years in the ERL Smart Cities Robotics Challenge showcasing how real robots can improve the quality of life of urban dwellers. The novel ERL Smart Cities challenge offers a unique opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of using a variety of robotic applications in different living contexts for all European citizens and offers urban dwellers an opportunity to interact or at least to observe robots operating in real urban environments and giving their feedback as potential end-users. The first ERL Smart Cities event offered companies as well as researchers the unique opportunity to demonstrate their systems and technology to a wide public audience. As stated in the project’s site “The synergy between smart robots and smart cities adds value to both, and showcases the technologies which will shape our living spaces in the near future.11 In the chapter “Technological Approaches to Cultural Heritage—Lessons from ROCK”, Anthony Colclough and Cécile Houpert point out that though the benefits of culture for health, wellbeing, and the local economy are unquestionable, it remains difficult to measure the real impact of a particular cultural program or policy. As the authors refer, information relative to this impact translated in questions as “How many people are attending cultural events and institutions, and where do they come from? “ can influence everything from funding and programming of cultural events, to the planning of mobility strategy and energy infrastructure. However, 140 major cities throughout Europe have reported that this information is difficult to get, especially for free outdoor events, or as it relates to wider areas like heritage walks, or a city’s old town or cultural quarter. In this chapter Colclough and Houpert present how the. ‘LBASense,’ in the ROCK project (Regeneration and Optimization of Cultural heritage in creative and Knowledge cities) aims to surmount this difficulty. In the chapter “Digital Social Markets: Exploring the Opportunities and Impacts of Gamification and Reward Mechanisms in Citizen Engagement and Smart City Services”, Thomas White and Francesco Marchet refer that though the term “Smart City” has become ubiquitous, its definition and interpretation remain ambiguous and divisive. There are those who celebrate its dizzying aspirations of seamless connection and integration between technology and services, clean, safe streets, resource and time efficiencies, sensing and sharing our every move, habit and desire in a bid to maximize our urban experiences both at home, work and everything in between. Then there is an alternative camp, led by those who view the smart city ideals with growing concern and scrutiny. These see it as a mechanism for governments and big corporations to tap, track and extract every facet of our “data-selves” in order to algorithmically deconstruct our democratic agency. Despite these opposing forces, advocates from both positions, often agree on one thing: if humans can’t rebalance the relationship between the planetary boundaries 11
https://www.eu-robotics.net/robotics_league/erl-smartcity/about/index.html.
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which sustain our homes, our energy needs, our schools, our offices, our lifestyles, our societies, indeed our cities, our very existence remains on a collision course which is set to cross thresholds of no-return (depending on the news outlets we follow) somewhere around the year 2030. The Digital Social Market (DSM), presented in this chapter, is best described as an approach to public service integration which incentivizes and sustains citizen engagement. It was established through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and development program. The initiative is intended to explore the potential applications and scalability of pioneering services capable of addressing some of the most pressing urban challenges: mobility, energy efficiency and citizen engagement. In response to these challenges, the program has developed and implemented eight measures, in demonstrator districts in three European cities (London, Milan and Lisbon) exploring a range of solutions around Building Retrofit, E-Logistics, E-bike sharing and Sustainable Energy Management Systems (SEMS) to name a few. The DSM was developed in parallel with these services and has a particular focus on utilizing human centered design methodologies in order to support with improved service development and user value in order to maximize uptake amongst the community. Chapter “Stockholm—Smart City” is the narrative of how the city of Stockholm attained the designation of Smart City. According to Gustaf Landhal, the strategy to become a smart and connected city was developed together with residents, academia and business by analyzing global developments. For Stockholm a smart city is quite simply a city that utilizes digitalization and new technology to simplify and improve the life for its residents, its visitors and businesses, offering, this way, the highest quality of life for citizens and the best environment for business. The way forward to make Stockholm a smart and connected city is to, via innovation, openness and connectivity, make the city more economically, ecologically ( by being Fossil fuel free by 2040 as a way of reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions), democratically and socially sustainable. In 2019 Stockholm was awarded the smart city designation for its GrowSmarter project at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona. David Cunha, in the chapter “Creating a Smart Ecosystem in Lisbon”, describes the creation and development of a Smart Ecosystem in the City of Lisbon. The author refers the progresses attained in Lisbon in order to establish a very dynamic and burgeoning innovation ecosystem, capable of attracting tech start-ups and flagship corporations alike. Lisbon is an historic city, with over two millenniums of history and the concerns of a modern metropolis. With over 500.000 inhabitants, and roughly the same number of people entering the city every working day, the strain sustained by its infrastructures is a major concern for the City Council, as these infrastructures have often been designed to support a fraction of today’s population. The need to expand, coupled with the inevitable need for maintenance, adaptation and innovation, creates enormous challenges for the entities responsible for their management, due to the rapid technological developments we know today. Chapter “Being Smart in the Context of a Crisis: Ethical Paradoxes” highlights how generalized acute crises, as the one brought by Covid-19, and the need to quickly overcome them, may potentially foster the loosen or drop off of ethical
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values previously regarded as unquestionable. The author claims that it is precisely during a crisis, as the one that characterizes the present global sanitary threat, that ethical guidelines grounded on unquestionable human rights must clearly and strongly uphold the whole societal edifice. Lisbon, Portugal May 2020
Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira
Acknowledgements
The editor wants to thank to all the authors that contributed to give substance to this book by reflecting on the initial question, according to their professional and personal experiences, their distinct perspectives and points of view−the members of the municipalities, of business and academia that kindly accepted to join in, composing a reflection that aims to contribute to the building of friendly, inclusive, equitable, resilient, sustainable cities, whose artificial intelligent systems serve the well-being and happiness of all the citizens. To Thomas Ditzinger for supporting the initial idea from its very start and to all the Springer team for their kindness and extreme professionalism throughout the making of this book.
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Contents
The Smart City: The Exponent of a Civilization Transition in the Context of a Global Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira The Right to the City: The Right to Live with Dignity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira
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There’s More Than One Kind of “Smart”: Big Data, Affect and Empathy in the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Colin G. Ellard
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Acting Smart: An Experimental Approach to Architecture, Performance Art and ICT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maria da Piedade Ferreira
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Leveraging the Use of Digital Technologies to Activate Public Areas and Foster Creativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Martina Mazzarello and Carlo Ratti
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Algorithmic Cities: A Dystopic or Utopic Future? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miguel de Castro Neto and Tiago de Melo Cartaxo
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Robots in Smart Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matthew E. Studley and Hannah Little
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Technological Approaches to Cultural Heritage—Lessons from ROCK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anthony Colclough and Cécile Houpert
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Digital Social Markets: Exploring the Opportunities and Impacts of Gamification and Reward Mechanisms in Citizen Engagement and Smart City Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Thomas White and Francesco Marchet
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Stockholm—Smart City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Gustaf Landahl Creating a Smart Ecosystem in Lisbon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 David Cunha Being Smart in the Context of a Crisis: Ethical Paradoxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira
The Smart City: The Exponent of a Civilization Transition in the Context of a Global Crisis Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira
Abstract In the course of their historical and existential narrative, human beings have come to define, in their physical environments, particular settlements—cities. These settlements-stars of multiple constellations-embodying the specific relations of production of their historical times—have always been dynamos of innovation, development and economic, social and cultural evolution. The present paper argues that we are presently on the verge of a civilization transition featured by the so-called smart cities. This transition has accelerated substantially in the two last decades, though remaining nearly unnoticed by the average citizen who has been progressively incorporating technological innovations in their daily routines, in their lifestyles. Adopting them acritically, even alienating themselves from reality with their excessive use, while adapting their social behaviours, their physical and social interactions to the new nature of the physical, economic, social and cultural reality they are embedded in. It is exactly at the verge of this transition that the Covid 19 outbreak, brutally shakes the citizens’ from their massive alienation. This huge unexpected disruption will lead either to a more self-aware, ethically-regulated, sustainable resilient city, where governance plays a fundamental regulatory role or will cause it to be even faster driven by the powerful force of an economy ruled by global markets and by huge global economic interests. Keywords Smart city · Technological development · Civilization transition · Ethics · Well-being Cities, and particularly the great metropolitan cities of modern times … are, with all their complexities and artificialities, man’s most imposing creation, the most prodigious of human artifacts. We must conceive of our cities therefore … as the workshops of civilization, and, at the same time, as the natural habitat of civilized man. Robert Park
M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (B) Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (ed.), How Smart Is Your City?, Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering 98, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6_1
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1 Cities: The Dynamos of Innovation and Change In the course of their historical and existential narrative, human beings have come to define, in their physical environments, particular settlements. These settlementsstars of multiple constellations-embodying the specific relations of production of their historical times have always been dynamos of innovation, development and economic, social and cultural evolution. In the dialectics that is inherent to the process of establishment, development and growth of those settlements, communities define spaces whose mapping, architectural options and artifacts are always determined by the demands of a particular mode of production and corresponding social model and by the typical cyclical patterns of behaviour,1 the standardized routines, that this mode of production generates2 and on whose regular and correct reproduction its very maintenance depends. That dialectics has produced, throughout times, generators of innovation and development— cities of differentiated shape, dimension and architectural and cultural substance. As Lefebvre3 refers every society […] every mode of production […] produces a space, its own space.
[…] the city of the ancient world cannot be understood as a collection of people and things in space. Whence the need for a study of that space which is able to apprehend it as such, in its genesis and in its form, with its specific time or times (the rhythm of daily life) and its particular centres and polycentrism (agora, temple, stadium, etc.) Throughout historical time, each mode of production has generated its type of city, which “expresses” it in a way that is immediately visible and legible on the environment, by making the most abstract relationships—legal, political, ideological—tangible. Cities are, consequently, complex systems whose cohesion depends on the relation of co-influence, that binds a specific mode of production to the social structuring and the cultural semiosphere4 [3–7] it produces. Together with its natural landscape, it is the presence of these specific interdependent economic, social and cultural components that, even in a globalised world, grant each city their uniqueness and their individual character. To each prevailing economic model correspond not only specific scenarios of production but also particular ways of living, of inhabiting, specific architectural options, forms of mobility, the definition of leisure modes and of consumerism spaces, in sum, the definition of reality and of the way of living in it. The introduction of a new mode of production, of a new economic model, always generates the obsolescence of the previous one and with it the obsolescence of the set of values that regulated it, 1 Ferreira
[1]. Lionel March and Philip Steadman (1971) point out in “Geometry of Environment: an Introduction to Spatial Organization and Design”, in a way we can claim that the ordering of spaces is the ordering of relations between people and the ordering of activities in relation to people’s routine. 3 Lefebvre [2]. 4 Cf Hoffmeyer [3]. 2 As
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the change of its social structuring, the modification of cultural manifestations and tendencies and, ultimately, the alteration of lifestyles. The urban space is a “social space” as it embodies the social actions, the cyclical patterns of behaviour performed by urban dwellers, as it objectifies both the individual and the collective routines. The way different communities, at distinct historical and developmental times, have defined their lived space can still be perceived, presently, in the so-called ghost towns.5 In these settlements where no longer anyone dwells— due to a variety of reasons, e.g. the failure of the economic system on which they relied, natural catastrophes or human-caused disasters—the evidence of their daily life still remains, reified in buildings, roads, artifacts, etc. That static once-lived reality is also reflected by the remains of older cities, frequently belonging to distant civilizations, as it is the case of the one known to us as Petra and founded by the Nabataeans. This evidence of “worlds” that have emerged and grown in the same natural environment we are in, but that do not share our temporal frame, is still present in the form of architectural remains scattered in some contemporary cities, vestiges of important civilizations, of other ways of being, as it is the case of Athens or Rome; or traces that point to the historical continuity of primitive urbs, to the city’s phases of development, as in Prague-the Mater Urbium—allowing the drawing of its developmental roadmap from medieval times until now. Like trees, whose growth can be assessed by observing the concentric circles that a horizontal section of their trunk always displays, the diachronic view of the city’s development can also be observed by looking at the successive roughly concentric rings that their expansion throughout time draws in the territory, the core generally corresponding to the primary settlement and edification—the oldest one (in the example depicted—Fig. 1—identified as L) and the outer circles corresponding to subsequent expansions. In the modern city, this segmentation usually maps urban mobility and public transportation planning, leading namely to the definition of multimodal interfaces and commuters’ travelling fares to and from the workplace (Fig. 2). As depicted in Fig. 2, each zone—“Coroa”, is characterized in terms of extension(km2 ) and demographics—“População”. The so-called Metropolitan Area of a city usually comprehends the peripheral adjacent zones, frequently constituted by smaller gravitating cities where the thousands of commuters, that daily converge to the city, live. The total area designated, by some authors, as the Functional Urban Area, illustrated in Fig. 3,6 constitutes in fact the whole urban territory. Cities derive their pulse from the beating heart of the human beings that dwell in it, not simply “the individual and collective subjects who are born and who die, who suffer and act”,7 but the individual and collective agents that strive to guarantee 5 Bannack
in the United States, Barkerville in Canada, Craco in Italy, Kolmanskop in Namibia, Pripyat in Ukraine, and Danushkodi in India (cf. Wikipedia). 6 Depicted in [9]. Source: JRC, DG REGIO, https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ucdb2018Overview.php. 7 Lefebvre 1974 (ibidem).
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Fig. 1 Sections of urban expansion—the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon. In https://criticaecono mica.net/2016/08/depender-menos-do-automovel-e-deslocar-em-transporte-publico-com-tarifasocial-unica-contra-a-logica-neo-liberal/
Fig. 2 Metropolitan Area of Lisbon (AML), public transportation planning. https://criticaecono mica.net/2016/08/depender-menos-do-automovel-e-deslocar-em-transporte-publico-com-tarifasocial-unica-contra-a-logica-neo-liberal/ [8]
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Fig. 3 The City (red), its Commuting Zone (pink) and the total Urban Functional Area (blue). Depicted in [9]. Source JRC, DG REGIO, https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ucdb2018Overview.php
their subsistence, their life, through the maintenance, progress and positive change of their community, of their city. Cities don’t have a life of their own, even when we talk of urban metabolism [10] as if referring to a pulsing living organism in order to produce models of resourceefficient, climate-friendly, sustainable cities.8 The fluxes that come in and out of the city (Fig. 4), i.e. the energy it consumes, its carbon emissions, the supplies it needs, the waste it produces, etc. are the living evidence not of the city per se, in abstract terms, but of the activity of the human beings that make it come into being. Cities are in fact ant-like colonies, structured according to ant-like hierarchies where to different “categories9 ” are assigned different functions, different tasks to be executed in compliance with general and specific patterns of behaviour whose social nature greatly depends on the mode and means of production, the economic and social model defined at their historical and developmental time. As it happens with all the other species, human beings exhibit from the day they are born onwards typical cyclical behavioural patterns, primarily associated with the 8 Musango
[11]. here understood as roughly corresponding to a division of labour within a society, always bearing in mind that in modern societies the same individual can perform multiple tasks throughout their lifetime.
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Fig. 4 The Urban (still linear) Metabolism. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v= uu-a1hFEV7Q
circadian loops and to the satisfaction of their basic needs. Then throughout their development as social animals and according to a socially standardized developmental timeline, they will mimicry the observed behaviours of their peers progressively incorporating a complex linguistic and behavioral repertoire corresponding to the accepted collective social practices within a specific community. The first of these social behaviours, whose nature is always determined by the context and status of that one is interacting with, are incorporated in the family environment, then sometime later at the kindergarten, at school, at the university, at work, and in all the various social contexts one is called to participate. These distinct contexts and distinct situations providing ongoing opportunities for updating the individual repertoire. Regular, persistent, movements are drawn by the urban dwellers, in their daily routines, drawn namely by the thousands of commuters that every day, at standardized timings, converge to specific workplaces or diverge from them, defining an essential part of the community’s collective being in the world.10 The daily life of those who run from their dwellings to the crowded buses and trains, from the station to the office, to school, and return home later the same way but backwards11 to restart the daily cycle on the next morning, over and over again.12 Thanks to this collective synchronized productive buzzing, cities are amazing engines of growth and innovation in the global economy, responsible for about 80% of the global GDP [13], in just 2% of land surface.13 However, cities are also responsible for consuming 75% of the Earth’s resources and for about 60–80% of the global greenhouse gas emissions, challenging global sustainability targets including keeping under a 2 °C temperature rise this century. 10 Ferreira
[1]. Lefebvre pointed out, the “metro-boulot-dodo” to refer to the banality of the “subway-worksleep” life of the suburban commuter. 12 Sorkin [12]. 13 City Level Decoupling [14]. 11 As
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Fig. 5 Below illustrates, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the real and the predicted growing percentage of the global urbanization rate from 1950 to 2050 [15]
Since the start of industrialization and throughout the subsequent developmental phases brought about respectively by the introduction of electricity, of computer processing and digitization, the expanding of the internet and the start of the massive deployment of automation and AI, cities have progressively become more central and relevant than ever. Their increased centrality has turned them into vortexes to which huge demographic movements converge. In 2016, 1.7 billion people—23% of the world’s population—lived in a city with at least 1 million inhabitants.14 By 2030, a projected 27% of people worldwide will be concentrated in cities with at least 1 million inhabitants, while two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to live in an urban environment by 2050. The challenges that such demographics place in a globalised world are immense, and these concerns are often made public in the media, as the following fragment reflects [16]: Spurred by demographic pressure, we are on the verge of a new urban explosion, which will take place in emerging and developing countries, of course, but also in already developed countries. Everywhere, the same questions will need to be answered. How can we facilitate travel for millions of residents, manage their waste, assure the food supply, reduce the environmental footprint and guarantee the resilience of buildings and infrastructure faced with increasingly frequent extreme climate events?15
In October 2016, a New Urban Agenda16 was unanimously adopted at the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development [18], serving as a new vision for cities and municipalities for the next 20 years. A year later, the Strategic Plan 2018–202117 set out the guidelines to be followed by state members in order to achieve the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Plan 14 www.un.org/urbanization_the_worlds_cities_in_2016_data_booklet. 15 L’Express,
France, 2018.in Bernard Cathelat [17] Smart Cities: Shaping the Society in 2030, page 30 https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367762. 16 https://www.habitat3.org/the-new-urban-agenda. 17 https://undocs.org/DP/2017/38.
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[19] recognized that rapid urbanization and changing demographic patterns challenge conventional thinking on development pathways, and that addressing them required cross-cutting, integrated applications of expertise and investment, customized for each country and circumstance and driven by global best practices and international standards. Acknowledging the central role of cities in achieving sustainable and equitable development, The Global Sustainable Development Goals,18 namely Goal 11, aimed to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” [20]. On 25–27 February 2019, representatives from national, regional and local governments, civil society, academia, private sector and the United Nations came together in Seville to review progress and lessons learned of implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and chart new pathways to accelerate and scale up action at the local level. The Seville Commitment19 recognized that it is in cities that the battle for sustainability will ultimately be won or lost [21].
2 The Smart City: The Exponent of a Civilization Transition The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. Mark Weiser.
The Smart City, the ultimate reflex of the present mode of production, embodies the most sophisticated forms of technological development achieved so far. As Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s) play a growing role in the development of societies and global economy, “intelligent” cities act as conveners of partnerships involving multiple stakeholders, comprehending not only local entities but expanding connections at an international scale. Bernard Cathelat,20 in Smart Cities: Shaping the Society of 2030, refers that the concept of [smart city] arose from a combination of three factors: “political intuition, the opportunism of IT businessmen and the appalling reality of twentieth century megacities. The idea has, according to this author, become a global utopia, supported by a combination of three strong feelings: disgust with unliveable megacities, humanist idealism, and gaining markets” [22, 23]. The concept of smart city has evolved from its initial mere techno-centric interpretation to a more human-centric perspective of ICT-driven urban innovation and
18 https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals.html. 19 https://www.agenda2030.gob.es/sites/default/files/recursos/Seville%20Commitment.%2027%
2002%202019.pdf. 20 https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367762.
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development where contextual variance (the city’s physical environment, its productive/economic model, the demographics and social and cultural specificity and diversity) has to be taken into account. All over the world, developed cities have been retrofitting, actively launching smart solutions for some of their outdated infrastructures, while new and emerging cities are already integrating intelligent, connected systems from scratch.21 Innovative intelligent applications have been acting on some of the city’s infrastructure sectors improving domains like energy, mobility and transportation, waste management, etc. contributing to their sustainability and improving the quality of the services provided to their citizens. Undoubtedly all cities, independently of their size, will see in the short term their essential infrastructures updated so that their functioning can be monitored and best regulated in real-time and predictions made by the algorithmic analysis of their data. The smart cities management platforms already present in many cities in an incipient form, and that could be designated as their artificial brain, aim to provide an objective bird’s eye view over the city’s complex dynamics, in real-time, namely a quantitative view on the nature, amount and movement of its different “metabolic flows”, allowing proper resource management and making possible the transition from the traditional linear metabolic trajectory to a more sustainable circular one [10]. The data that fuels the city’s management platforms, provided by the sensors that populate the city’s infrastructure and environment, is no other than the patterns urban dwellers define, in the course of their daily life, in the common lived space, as well as the different flows that this same activity, this being in the world, generates. The deployment of successive “layers of smartness” transforms the city’s industries and services, updating or modifying the modes of production, changing the ways urban dwellers interact with their surrounding environment and interact with each other, causing the modification of the way people move around, ultimately determining the definition of new ways of being, the definition of new worlds. But this process is not, as Carvalho [24] points out22 just a matter of developing and pushing the right technologies. It is necessary to be aware that the changes involved have a socio—technical nature because we are dealing with socio-technical artifacts, i.e. systems that strongly impact on society. For this reason, their integration has to be the object of previous piloting, of experimenting in real environments, in a controlled way so that all human factors involved are taken into account and closely monitored. This spirit has, in fact, been present in most EU Smart City initiatives, namely the Smart Cities and Community Lighthouse Projects,23 where particular intelligent deployments that prove to be successful in a “Lighthouse City” are replicated by the net of its fellow cities [25]. We agree when Carvalho [24] points out, quoting Truffer et al. (2002), that niche-based arenas and experiments are pivotal to the extent that 21 As
in South Korea or Saudi Arabia. cities from scratch? A socio-technical perspective. Available from: https://www.resear chgate.net/publication/264233008_Smart_cities_from_scratch_A_socio-technical_perspective [accessed Jun 03 2020]. 23 https://smartcities-infosystem.eu/scc-lighthouse-projects. 22 Smart
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they provide an opportunity for (i) learning, i.e. discovering, testing and fine-tuning of new insights about the technologies at stake, their variants and the conditions for success in real-life environments and (ii) societal embedding, i.e. the progressive interaction between new technologies/solutions and the social, cultural, political and governance dimensions that structure their use. Though human beings have been progressively adapting themselves fast to ICTs, incorporating them in their daily experience, this fast adaptation has been generally accompanied by an acritical appraisal of the value and role of some smart technologies in one’s life. This acritical perspective has already two visible impacting effects: 1. The excessive use of digital interfaces for communication and social networking has aggravated the already existing state of alienation of people from the context and conditions of their lived reality, expanding what we could call a “situational alienation” to alienation towards the other, with deep consequences in what concerns the quality of real human interaction, the creation and/or maintenance of affective bonds, fostering the emergence of a loneliness epidemics24 transversal to all genders and cohorts.25 2. The lack of public awareness relative to the appropriation of their personal data by large corporations, by governance, through digital interfaces and the ways that data may be further used. Socio-technical systems impact on individuals, on institutions and on society in general, causing them to change, but in this process simultaneously adapting and evolving themselves. This complex temporally extended dialectics is frequently designated as a technological transition. The [Smart City] concept, even in its still very incipient form is, in our opinion, not just the reflection of a particular stage of technological development [26] but an exponent of a civilization transition that having started long ago26 is now reaching its verge. We designate it a civilization transition because it distinguishes itself from all the previous mere technological transitions by introducing two fundamental ontological changes. These ontological changes are 1. the alteration of the nature of the environment living beings are embedded in 2. the introduction of a new type of agency. The first one occurs by having the typical physical environment merging with digital interfaces creating a purposefully responsive hybrid environment, where natural and artificial intelligence will coexist27 and interact. 24 According to The Guardian February, 7th, 2020, more than 2 million adults suffer from chronic loneliness in the UK. Though its more severe form is more prevalent among Britain’s oldest citizens, younger adults report loneliness more than other age group. 25 The very current scenario of a family having dinner and each of its members keeping the mobile phone at their side and responding to it, or the equally common context of a couple sitting together but each interacting with their respective digital interface. 26 In 2000, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proposed the First Industrial Revolution as the start of the Anthropocene. 27 By natural intelligence we refer to all living entities that populate the physical environment and whose life and behavior can be affected by the presence of artificial systems.
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The second fundamental change results from the fact of tools becoming autonomous entities, as non-embodied and embodied intelligent systems become capable of agency.28 This fact will affect substantially not just the nature of the daily life patterns, but the way human beings mentally model and conceive reality.
3 The Context of a Crisis This storm will pass. But the choices we make now could change our lives for years to come. Yuval Noah Harari.29
With the development of ICT’s, speed becomes, together with utility, the predominant value for all economic and life contexts, causing the tremendous acceleration of daily life patterns and consequently the acceleration of individual mental processes and the aggravation of alienation due to the decrease of awareness to the daily reality, due to a smaller capacity of focusing and a reduced affective attachment capacity. The close relationship between technological development and velocity30 in order to raise productivity levels and consequently revenues has for decades been accompanied by increased work toil, mobility of the workforce and instability of employment causing a substantial decrease in the quality of life for most workers. None of the voices that have called the attention for a highly destructive pathway, like that of Robert Kennedy in the 1960s31 or that of Joseph Stiglitz in present days advocating a shift of paradigm from a “production-oriented” measurement system to one focused on “the well-being of the present and future generations”, have encountered the proper echo in the change of economic models and global politics.32 The blind emphasis on productivity and revenue has uprooted, or at least set-aside, from a proper and adequate social embedding, those that due to their very young or older age or to specific circumstances are not viewed as “productive”: Toddlers going to “children’s warehouses”, alien incubators where they stay from morning to late afternoon, the time their exhausted mums or dads come to pick them up to go home, to have dinner, to sleep so that they can wake up early in the next morning to another day 28 By
“agency” we understand intentional, purposefully directed action. Financial Times, 20th of March 2020. 30 According to Virilio [27] this acceleration fostered by more and more powerful systems, has made modern society more mutable and mobile than any other before. 31 Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product, if we should judge America by that, counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways o carnage. It counts special locks for our doors … Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play … it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. Quotation in Ferreira [28]. 32 Ferreira [28]. 29 In
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at the “warehouse”, where they will share bacteria and infections with all the other resident children, where they will be fed and changed nappies by strangers, where they will smile to strangers, where these strangers will hear their first words… There they will go every day until they reach the age of going to school and starting what is already viewed as a pathway to productivity. An identical situation in terms of closure and total affective desertification characterizes the being in the world stipulated by our society for the elderly; those who having significantly contributed with their work to the development of their community are not only no longer considered as having a market value, but are frequently viewed as burdens to their relatives and to society as a whole. Most of these remaining in residence houses, pre-chambers of death, where they will hopefully be well taken care of by strangers, daily enrolling in dull free time activities, in a purposeless existence, no longer consumed by destructive acceleration but by static dullness, loneliness and affective emptiness. It is exactly during the period of particular acceleration of our collective narrative and at the verge of the aforementioned transition that the sudden outbreak of the Covid-19, in China, with its spreading at light speed, in the first months of 2020, to capitals, cities, regions, entire nations all over the world, constituting an overwhelming sanitary crisis, disrupts urban communities, exposes the city’s fragilities and the forgotten frailty of the human condition and by freezing the city’s normal dynamics, brutally shakes up the citizens, the society from their individual and collective alienation. Otto Scharmer33 refers that the pandemics have exposed our three big disconnects [29]: 1. Disconnect from our planet, 2. Disconnect from the other, 3. Disconnect from ourselves. This temporary freezing of the acceleration of time causes a momentary awakening in which individuals become conscious, at least for a while of their respective roles in society, of their individual roles in the family/affective life. Having this way the chance to rethink priorities in what concerns the dimensions of their collective and personal existence. This crisis has also reminded us that human beings are essentially social animals and of the importance of the physical presence in the interaction with the other. In fact, we are able to connect mentally with others, because we have bodies that have made possible the previous physical interactions that built the mental representations on which the present virtuality depends. We are physical entities, entities that depend on the interaction with others, in presence, to develop, to grow, to flourish. As Lefebvre34 pointed out the body is the place of interaction between the biological, the physical and the social.
33 https://www.ottoscharmer.com/. 34 Lefebvre
[2].
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By watching the deserted streets and squares, during lockdown, or the emptiness of the previously dramatically overcrowded trains, emerges this collective acknowledgement of the importance of human beings’ presence, the importance of their daily life movements to the city’s life. The consciousness that we are the city and that the city is us. It is also during the period of lockdown that there is the collective recognition of the vital importance of each of the members of the “colony”, the importance of their individual and collective work. From those that in the frontline guarantee the medical and health support to the thousands of infected to those that guarantee the coming of supplies on which life in the city depends, to those responsible for the removal of waste, to those that behind doors went on working online, overlapping their personal and work lives so that fundamental systems, education, business and enterprises did not collapse. As Turnbull Malcom35 referred in a discourse in 2015 [30] […] the most valuable capital in the world today is not financial capital […] the most valuable capital today is human capital. Men and women like us
Crises of different nature are sometimes just not avoidable. The lockdown period has made salient the importance of a truly smart resilient city, one that being humancentered, is capable of answering the basic needs of its citizens even during a crisis. In fact it is already thanks to the digital connectivity available in most territories that the dynamics that sustains the colony could go on even behind doors, supported by smart technology, a tool for human benefit. It was also that technology that guaranteed realtime communication with the global world, the sharing of experiences, the sharing of knowledge, feeding the collective effort to overcome a sanitary emergency. Crises urge rapid responses from governance because as we have seen delayed responses may cost lives.36 As Yuval Noah Harari37 pointed out [31], during crises “fast-forward historical processes and decisions that in normal times could take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours. Immature and even dangerous technologies are pressed into service […]” In fact, these responses, though very urgent, cannot be taken in haste. They have to be part of strategic planning that, being ethically grounded and guided, anticipates their extended impacts on society so that the solutions for the present do not become huge problems in the near future. This is, for instance, the case of the possible permanent massive deployment of online work replacing the physical presence at the workplace of thousands of workers. Based on the experience withdrawn from the lockdown period this strategy is now viewed as being very promising as it permits not only to prevent the spread of the pandemics but also to reduce traffic load, greenhouse gas emissions, allowing to control, this way, climate change and environmental pollution. Plus, it is economically very attractive as it diminishes substantially the costs of production and apparently guarantees, at least 35 Prime
Minister of Australia (2015–2018) https://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/media/Ministry. are referring to the delayed correct response to control the epidemics as it happened in the UK, Sweden, or the US, to mention just a few. 37 In The World after Covid 19, Financial Times, 20th of March 2020. 36 We
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in the short term, higher productivity. But are we also measuring the possible negative effects on human beings? Are we acknowledging that work is the most powerful means of socialization? What will be the psychological and social consequences in the long term if we banish our physical cooperation at work? The huge unexpected disruption caused by the pandemics will lead either to a more self-aware, ethically-regulated, sustainable resilient urban territory, where governance plays a fundamental regulatory role, or it will cause society to be even faster driven by [32] the powerful force of a market regulated economy, that ruled by huge global economic interests, will only aim at a speedy economic recovery from the crisis inflicted by Covid, whatever the costs. The present crisis will constitute itself as the Great Reset38 or as the Great Accelerator of an ongoing crisis. About the dual options that, this way, open up Klaus Schwab39 pointed out [33]: We have a choice: to remain passive, which will lead to the amplification of the trends we see today […] or we can build a new social contract […], we can change our behavior to be in harmony with Nature again and make sure that technology, the 4th Industrial Revolution are best utilized to provide us with better lives.
References 1. Ferreira MIA (2013) Typical cyclical behavioural patterns: the case of routines, rituals and celebrations. Biosemiotics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-013-9186-4 2. Lefebvre H (1985) Qu’est-que penser?. Publisud. Paris 3. Hoffmeyer J (1996) Signs of meaning in the universe. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 4. Ferreira MIA (2011) On meaning: individuation and identity—the definition of a world view. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. England. ISBN 10:1443829250 5. Ferreira MIA (2010) On meaning: a biosemiotic approach. Biosemiotics 3(1):107–130. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s12304-009-9068-y. ISSN 1875-1342 6. Ferreira MIA (2012) Interactive bodies: the semiosis of architectural forms—a case study. Biosemiotics 5(2):269–289. ISSN 1875–1342. Springer 7. Kull K (1998) On semiosis, umwelt, and semiosphere. Semiotica 120(3/4):299–310 8. Urban Transportation Planning: https://criticaeconomica.net/2016/08/depender-menos-doautomovel-e-deslocar-em-transporte-publico-com-tarifa-social-unica-contra-a-logica-neo-lib eral/ 9. The Future of Cities: Opportunities, Challenges and the Way Forward, April 2019. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2019. https://urban.jrc.ec.europa.eu/thefut ureofcities 10. Urban Metabolism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu-a1hFEV7Q 11. Musango JK, Currie P, Robinson B (2017) Urban metabolism for resource efficient cities: from theory to implementation. UN Environment, Paris 12. Sorkin M (2018) What goes up: the rights and wrongs to the city. Verso. New Left Books. NY 13. UNEP (2013) City-level decoupling: urban resource flows and the governance of infrastructure transitions. In: Swilling M, Robinson B, Marvin S, Hodson M (eds) A report of the working group on cities of the international resource panel 38 https://www.weforum.org/great-reset. 39 https://www.weforum.org/great-reset.
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14. City Level Decoupling: Urban Resource Flows and the Governance of Infrastructure Transitions. International Resource Panel. UN. https://www.resourcepanel.org/reports/city-level-dec oupling 15. Accelerating Change: From Smart Cities to Smart Societies. White & Case Report. https:// www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/accelerating-change-from-smart-city-to-83944/ 16. L’Express, France, 2018. In Bernard Cathelat (2019) Smart Cities: Shaping the Society in 2030, p 30. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367762 17. Bernard Cathelat (2019) Smart Cities: Shaping the Society in 2030, p 30. https://unesdoc.une sco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367762 18. https://www.habitat3.org/the-new-urban-agenda 19. https://undocs.org/DP/2017/38 20. https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals.html 21. https://www.agenda2030.gob.es/sites/default/files/recursos/Seville%20Commitment.% 2027%2002%202019.pdf. 22. Smart Cities 2030: Shaping the Society of 2030 23. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367762 24. Carvalho L (2015) Smart cities from scratch? A socio-technical perspective. Cambridge J Reg Econ Soc 8(1):43–60. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsu010 25. https://smartcities-infosystem.eu/scc-lighthouse-projects 26. Crutzen PJ (2002) Geology of mankind. Nature 415(6867):23. https://doi.org/10.1038/415023a 27. Virilio P (1977, 1993) Speed and Politics. Semiotext. 28. Ferreira MIA (2018) Technological development and well-being. In: Robotics and well-being. Springer, Berlin 29. https://www.ottoscharmer.com/ 30. https://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/media/Ministry 31. Harari YN (2020) The World after Covid 19, Financial Times, 20th of March 2020 32. Building Resilient Societies after the Covid-19 Pandemic (2020) International Resource Panel. UN Environment Program 33. https://www.weforum.org/great-reset 34. The Grand Review Research 2018. https://www.pwc.com/us/en/industries/capital-projects-inf rastructure/library/foundation-of-smart-city-success.html
The Right to the City: The Right to Live with Dignity Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira
Citizenship is the right to have rights. Hannah Arendt
Abstract The present chapter addresses Lefebvre’s famous claim to ‘The Right to the City’ by reviewing the Aristotelian concept of [Citizen] and highlighting how its main primitive semantic features have embodied, in Western societies, successive reformulations, keeping however the initial noncomprehensive character of the concept, a non-holistic view of those that inhabit the city and consequently belong to the community. Observing that from its inception the very concept is inherently associated to the notion of a physically fit, active and productive male individual, the text reflects on how this fact has determined not only the cast-off, from active social participation, all the other urban dwellers, namely the children, the elderly, the impaired, the jobless/homeless (and not so long ago the women), but has also determined the particular architectural features that cities have been assuming, throughout time, their built reality. Imagined for an idealized standard citizen, cities have always been spaces of differentiation, discrimination, exclusion, physical and psychological suffering, for a significant part of their population. This population is frequently sympathetically called ‘vulnerable’ forgetting that their vulnerability is most of the times not an inherent state or condition per se, but a consequence of the aggressiveness of a physically unsuitable urban environment, of the inexistence of proper living conditions, of the absence of basic health and social care systems, of fragile or inexistent social networks and erased affective bonds, a context that fosters segregation, exclusion and inequity. As pointed out in Urban Policies and the Right to the City [1], although there are encouraging initiatives being taken by key players in various cities and countries, there is not yet a consolidated approach to inclusive urban policy and governance. The present Covid-19 crisis has totally unveiled the fragility of contemporary urban settlements, their difficulty of response when facing a generalized crisis and the ugly reality of exclusion in our cities, even in those cities that claim to be citizen-centred, even in those that aim to be inclusive, friendly and M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (B) Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (ed.), How Smart Is Your City?, Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering 98, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6_2
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smart. But this crisis has also shown up the role to be played by urban intelligence endowing the city with the capacity to respond to its citizens’ needs, especially in extreme situations as the one caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The key role that urban intelligence can play so that the city remains a space of freedom-respecting the citizen’s individual rights while providing comfort, care and protection to each and all its dwellers. Keywords The right to the city · Inclusiveness · Equity · Freedom · Human rights
1 The Citizen—A Social, Political and Legal Construct 1.1 The Aristotelian Concept The concept of [citizen] having been coined in a particular economic, social and cultural framework—that of the Greek polis—has, since then, always been present in the historical narrative of Western societies, throughout distinct social and political settings, maintaining its core semantic identity notwithstanding the importance of other relevant conceptualizations in the course of this concept’s ontogeny, we will only, very briefly, consider in this paper the following milestones: (i) the Aristotelian conception (ii) the fundamental role played by the French Revolution ideals (iii) the concept’s modern/present meaning in Western democratic societies. To Aristotle the city-state is a collective entity, ruled by ‘nomos’, the rule of law, and grounded in the concept of citizen [politês], the individual member of the community who has the right [exousia] to participate in the deliberative or judicial office [2], i.e. to take turns ruling, contributing to the legislative effort and to judicial and executive decisions. All the legislation issued as well as the political actions carried out by rulers, should, according to the philosopher, be driven by the pursuit of achieving the common good, i.e. individual happiness and collective well-being. To Aristotle to be truly human involves being politically active and he argues that ‘the good life is the goal of the city-state,’ a life consisting of noble actions [3]. The Aristotelian concept of [citizen] is a social, political and legal construct that reflects the Ancient Greek society’s mode of production and division of labour and creates the conditions for a primitive model of direct democracy. In this model we can already find, in embryonic form, two concepts that sustain modern democracies1 : 1. the concept of [representation]—making citizens’ opinions, and perspectives ‘present’ in the definition of policies and legislative process [4–6] 2. the concept of [legal affectedness]—the idea that all those who are affected by a political decision should have a say in its making [7]. To open the third book of the Politics, Aristotle considers the status of citizenship and which of the residents of a polis are to be considered citizens. To be a citizen of 1 Democracy
from the Greek demokratia or people (demos) rule (kratos).
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Athens it was necessary to be a male aged 20 or over, of known genealogy as being born to an Athenian citizen family, a patriarch of a household, a warrior—possessing the arms and ability to fight, and a master of the labour of others—namely of slaves [8, 9]. Ethnicity, gender, age, education and economic autonomy were by far the main parameters to eventually determine admission to the category of [citizen]. Aristotle, consequently, explicitly excludes the following dwellers: 1. slaves and resident aliens by claiming that natural slaves lack a deliberative faculty and thus need a natural master to direct them [10] 2. women because ‘the male is by nature more capable of leadership than the female […]although women have a deliberative faculty, it is “without authority” [akuron] so that females require male supervision” [11] 3. dependent people (as the impaired) 4. boys too young for military service. The young were viewed as ‘underdeveloped’ 5. the elderly, viewed as ‘superannuated’, when retired from duty could be citizens, but not fully-fledged ones 6. people who have been exiled or stripped of their rights. A profound consciousness of membership to the community to which all citizens pledged allegiance, together with a set of obligations and rights plus the feeling that there was a common interest which imposed its obligations on everyone, constituted the essence of the Ancient Greek notion of citizenship.
1.2 Embodying Equalitarian Ideals Two great revolutions inaugurated the modern democratic era—the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,2 set by France’s National Constituent Assembly in 1789, proclaims that the rights of man are universal as they pertain to human nature itself. The citizen is the social individual whose rights, protected by the law, make him an element of a collective institutional being—the nation. The French Revolution of 1789 acts as a prime example of how the empowerment of the people could change the formal and informal institutions of French society towards democracy and equality. François Furet [12] described the French Revolution as the first experiment with democracy, as universal male suffrage took place, for the first time, in 1792 and the Revolution also witnessed debates over such issues as the rights of citizens and whether women should be given political rights.
2 Déclaration
des droits de l’homme et du citoyen.
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1.3 The Contemporary Perspective In the course of its ontogeny the concept has evolved from its primitive lexical root signaling the belonging to the economic, social and cultural community defining a city to the belonging to a wider community—the nation.3 In its present form, the concept applies to all the individuals belonging to a certain community independently of their gender, ethnicity, physical status or age. Citizenship is frequently read as a synonym of nationality, the status individuals get by having been born within a specific community-country- and, frequently concomitantly, by having their ancestors also belonging to that community. Citizenship can also be granted under specified legal circumstances to individuals that previously didn’t belong to the community. The shared identity that the concept presupposes gets its roots in a common historic, linguistic and cultural background. This fact is evidenced by the requirements demanded by many countries, to applicants, in what concerns the knowledge of their fundamental distinctive elements: language, history, cultural traditions, that come to define their identity as a nation. For instance, in the UK, citizenship applicants have to succeed in exams assessing their fluency when speaking English and their knowledge of English history, culture and institutions. According to Marshall [13], citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All those that possess that right are equal with respect to the rights and duties this status embodies. Marshall argues that modern citizenship encompasses three dimensions: a civil relation-having equality before the law, a political-having the power to vote; and a social-having the state support individual persons along the lines of a welfare state. Marshall added that citizenship required a vital sense of community in the sense of a feeling of loyalty to a common civilization. In contemporary societies, the concept of citizenship cannot be dissociated of the Charter of Human Rights, as they are the grounding stone for the civilized world. The inalienable link between the concept, as presently understood, and the Human Rights Declaration and its subsequent formulations, was pointed out by Hanah Arendt [14], based on her own personal experience as a refugee: Human Rights will never be effective if they are not enforced by the legal/political dimension of citizenship that can be translated as the Right to Have Rights.
2 The Right to the City Thinking the city as the mirror not only of the society’s structuring and organization, but also as a mirror of its tensions and fragilities, Lefebvre [15] referred that citizenship should aim to create a different social life, a more direct democracy and a civil society based not on abstraction, but on space and time as they are lived. In his claim to the Right to the City [16], endlessly repeated by many, since then, Lefebvre specifies that this right manifests itself as a superior form of rights: the right to freedom, 3 Or
Commonwealth of Nations or a Union of Nations as in the European Union.
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to individualization in socialization, to habitat and to inhabit. It encompasses a set of fundamental concrete rights pertaining to all social groups including the older citizens, the young citizens, the jobless citizens, homeless citizens, etc., and involving issues as mobility, accessibility, health, education and above all employment and housing. According to Lefebvre the right to the city, complemented by the right to difference and the right to information, should modify, concretize and make more practical the rights of the citizen as an urban dweller and user of multiple services. David Harvey [17] refers that we live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. A great deal of energy has been expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. But for the most part, the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logic or the dominant modes of legality and state action. We live, after all, according to him, in a world in which the profit rate trumps all other notions of rights. Human rights are not nice general formulae to be applied to people from far away regions, but they are the concrete rights pertaining to all the social groups of our societies, in the particular daily circumstances of their lived experience. The present Covid-19 crisis has totally unveiled not only the fragility of contemporary urban settlements in terms of their resilience to unexpected crises but also the ugly reality of exclusion in our cities, even in those that claim to be citizen-centred, even in those that aim to be inclusive, friendly and smart. The existence of thousands of homeless citizens, most of them thrown to live in the street by unemployment and poverty, in capitals that are viewed as pillars of development and civilization has shown how distant we are from having attained not only inclusiveness and equity but fundamental human rights. By hitting the most vulnerable the hardest, namely the people lacking access to adequate, affordable, and secure housing, the pandemic exposed inefficient governance and the consequent fundamental inequalities. Without a house, it was impossible to heed the call to stay at home. In a short poem that was retweeted thousands of times and became one of the most iconic statements during the pandemics, Damian Barr [18] in response to the slogan ‘We are all together in this’ and reflecting on the huge inequity of lived experiences, wrote: ‘We are all in the same storm/Some are on super-yachts/Some have just the one oar’. According to Maimunah Mohd Sharif,4 the executive director of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, ‘this pandemic exacerbated the urban divide that has resulted from a long-term failure to address fundamental inequalities and guarantee basic human rights. The post-COVID-19 response will require these failures to be addressed and all urban residents provided with basic services— especially health care and housing […]’.
4 https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/secretary-generals-speeches.
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3 Vulnerable Citizens 3.1 The Universal Design Framework To those that, in society, apparently lack the capacity to cope with a particular context we call ‘vulnerable populations’. Vulnerability can assume distinct forms, distinct natures, depending on the situational contexts, but it is always translated in the difficulty to face a situation, because of not having the necessary means to do so. This vulnerability is in most cases not an intrinsic feature of the experiencer subject, but the consequence of a society where there is no equity. But vulnerability can also be a consequence of deficient urban planning, planning that has not taken into account the differentiated physical realities of their dwellers and the way these realities determine the way they move around and interact in the city. The right to mobility and accessibility are fundamental rights frequently constrained by the barriers imposed by the built environment.5 From all the circumstances that in the city are responsible for the citizens’ vulnerability, we have chosen the urban built environment and its frequent aggressiveness. From the so-called ‘vulnerable populations’ we have chosen the children. With this example, we want to embrace all forms of vulnerability highlighting how the city is in fact structurally and functionally conceived to respond to the daily patterns of an active productive population and that apart from that socio-economic imperative, everything else becomes subsidiary. Also, we would like to claim that an inclusive city is a city where mobility and accessibility are universal. In order to attain this, urban planning has to consider: (i) the differentiated nature of the city dwellers; (ii) the importance of the individual/environment scale relationship; (iii) the way different people move in the world according to their age and physical status. To achieve true inclusiveness it is necessary to follow a Universal Design framework. The term was coined by Ronald Mace in 1985 to describe the idea that people, either disabled or nondisabled would benefit from a more accessible built environment. Universal Design guidelines foster the design and composition of an environment so that it can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people regardless of their age, size, ability or disability [19]. The Principles of Universal Design as defined by Ronald Mace6 are as follows: • • • • •
Principle 1: Equitable Use Principle 2: Flexibility in Use Principle 3: Simple and Intuitive Use Principle 4: Perceptible Information Principle 5: Tolerance for Error
5 The
Capital Crawl, a disability rights protest demanding that the Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, landmark anti-discrimination legislation that identified a civil right to accessible buildings, public transportation, and workplaces for disabled citizens. 6 https://universaldesign.ie/What-is-Universal-Design/The-7-Principles/.
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• Principle 6: Low Physical Effort • Principle 7: Size and Space for Approach and Use.
3.2 The Case of Children Of the 4 billion people living in urban areas today, nearly a third of them are children and it is estimated that by 2050, almost 70% of the world’s children will live in urban areas [20], many of them in slums [21]. Frequently we hear that children are the citizens of the future. This is a fact, but the sentence seems to ignore that children are full-fledged citizens from the day they are born7 and that consequently, the city has to be planned in order to satisfy their fundamental individual rights. One of these fundamental rights is the right to mobility and accessibility, as any constraint on any of them is a barrier to freedom and in the case of the children, a constraint on their normal physical and mental development. In the industrialized countries of the early twentieth century, there were no standards of protection for children. It was even common to see them carrying out nearly the same work as adults in unsanitary and unsafe contexts. In 1924 the League of Nations adopted the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child [22], by declaring that ‘the world owes the child the best that it has to give’. The declaration stated that ‘all people owe children the right to means for their development; special help in times of need; priority for relief, economic freedom, and protection from exploitation and an upbringing that instills social consciousness and duty’. Throughout the twentieth century, the general topic of the rights of children was approached on several occasions in different documents and distinct initiatives.8 The most important milestone in what concerns the specification of children’s individual rights was in 1989 when several world leaders came together and made a historic commitment by defining and adopting an international legal framework—the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child [23]. The Convention highlighted that ‘children are not just objects who belong to their parents and for whom decisions are made, or adults in training.9 ’ Rather, they are human beings, individuals with their own rights. The Convention points out that ‘childhood is a special, protected time, in which children must be allowed to grow, learn, play, develop and flourish with dignity’. The Convention identifies the rights that must be realized for children to develop their full potential, free from hunger and want, neglect and abuse and it is the first legally binding international instrument to incorporate the full range of children’s rights—civil, economic, social, cultural and political rights. Because in human beings, the process of maturation and full autonomy takes longer than in other species, children’s needs, interests and expectations cannot be 7 That
are assigned a legal identity translated in na identity card they receive from the time they are born. 8 https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention/history-child-rights. 9 https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention/what-is-the-convention.
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rendered second, be minimized or just ignored in what refers to the identification of development priorities and strategies. But as urban planning and infrastructures are essentially thought to respond to the prevailing modes of production and to facilitate the work routines, the behavioral patterns of those on whose activity the ‘economic machine’ depends, children, though naturally cherished, are generally not considered as peers when planning or building. One of the fundamental issues in planning is that of scale. Everything in town is dimensioned for adults, not for little ones. High steps either in buildings or in transportation are barriers to the normal movement of children, but they are also barriers to the mobility of pregnant women, of elderly and of impaired people. Everyone certain recalls the frightening sensation when having to step out of a train with a child on the lap. What is the ‘Mind the Gap’ warning voice good for? It is certainly good to remind us that there are huge gaps in our cities and that this is certainly one, the gap to provide easy mobility and accessibility to everyone. Presently cities are not a place for children: their huge streets crowded with vehicles at high speed; their traffic lights, programmed for an agile walker capable of crossing the zone in an established fraction of time totally indifferent to the length of one’s legs or to the lack of agility of movement. The bike, skate and electric scooters that in many cities move at high speed in the same lanes walkers do….constitute a generalized option in what concerns transportation, that, however, does not take into account the demographics of the present and mainly of the future years. It has been frequently pointed out that shaping cities for children [24] will benefit not only children but all the urban dwellers as urban scales, proximity, walkability, independent mobility and connectivity become fundamental standards. Seeing a city from a children’s perspective is fundamental [25] to have a vision of how the urban environment could be improved in a way to offer well-being and development.
4 Conclusions Lefebvre [15] pointed out that the Analytics of the City would be fundamental to improve urban planning and the relationship of the urban dweller with its environment. We believe intelligent tools will play a fundamental role in helping to adequate the surrounding environment to their users and turning the city into a friendlier and more inclusive environment.
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There’s More Than One Kind of “Smart”: Big Data, Affect and Empathy in the City Colin G. Ellard
Abstract Most conceptions of the smart city envision uses of technology that improve urban efficiencies, such as control of environmental variables and urban infrastructure. When smart city algorithms venture into areas related to the measurement and control of human behaviour, popular responses are often fractious. In this chapter, I discuss the reasons for such visceral responses and, in the context of Albert Borgmann’s “device paradigm,” I offer one potential positive use of the collection and use of such data to inject effective human context into the urban fabric and thereby to improve collective empathy and compassion. Keywords Psychology · Empathy · Emotion About an hour down, the highway from where I live in the city of Kitchener lies a twelve-acre patch of waterfront land in Toronto called Quayside. This parcel of real estate, currently home to a sparse collection of mostly temporary buildings and large flocks of waterfowl, is the site of a development that has been so contentious that it has been compared to Guadalcanal, the site of the beginning of the ferocious land battle between the USA and Japan during World War II [9]. For this is the location that was chosen by Google as the site of their vaunted Alphabet Sidewalk Lab, prospectively the realization of Google CEO Larry Page’s dream to set aside a city within a city for unregulated exploration. The vision was to make a real place work something a little bit like the annual Burning Man Festival [10] but here embedded in the context of a functioning city rather than standing alone on an island or in the middle of a desert. The full prospectus for the project was published in 2019 and was supported by voluminous online material [15], which touts the development as a progressive livework community including infrastructure for transportation both within the area and between it and the rest of the city, cutting edge residential development realized in wood and, as one might expect from Google, comprehensive technology for highspeed connectivity within the sector. C. G. Ellard (B) Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (ed.), How Smart Is Your City?, Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering 98, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6_3
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The publicity blitz for Sidewalk Lab and the effort by Google’s Alphabet to sell the idea to the city was formidable, yet at present, the project is somewhat in limbo— the scope of the project has been scaled down considerably and there are still some lingering questions about whether, in spite of substantial support from the City of Toronto, including its mayor, the project will go ahead at all. The reason for this is that there was a considerable public backlash to an initial proposal for the project that included a strong IoT (Internet of Things) component and individualized tracking of human behaviour. In spite of the fact that Sidewalk Labs agreed that the data collected would be securely anonymized and not commercialized (at least in the sense that individuals would not be targeted by commercial interests based on their habits), public unease and even blatant mistrust of the intentions of the proposal resulted in sociological and political upheavals that seemed as though they took Google and Sidewalk Labs by surprise. Though they admitted to having a commercial stake in the project as a platform for the development and marketing of smart city technologies (else why do this at all?), it was hard for them to discern the downside for the city. The availability of an idyllic urban setting offering beautiful amenities, a prime location and below market-value accommodation in one of the world’s more expensive cities seemed like it should be an opportunity too good to pass up. And yet that was exactly what many people wanted to do. The public reaction to the Sidewalk Labs proposal interests me greatly because I think it may be a diagnostic of attitudes towards smart city design in general. Further, I think that we human beings have an implicit sense of the divide that separates the use of machine algorithms to speed certain kinds of urban efficiencies—to regulate parking spaces, guide driverless cars, rationalize HVAC systems—but not other kinds of smart designs that may be perceived to pry into our personal habits—where we go and whom we go with, what we do there and perhaps even how we feel while we are doing it. To understand this response, it might be fruitful to flip the issue by asking what kinds of urban developments we seem to like. There may be no better guide for this than the thoughts of legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs. In a speech written for a planning conference in Germany, Jacobs argued that structure imposed on a city by “big planning” from above was destined to be unpopular at best and quite likely an abject failure. Instead, Jacobs argued that we like a mess: we are attracted to urban landscapes that show variety, complexity, democracy and perhaps even a little chaos. Such settings, she said, came about not from the top-down but through the operation of “vital little plans” [17]. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere [7] that we may even gravitate to such settings because they resonate with ancient preferences written into our very DNA that draw us towards vitality. Such an argument is related to Christopher Alexander’s lifework [2] in which he similarly argued that human beings are not only preternaturally attracted to life but exquisitely tuned to being able to know it when we see it. Recent empirical studies [5] are now beginning to shore up Alexander’s claims with data. If any of this is true, then it suggests that there may always be a tricky divide between the smart city vision of mechanic efficiencies that can empty our trashcans when they are full and melt the ice on our sidewalks when they are slippery, and the edge of the precipice that leads to human activity and emotion. Our fear is
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that what lies beyond the precipice is first the whiff and then the full-on assault of a dystopic, socially engineered life. Yet it could be argued that the human dimension— the arena that deals in our emotional lives, our stresses, our unbridled desires, healthy or otherwise—may be the arena most fully in need of the kind of assistance that at least some aspects of smart design might be able to offer. We have long known that rates of psychiatric disorders like generalized anxiety, depression, and psychopathy occur at a markedly increased incidence in cities [8] and there is even evidence that urban life contributes to changes in brain functionality [1, 11], possibly due to the social stresses of living cheek-by-jowl with thousands or even millions of strangers in a city. Given the disconnect between the modal conditions of urban living and the likely environmental settings for which we are evolved (small settings of 100– 150 hunter-gatherers), these signs of psychic stress are not at all surprising. It is the task of urban design, smart or otherwise, to mitigate such stress. I argue that good urban design should provide psychological sustainability, that is, a cohesive set of environmental affordances that protect and sustain our minds in the face of the inevitable stresses of the city. In a book that should be much more widely read in the current context of Big Data, artificial intelligence and smart technology, philosopher of technology Borgmann [4] argues that the arc of progress from pre-technological society to the present time has included the transformation of things into devices. To unpack this somewhat opaque premise, let us consider the example that Borgmann turns to more than once—that of the hearth. A hearth in a pre-technological home is the main source of heat for both physiological comfort and for cooking. But it is much more than this. It includes a context, a set of human habits and practices that are integral to the “thingness” of the hearth. For example, the practice of togetherness, the enjoyment of the company of family and friends while relaxing in comfort or while preparing a meal all constitute the fuller context of the meaning of a hearth. Modern homes replace the hearth with an appliance or two—a gas furnace, an electric heating system, an electronic range for cooking. In Borgmann’s terminology, these appliances are “devices” in that they fulfill the bare pragmatics of the “things” that they replace, but they remove the context, consisting of what Borgmann calls “focal practices.” In a short period of time, those practices and our awareness of them disappear except on those odd occasions when we may take the time to light a fire in a fireplace or cook a part of a meal on an old woodstove, more usually as an aesthetic complement in celebration of an event: an occasional ritual rather than a focal practice. Borgmann argues that this transition—from thing to device—always involves a loss. An essential part of the conduct of life has been replaced entirely by a piece of technology. In the case of the hearth, focal practices that would have involved the gathering of fuel, monitoring the weather, building and maintaining the fire, many of which would have been communal or family activities have all been replaced by a thermostatic relay, which is largely invisible to human affairs unless it breaks. The loss here is that the replaced focal practice provided an important affordance for a shared experience. Once gone, we have fewer reasons to communicate, share responsibility and dependency and, perhaps most importantly of all, our emotional state.
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The relevance of Borgmann’s concerns about technology and the device paradigm to the discussion of smart city design when it includes behavioural tracking (or even when it doesn’t) is obvious and perhaps even more alarming than the loss of a hearth. If a system of technology is designed to intervene in the context of interpersonal transactions between humans in the same way that a thermostat obviates the need for the hearth, then what, in Borgmann’s terms, has been lost? When it comes to our engagement with one another, the question might better be “what is left?” In a way, the crisis of the device paradigm in the context of interpersonal affairs is already upon us. Though there are many points of view and the evidence is far from conclusive, many have already raised the alarm about the impact of the waning of face-to-face interaction on the human psyche [13, 16]. For human interactions with larger entities, such as machines or corporations, current developments are no less concerning, and there has already been a considerable outcry about the impact of behaviour tracking on current affairs—public opinion formation and even election outcomes. There have been several powerful demonstrations of the impact of Big Data harvesting on political and economic outcomes [3], so that there is an appetite for oversight and regulation, even though such things will be incredibly difficult to achieve with current models. But beyond the truly frightening possibilities for the uses of automated devices to sort us socially, to regulate our opinions and our actions without awareness, the more germane question for this essay has to do with the prospects for “smart” decision-making based on data harvested about the massed behaviour of the many. Even if such decision-making can make our lives more “efficient” by, say, steering us away from risky or crowded locations, we are likely to continue to have a measure of distrust and dislike for the prospect of smart designs that impose behaviour-regulating algorithms from above, especially when the machinations of such algorithms are hidden from view. What is the way ahead? We will not stop using mobile technologies to communicate with one another and there are few good reasons to argue that this would be desirable. Such technologies, for all of their liabilities, are a net good. The deeper question is whether it might be possible to maintain the context that Borgmann argues represents a cornerstone of human engagement with the world. Can we keep the toys but avoid the device paradigm, in other words? In more prosaic terms, perhaps behaviour tracking would be more acceptable if participants themselves had both transparent access and a tangible stake in such tracking. In a previous paper [6], I have suggested that one way to think about this may be in the context of emotion. Cities already contain many indexicals that map emotion and preference. One such indexical is the desire line, in which the march of human feet (or sometimes the tires of cars), makes visible and accessible to any who encounter it an analog trace of human movement. Desire lines can be as ephemeral as tracks through the snow, more enduring as the patterns of wear on a public lawn, or practically permanent as in the patterns of erosion in stone walkways. The lines offer a hint of reassurance that we have been “there” with others, but they also can serve to notate an environment, recommend shortcuts and efficiencies in the physical terrain that may vary from those that have been prescribed by the original designers of a building or a streetscape. But what if desire lines could go beyond simple recordings of footfalls? What if a
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data stream could be made to contain affective values themselves? Such data could be harvested either from our remote devices or through embedded environmental sensors. They could collect data using one or more of the variety of means now available to us, ranging from sentiment analysis of textual information to biometrics that is already available on our phones or that could be added by using the slew of relatively affordable wearables such as fitness trackers. Those with commercial interests in the prospect of widely available behavioural data would salivate at the prospect of having access to an individually identifiable emotion map of this type, so the critical move would be to find ways to prevent such access by ensuring that the raw data could not be so co-opted. It would need to be open and universally accessible, fully anonymized and as secure as possible. The data stream could consist of nothing more than a high-level geo-overlay, perhaps illustrating average affective state using an intuitive and accessible form of visualization, such as a visual heat map. Like all such data, inputs to the stream would need to be digital at some level, but participants would only have access to analog representations so as to avoid the perils of over-metrication and comparison [12]. Though the technical details of how to get this right would be formidable, such issues are beyond the ambit of this essay. The more pertinent issues have to do with the potential uses of this affective data stream. Conventionally, crowd-sourced behavioural data have been used to monitor traffic patterns and delays (Waze, for example) or other pragmatic variables related to efficiency, such as wait times at emergency rooms or lengths of line-ups at bars or restaurants. Instead, the affective data overlay that I propose would do something quite different. Depending on the time interval over which the stream was inspected, it might be used to indicate the ambience of a location when such time intervals were long (i.e. is the current location a happy/anxious/disgusting place generally) or the current mood of a location when time intervals were short. One could imagine some such appraisals as having pragmatic value (as in Quercia’s [14] example of a navigation app based on density of Flickr photographs that can be used to recommend aesthetically pleasing routes through an urban space) but they might also be supposed to lend context in the sense meant by Borgmann to a machine designed to measure collective emotion at a location. The intrinsic value of the data, in this case, could be considered as nothing more than an occasion to participate in the shared experience of a place. The data stream might be considered less of a tool to promote efficient behaviour and more as an aid for immersed, geo-located affective sharing. To conclude, my argument is that one major barrier to public acceptance of smart city paradigms is the concern about data privacy, especially when the data includes personal information about our behaviour. A related barrier is our well-founded concern that the monetary value or political power of such data renders it vulnerable to unscrupulous uses by vested interests. This has been well-illustrated by the backlash to the Toronto waterfront project but is by no means limited to this particular case. Such concerns have also been shown to be well-founded, as suggested by recent events involving political meddling. An even deeper concern, as I have discussed here, is the manner in which mass public data on behaviour might actually change fundamental aspects of human nature
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by the mechanism described by Borgmann. His device paradigm, when applied to the technology of behaviour monitoring and tracking, poses the risk of stripping rich context from human affairs and ultimately of impoverishing the full gamut of human interaction, much of which is founded on empathy. In this paper, I have suggested that one kind of a remedy to this may be to think about the monitoring and sharing of affective information via technology in a different way. Rather than using such data as a resource for promoting efficiency or for making money in the same way that we might leverage environmental variables like the weather, a more mindful approach might be to develop tools that allow us to use such resource that could provide ambient information about shared affect and contribute positively to human empathy and compassion.
References 1. Adli M, Berger M, Brakemeier E-L (2017) Neurourbanism: towards a new discipline. Lancet 4(3):183–185 2. Alexander C (2004) The nature of order: an essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe. Routledge, London 3. Bolsover G, Howard P (2017) Computational propaganda and political big data: moving toward a more critical research agenda. Big Data 5(4):273–276 4. Borgmann A (1984) Technology and character of contemporary life. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 5. Coburn A, Kardan O, Kotabi H (2019) Psychological responses to natural patterns in architecture. J EnvPsyc 62:133–145 6. Ellard C (2017) Becoming the city. Conscious cities, https://theccd.org/article/becoming-thecity/ 7. Ellard C (2020) Drawn to life: desire and the city, LA+, 11:26–33 8. Faris R, Dunham H (1939) Mental disorders in urban areas: an ecological study of schizophrenia and other psychoses. Univ. Chicago Press, Chicago 9. Hackett R (2020) Did the “techlash” kill Alphabet’s city of the future? Available via Fortune. https://fortune.com/longform/alphabet-sidewalk-labs-quayside-toronto-techlash/. Accessed 23 Feb 2020 10. Ingraham N (2013) Larry Page’s dream of building a Google island could be coming true. Available via The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/26/11512256/google-sidewalklab-smart-city-dan-doctoroff-larry-page. Accessed 25 Feb 2019 11. Lederbogen F, Kirsch P, Haddad L et al (2011) City living and urban upbringing affect neural social stress processing. Nature 474(23):498–501 12. Mau S (2019) The metric society: on the quantification of the social. Wiley, Hoboken 13. Pinker S (2015) The village effect: How face-to-face contact can make us healthier and happier. Vintage Canada, Toronto 14. Quercia D, Schiffanella R, Aiello LM (2013) The shortest path to happiness: recommending beautiful, quiet, and happy routes in the city. In: HT ’14: proceedings of the 25th ACM conference on hypertext and social media, pp 116–125 15. Sidewalk Toronto (2019) https://www.sidewalktoronto.ca/. Retrieved 23 Feb 2020 16. Turkle S (2016) The power of conversation: reclaiming talk in a digital age. Penguin 17. Zipp S, Storring N (eds) (2016) Vital little plans: the short works of Jane Jacobs. Random House Canada, Toronto
Acting Smart: An Experimental Approach to Architecture, Performance Art and ICT Maria da Piedade Ferreira
Abstract The artistic research project which is described in this chapter, Corporeal Architecture, takes place in the context of design education, exploring the relationship between body, space and object, with a focus on embodiment. The Corporeal Architecture project proposes that the integration of performance art, neuroscience and information technology (ICT), namely AI, in architectural design have the potential to develop corporeal awareness and stimulate the creativity of future designers to address contemporary challenges. The research has connections to Smart Cities approaches while being supported by experimental work which includes technology and methodologies from ICT, psychophysiology and neuroscience. The methodology it proposes combines the somatic practices of performance art with emotion measurement tools in design education and encourages the active creative participation of students in the design, fabrication and performance with body extensions, body restrictions, pieces of furniture and installations. Integration of performance art in the teaching curriculum of architectural design aims to make students aware of their own body as a way to develop techniques to design from a holistic, inclusive and experiential stance, with particular attention to health and well-being. The performances are documented on camera and film and constitute the archive of the platform Corporeal Architecture to be found at corporeal.persona.co and at the YouTube Channel Corporeal Architecture. Keywords Architecture · Performance art · Embodiment · Neuroscience · ICT’s
1 Hypothesis, Context and Application The work hypothesis is that by training design and architecture students to be able to tune into their own corporeal awareness using techniques from performance art and technology, their spatial, sensorial and perceptual skills will expand, develop and refine and, consequently, their creativity and sensitivity as designers will improve [1]. M. da P. Ferreira (B) Fakultät Architektur, Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM), Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (ed.), How Smart Is Your City?, Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering 98, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6_4
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Already at the German design school Bauhaus in the 1920s, the different pedagogical approaches which integrated performance, visual arts, sculpture, philosophy and science approached design as a tool to re-form society “from the spoon to the city”. Bauhaus-produced objects and performances are 100 years later still a living testimony of the school’s progressive approach to teaching and design as a vehicle to transform society [2, pp. 128–139]. Therefore, Corporeal Architecture aims to retrieve a tradition that has always been important in teaching architecture and design, of learning directly through the body and experience and extend the learning possibilities through technology. Now more than ever, a designer is someone who conceives a space taking into consideration the well-being of its users and aiming to provide places where meaningful experiences happen [3, pp. 89–97]. The increased focus on the topic of wellbeing in design comes as a natural response to the demands of an increasingly aged population as well as to a number of stress-related health conditions that affect not only citizens facing particular health-related challenges but society as a whole. Smart Cities solutions to address such challenges are proposed globally by government and institutional initiatives. The European Union (EU) has devoted constant efforts to devising a strategy for achieving ‘smart’ urban growth for its metropolitan cityregions [4, pp. 337–355]. In 2010, it highlighted its focus on strengthening innovation and investment in ICT services for the purpose of improving public services and quality of life. In the USA, according to the National Conference of State Legislators, the aim of a smart city is “to improve quality of life, economic opportunity and security” for those who live in cities and surrounding areas. The HIMSS Global Health Equity Network, which proposes ways which the healthcare industry can help cultivate a more inclusive environment that celebrates diversity, states that “a smart city may be most impactful when it is interoperable across core health, human services and non-health sector systems, including public safety, environmental health, social services, emergency services and transportation”. Of course, all of these aspects have one fundamental topic in common—the design of the interfaces, objects, buildings and means of transportation that embody ‘Smart Cities’ solutions by incorporating different types of electronic sensors to collect data. Which means that designers of the present and the future have the task of creating objects and interfaces which allow anyone to intuitively and easily access new data-supported ecosystems and promote a closer connection between citizens and governments, namely, by promoting egovernance and e-participation while respecting the fundamental ethical values of privacy and human dignity. Abiding those fundamental values, designers now also have the possibility of working with data collected from human bodies while experiencing design objects and architectural spaces, in order to access their affective states. It is with this intention that physiological measures recorded from the body using an e-health platform such as heart rate, skin conductance and blood pressure, are applied in experiments for the Corporeal Architecture project. An e-health platform is a hardware and operating
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Fig. 1 e-health platform which is used in the experiments of the Corporeal Architecture project
system on which software applications can be run to provide digital data—transmitted, stored and retrieved electronically—for clinical, educational and administrative purposes. Such measurements have been previously used in psychological studies [5, pp. 1248–1263] and in neuroergonomics (Fig. 1). Both psychophysiology and neuroergonomics share one goal—the design of safe and efficient technologies and systems for human effort, therefore, such methodologies offer a very fertile ground for designers and architects to research, especially when integrating performance art. Although the technology still has more limitations than possibilities, an integrated practice of design which includes such methodologies and developments will not only radically change the way we design but, most importantly how we live. The Corporeal Architecture project aims to act “smart” by integrating on one hand ICT and in the short term AI contents, in the e-health platform and in the teaching methodology while using play as a creative strategy characteristic of performance art. By learning, for example, to monitor how the rituals of everyday life affect the human body, such as cleaning the house, preparing a meal or taking a walk in a part, and how the placement and order of the objects and buildings which support such rituals allow humans to express who they are in the world and create a sense of placement and feel situated, students understand their importance but also how at the same time such conventions might equally in time become obstructive or even undesirable and their direct impact in the body. Through this methodology, students can also start thinking about the ways Smart Cities technologies, especially supported by Internet of Things (IoT) are changing the way we move in the city, at home and in the workplace, and in the future even how we dress, since many of such interfaces will be wearables. Students are also sensitised for the new protocols of interaction which will be constantly introduced and understand that many of our usual daily rituals and modes of interaction will experience radical transformation. In the design projects ‘Mean Chairs’ and ‘Tricky Tables’ (Fig. 2), these topics are addressed through the proposal of a radical approach to furniture design that promotes an active lifestyle
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Fig. 2 Performance for the design project Tricky Tables. Maria da Piedade Ferreira, TU Kaiserslautern, 2017/2018. Image by author
and adaptability to change, while at the same time directly working with the body in movement to explore the affordances inherent in tables and chairs. The Corporeal Architecture project uses performance art as a design and teaching tool to introduce the idea of the protocol in the interaction between body and space and/or body and object, as well as one’s own body and the bodies of others and to question through direct interaction where the protocol comes from and why and which narratives are performed in such patterns of behaviour. In this way, students are sensitised to their own habits and by observing their own movement they learn how such protocols and objects are shaped by cultural identities [6, pp. 97–99] This practical reflection allows the body and mind to release itself from the constraints of the already built-world, stimulating the imagination and opening up possibilities for the world of the future. When working with students it is also important to find in the mix of all these conditionings the subtle idiosyncrasies that make each student a creative individual. By becoming aware of one’s patterns of thought and interaction with the world, students become conscious of their agency and limits, their possibility of choice and their potential to become active participants in shaping and transforming the world (Fig. 3). Such approaches also offer problems, for example, the question of “data bias” which is not a contemporary concern but has been a present reality as statistics and histories have mostly been written from a male-gendered perspective. Data bias has guided for centuries how we think, design and act in the world and established ideas on comfort and usability. Historically, and especially after the Industrial Revolution, design objects were mostly adapted to generalised male standards based on the averaged collected data from male gender humans [7, pp. 29–66]. Such a built environment shaped cultures and identities, forcing everybody, regardless of one’s
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Fig. 3 Experiment “De Humani Corporis Fabrica”—performance “eating dinner”. Maria da Piedade Ferreira, TU Kaiserslautern, 2013/2014. Image by author
naturally imperfect humanity, to adapt to such standards. And although the twentyfirst century has definitely brought an evolution in this regard, most of the spaces we live and work in are mostly adapted to the efficiency-driven ideal of the “car-driving healthy male standard”, a residue of Taylorism. Similar problems might appear in Smart Cities solutions, as Criado Perez states that certain algorithms at work reveal the same male-bias tendency. Philosophically, one must also address that there are fundamental aspects of being human and of the creative process that are not measurable or translatable as data [8]. A non-measurable human feature is our innate interest in ritual and need for introspection [9, pp. 155–175]. In a century when religion has not as much importance as before and human beings’ instinctual need for community and ritual is increasingly met by commercial experiences, it is an architecture that has the responsibility to create typologies where such needs are met, what Pérez-Gómez [10, pp. 165– 196] refers to as architecture as a place for free enjoyment or catharsis, which can take place where humans individually and collectively feel a sense of attunement. Smart Cities approaches can offer interesting possibilities in this regard too while allowing individuals with different personal, political and social stances to meet and build social networks and communities which can start in virtual space and extend to shape the city.
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2 Qualitative Research, Architecture and Embodiment A broad definition of “qualitative” defines this adjective as relating to, measuring or measured by the quality of something rather than its quantity. In the context of the research project, Corporeal Architecture, the term “qualitative” has the meaning of the scientific procedure which by adopting a wide scope of analytical tools allows us to evaluate and extract conclusions on the effects of architectural spaces and design objects in the human body and mind. Qualitative research, by including methodologies that attribute measurable values to the felt experience, might help us better understand the effects of the built environment in the human body during the design process itself and after building [11, pp. 133–144]. Investigating a qualitative approach to research, the Corporeal Architecture project integrates performance art, qualitative methods, psychophysiology and self-assessment tools in the teaching of architecture [12]. The aim is to understand how to create spaces that might improve the quality of the built environment and use these tools to observe in real-time how body, space and movement are interdependent. Qualitative research methods have a long tradition of being used in psychology, mathematics, medical sciences and more recently, neurosciences, revolutionising many other disciplines. Architecture and design are no exception and a growing community of individuals and institutions are embracing the possibilities of qualitative research to analyse how the existing built environment can be improved to address contemporary health concerns characteristic of urban settings [13, pp. 2–41]. This offers to us the possibility of creating design methodologies that are scienceinformed. A building, home or office can then be designed or adapted as an intelligent extension of the human body and positively impact how this feels and acts in the world [14, pp. 1–9]. Smart Cities approaches that integrate qualitative research outcomes are helpful to measure the impact of the built environment in the human body and implement science-informed solutions that promote the citizens well-being through design. Qualitative Research offers many possibilities but also challenges and ethical concerns. It is important that while working with such tools one clearly has in mind the current limitations of technology and understands that the measurements collected should not be seen as deterministic but as indicators of how body and space/design objects affect each other. Also, architects must learn to develop the sensitivity to deal with the consequences of looking so deeply into the bodies and lives of others. Therefore, integrating such practices in the context of design and teaching also brings the challenge that architects, as happens in the medical professions, learn how to respect boundaries and privacy and use the information collected with the highest ethical standards.
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3 Methodology, Research Goals and Experimental Findings Each human body carries a history and a story, i.e. when working with human bodies, especially in states of vulnerability as often occurs when applying the somatic techniques of performance art and psychophysiology measurement tools, it is paramount to create a place where each student does not feel coerced to expose or participate but has space and the time to choose the level of participation which feels for her/or himself appropriately and meaningful. This is a golden rule in my teaching/research practice, especially since most students of architecture and interior design have never been exposed to performance art and only used emotion measurement technology in a medical context. Students of architecture often legitimately ask—what does this have to do with architecture? So it is also my intention that they can make the most of the classes and understand how the exercises develop their skills as designers. Also, when teaching performance art, for example as usually happens in art academy, students are challenged to overcome inhibitions and certain forms of cultural conditioning which might present limitations for their creative development. Here the same dilemma applies as, for example, in theatre where a director might use aggressive strategies to break the passivity of the actor [6, pp. 100–102]. We claim that positive reenforcement and encouraging each student to choose one’s own themes for reflection and level of expression/participation to bring out the best of their creative potential. Joy, pleasure and play are conscious strategies employed in these classes in all stages of the design process—design, building and performance. These strategies are not permissive, ensuring that the atmosphere is playful but that there are rules and these include always the respectful treatment of oneself and one’s colleagues and privacy regarding the data obtained. The Corporeal Architecture project aims to explore the affective influence of architectural space and design objects in the human body, whether empathy/attunement between the user’s body and its surroundings can take place [10, pp. 165–196] and how affordances are expressed in action [15, pp. 103–106]. Through this methodology, students experience two main interlocking strands: an introduction to the somatic techniques of performance art, which is undertaken through practical exercises that directly work with the body in movement and basic notions of neuroscience [16], behavioural sciences [17, pp. 49–59], sensorial design [18, pp. 70–71], affective science [5, pp. 1248–1263] and psychophysiology tools [19, pp. 10–12]. Designed to make students aware of their own body’s relation and reaction to space, such experiments are taken in the context of seminars and workshops with the aim to develop their own corporeal awareness. Questionnaires and other self-assessment tools are often also employed, taking into consideration that the information collected is most of all important as direct feedback on bodily states under certain conditions and not necessarily a deterministic analysis of affect. The methodology that is applied in the experiments is a Multi-Componential Response approach, consisting of a variety of components that can provide a comprehensive way of measuring emotions [19]. According to Kim et al., “three main
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components of emotional response are currently accepted in Human-ComputerInteraction: experiential response, a physiological response and behavioural response.” In the experiments undertaken under the Corporeal Architecture research project, the methodology combines the assessment of the experiential response (SAM charts), measuring of physiology response (e-health platform) and evaluation of behaviour response (Presence Questionnaire). The main goal of these experiments is to classify users’ response to corporeal stimuli, by analysing sensory data, having in mind that our main hypothesis is: H1—a user’s emotional response to design objects as “compelled or not compelled”, “positive or negative”, “aroused or not aroused” and “dominant or dominated” can be evaluated through objective measurements of emotion using a Presence Questionnaire (PQ) and a SAM chart (Fig. 4). Two secondary hypotheses follow: H2—the somatic techniques of “performance art” and “emotional design” is an effective strategy to develop corporeal awareness and stimulate the creativity of students and designers; H3—the illusion of presence and emotional activation of the body of a user can be intentionally induced through the performance with design objects. To verify these hypotheses, the experiments are developed considering the following four stages: Fig. 4 SAM—selfassessment mannequin chart
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1. Identify the design elements that are more suitable to induce sensations in the user such as “positive, aroused, dominant, compelled” or “negative, not aroused, dominated, not compelled;” 2. Design an object so that those elements are the most important aspects of the design; 3. Perform experiments with users interacting with these objects while being monitored by camera, and assess their emotional experience through the use of a PQ and a SAM chart after the performance; 4. Process and analyse the sensory data collected to understand if significant differences can be found in the classification and differentiation between a “compelling-positive” experience and a “not compelling-negative” one. The experiments previously described evaluating the emotional experience of body extensions, body restrictions, the body performing as an architectural element, the body performing in an architectural setting, the body immersed in an architecture model and the body interacting with furniture. This evaluation is done by the analysis of changes in the sensorial perception of the user, while performing with the objects. The results collected with these experiments were the answers to the Presence Questionnaire and the SAM chart, where recall of experience and believability of simulation are systematised according to specific parameters. Such data records the subject’s physiological response and emotional activation, thereby enabling one to evaluate the object’s ability to condition the user’s movements and alter her/his emotional state and corporeal perception. The data is organised according to Presence Questionnaire’s “Factors” and “Subscales,” as defined by Witmer and Singer, and to the SAM chart’s parameters of Valence, Activation and Control. The final values considered in the analysis of the PQ results are obtained by averaging the ratings assigned by the subjects to each of the questions, according to Witmer and Singer’s (1998) 1 through 9-point scale. The analysis of the data collected through the SAM chart also follows the same principle, as the three parameters of “valence”, “activation” and “control” were rated by the subjects using also a 1–9 point scale. After making such calculations, values are obtained that qualify each subject’s individual experience of the objects in each Experiment, regarding the parameters of “presence,” “emotional response”, “valence”, “activation” and “control.” From the data collected, we can also qualify the experience of the group of subjects as a whole, by averaging the results for the same parameters. Initially, the Corporeal Architecture project foresaw simulations in virtual environments to verify the research hypothesis. However, the literature review led to the conclusion that for assessing the emotional experience of architecture, especially involving movement in space, it is necessary to work in real space. Also, it seems more appropriate to work with objects and settings that have real properties of weight, scale, scent and texture, as these aspects cannot be simulated so accurately in a virtual environment. For these reasons, the experiments aren’t meant to evaluate the effectiveness of computer-simulated virtual environments to influence the subjects’ emotional experience, although this is still a possibility for future work. Instead,
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they are designed to evaluate the ability of “real” environments and objects to create specific changes in the sensorial and emotional landscape of the subjects. Therefore, the situations explored in the experiments are simulated through architecture models, through objects that function as body extensions or restrictions—“props” as one would call in performance, through 1:1 scale models of architectural settings and pieces of furniture. It is also important to understand how such material properties interfere directly with the emotional experience of a subject, specifically as they address sensory modalities that are still hard to explore in virtual simulations due to technological constraints. Although conceived to evaluate the sense of presence, that is, the feeling of being “more or less compelled” by an environment, the Presence Questionnaire is considered a valuable tool for the research to qualify a subjects’ experience of a real environment, as it used a methodology that helped finding answers for the research’s main question: “how is it that a designed object/architecture space affects the emotions (or is able to move) of a user?” The importance of the combined use of the PQ and the SAM chart also is reinforced by difficulties encountered in the course of the Experiments with students. Sensors of the e-Health platform don’t function consistently throughout the experiments and performances with objects that demand more movement interfere with the calibration of the sensors. For this reason, it is important to cross-reference the data collected also with the SAM charts and the Presence Questionnaires, to assess the emotions experienced by each subject/performer as accurately as possible. Even though the e-Health platform sensors present such difficulties, the data collected is in most cases consistent with the results evaluated through the SAM charts and Presence Questionnaires.
4 Conclusion Working between the seemingly different worlds of art, architecture and scientific and technological research, poses questions and my work is not always understood by students and peers. My research is dedicated to the conscious exploration of this situation of liminality, as the capacity to relate different ways of conceiving and addressing the same topics, across disciplines, between worlds. Therefore, my approach to technology and specifically emotion measurement takes advantage of what we can learn about the interaction of body and space through data but does not accept it as the full picture of the felt experience, more as an abstraction which is conditioned by the architecture of the machines used and their own form of artificial sentience. In this regard, I approach technology (as well as design and architecture) as an extension of the human body’s sensorium. It’s important to note that just like human bodies, machines are prone to failure. This is especially the case when working with emotion measurement tools, which from my experience, pose many problems. Bio-markers require direct contact with the body and do not respond
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well to continuous or sudden changes of movement. This alone restricts considerably the range of motion and situations which can be explored by analysing a body performing in architectural space. So my experiments with emotion measurement take place in minimalistic settings that explore basic human actions such as sitting at different heights and positions for different periods of time and performing simple daily actions such as eating dinner, reading the newspaper, dressing and undressing. Another aspect that is especially relevant in my research and is influenced by the presence of digital media and social networks in our lives is privacy regarding the data obtained. The issue of privacy also influences directly the documentation of the performances and it is always made sure the performers remain anonymous by wearing a mask. This is particularly important since my work with performance art explores improvisation in situations of vulnerability and in such situations it is not uncommon that unconscious patterns take expression. Another strategy I consciously employ in my practice is to perform myself with the group. I develop the same task, show how the preparatory exercises are done and perform. Here I work again in liminality, as performer and director, often also documenting. This requires a high level of presence. It is often the biggest challenge in performance with students of architecture to create an atmosphere where for a certain amount of hours all the group is fully present. The preparatory exercises encourage this, but it is not always possible or successful and the outcomes are unpredictable. But working within this paradox is also the source of much creative opportunities.
References 1. Ferreira MP (2016) Embodied emotions: observations and experiments in architecture and corporeality. Ph.D. thesis, FAULisboa, Lisboa 2. Mallgrave HF (2013) Architecture and embodiment: the implications of the new sciences and humanities for design. Routledge, New York 3. Ruggles DH (2017) Beauty, Neuroscience and architecture: timeless patterns & their impact on our well-being, Fibonacci, LLC. University of Oklahoma Press, Colorado 4. Komninos N (2009) Intelligent cities: towards interactive and global innovation environments. Int J Innov Reg Dev 1(4):337 5. Lang PJ, Bradley MM, Cuthbert BN (1998) Emotion, motivation, and anxiety: brain mechanisms and psychophysiology. Biol Psychiat 44(12):1248–1263 6. Marshall L (2008) The body speaks: performance and physical expression. Methuen Drama, Great Britain 7. Criado Perez C (2019) Invisible women: exposing data bias in a world designed for men. Penguin Random House, UK 8. Varela FJ, Thompson E, Rosch E (1991) The embodied mind—cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press, Cambridge 9. Mallgrave HF (2018) From object to experience: the new culture of architectural design. Bloomsbury Publishing, London 10. Pérez-Gómez A (2016) Attunement: architectural meaning after the crisis of modern science. MIT Press, Cambridge 11. Mallgrave HF (2010) The architect brain: neuroscience, creativity and architecture. Wiley, West Sussex
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12. Ferreira MP (2017) Corporeal architecture: teaching future architects to think through the body using neurosciences and performance art. (Ed.) Itai Palti. Conscious Cities Journal, vol 2, Bridging Neuroscience, Architecture and Technology 13. Goldhagen SW (2017) Welcome to your world—how the built environment shapes our lives. HarperCollins Publishers, New York 14. Sussman A, Hollander JB (2015) Cognitive architecture: designing for how we respond to the built environment. Routledge, New York 15. Noë A (2004) Action in perception. MIT Press, Cambridge 16. Eberhard JP (2009) Brain landscape. The coexistence of neuroscience and architecture. Oxford University Press, Oxford 17. Bradley MM, Lang PJ (1994) Measuring emotion: the self-assessment manikin and the semantic differential. Behav Ther Exp Psych 25(1):49–59 18. Pallasmaa J (2005) The eyes of the skin: architecture and the senses. Wiley, England 19. Kim MJ, Cho ME, Kim JT (2015) Measures of emotion in interaction for health smart home. IACSIT Int J Eng Technol 7(4):10–12
Leveraging the Use of Digital Technologies to Activate Public Areas and Foster Creativity Martina Mazzarello and Carlo Ratti
Abstract The capability to design spaces that foster social relations, meeting exchanges, as well as the break-down of social segregation between individuals, has received growing interest from both academic researchers and urban planners, architects, designers, and sociologists. Dealing with the context of the design, development, and management of public spaces creates a new goal of investigation on the relationship between human behavior and physical space mediated by digital technologies. This chapter focuses on how the merge of physical and digital layers of space can enhance new forms of interaction (both serendipitous encounters and/or other types of collaboration) between the urban dwellers and the microcosm they are embedded in it. It aims to present an overview of the impact of the environment and digital technology in these cited forms of people’s aggregation and interactions in order to stimulate innovation, creativity, and the creation of new knowledge. To better introduce a dialogue on this field, scenarios of connecting people and spaces through technology will be presented with a selection of the MIT Senseable City Lab’s research projects. If patterns of social interaction can often appear blurred, the proposed strategy is to comprehend how these overlapping layers (physical, digital, human) can be turned into systems to foster new dynamics of innovation, collaboration for urban public spaces’ future growth. Keywords Spatial interactions · Technology · Vibrant spaces · Serendipitous encounters · Collaboration
1 Public Meeting Spaces and Human Behaviors Within the context of the design, development, activation, and use of public spaces in today’s cities, many elements and variables are protagonists in the framework to predict new possible scenarios of urban innovation and development. M. Mazzarello (B) · C. Ratti MIT Senseable City Lab, 77 Massachusetts Avenue room 9-216, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (ed.), How Smart Is Your City?, Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering 98, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6_5
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Considering primarily resultants of people’s touchpoints happening in a public area, the analysis of all the distinctive components comprehensive of the evolving trends becomes fundamental. The way to flow in a particular space, the choice to pause in a specific one rather than another, whether for own fruition or meeting with other individuals, is complicated in reading and includes innumerable influencing factors. These factors can be organized in tangible elements, as physical barriers and environmental characteristics (defined as Physical layer) and intangible ones—different use and ways on how people can experience and interact within the city (Digital layer).
1.1 Heterogeneity of Space For Aristotle, the concept of the differences occurs in cities because it is formed by synoikismos, a drawing together of different families and tribes, of competing for economic interests, of natives with foreigners [1]. Despite this, the concept of difference is even stronger; people are different and they experience different things acting in divergent ways that are not universal and the result cannot be predictable. This statement can be reflected on the idea of the diversity of the public, meaning class, race, gender, ethnicity, but also daily actions to be done in the same physical proximity together. This heterogeneity of people rooted in places generates an unpredictable scenario in his infinite possibilities of social relationships. Heterogeneity of humankind and spaces hosting them is translated in what Gehl [2] calls resultant activities, as actions that occur spontaneously, as a direct consequence of people moving around and being in the same spaces. He also states that architects and planners can affect the possibilities of meeting, seeing, and collaborating with each other. Historically, the presence of physical space was directly proportional and strictly connected with important innovative ideas. Notably, the Greek Agora and the concept of democracy born within it. In these contexts, the importance of the space was not only for his physical impact but for its incentives, intangible elements. In the sense of Thaler [3], we can design ecosystems, products, and services that nudge users into making better decisions as positive reinforcements to foster a specific behavior. And, for this purpose, a reflection is needed to find inputs of, and directly from the space; to give an illustration based on the above-cited Greek Agora, visual inputs were present as laws posted to be observed and that generated an occasion of ideas exchanges. Provided that, to create the conditions for such new encounters, often external stimuli could prompt conversation between strangers.
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1.2 Heterogeneity of Use (Physical and Digital Dimension) The notion of activating public areas and fostering creativity through new forms of interaction is even connected with an impact generation capable of triggering innovation. New parameters for the long-lasting activation of urban space not only related to the physical dimension of the space are strictly related to the co-creation of vibrant spaces, meaning a measure of the spillover effects that arise from the interactions of urban residents [4]. Furthermore, urban design concepts need a consideration on the use of the space, detecting invisible traces of individuals interactions embedded in a digital dimension, to be able to find a dialogue between them and their environment. In other words, an environment that is considered both from a physical and digital point of view. A current topic is to consider tangible interactions more effectively in the relationship between humans and the surrounding reality. The role of physical space is believed as fundamental for proxemic interaction; on the other hand, it is not the only recipe for the success of a space. The digital dimension can be crucial in the inter-exchange between all the elements involved; it can be present finding a merge with the physical environment through materials (i.e. kinetic materials), fostering new forms of interactions [5]. Through the digital, humans are able to change an image, object, or content present on a screen with a simple touch in few seconds. For this reason, the afterward step unconsciously expected from and for users is having intuitive ways to stimulate interactions within the environment and between them. The technology embedded in the world around us can be responsive and flexible on this purpose, with strategies to combine physically and digitally sustainable interactions and producing new experiences and new knowledge. If flexibility and adaptability are variables to be present in our urban spaces, gaining sensitivity to improve our life [5], the role of technology can be a fundamental tool in achieving this goal.
1.3 Human Factor: Interactions Between People A critical factor to activate urban public areas and fostering creativity is the ability to form new connections with both known individuals and strangers, including people sharing the same context or a different one. Inputs and opportunities of conversations with in-person interactions can not necessarily be orchestrated, they must be unexpected and serendipitous. Furthermore, collaboration can be the art of building from human connections a more creatively and more productively scenario, creating and activating unprecedented conversations on innovative ideas, due to different people joining together.
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Specific aspects of the built environment can play a vital role in how people experience a space, in fostering these connections and enabling people to work together, but it therefore becomes fundamental to understand how new technologies can regulate and shape the optimization of the built environment for collaboration. Previous research has attempted to facilitate random meetings of extras in public spaces to allow for social serendipity and increase general social awareness [6, p. 87]. Following this, the challenge is to provide opportunities to bring people together, take advantage of opportunities offered by current technologies, and better cater to collocated social interaction. Above all, find strategies encouraging proxemic interaction creating serendipitous encounters and new forms of collaboration.
2 Role of Digital Technology If remote connectedness has been deeply considered for technology development, it is less exploring the role of technology within the physical space aiming for new forms of interaction. A further reflection is needed on directions for technology that would better support collocated interaction (e.g. [7].). Information and communication technology (ICT) and computer-mediated communication (CMC) has allowed new forms of interaction between humans with an impact on the relationship between physical and digital space. Virtual encounters are commonly used from text-based communication (i.e. email exchanges), as face-to-face interactions, and visual communication through social networks. New possibilities for spatial environmental behavior research have emerged thanks to widespread technology such as human activity tracking phone applications. This phenomenon can be especially crucial to understanding the touchpoints of a large number of people in complex built environments within a city. Technology, in this sense, allows the understanding of mobility at an individual level, collecting and analyzing sets of times, places, and semantic attributes about how and why users travel between them [8], defining patterns of individuals using new high-resolution data. These patterns will constitute observation points that allow the interpretation and description of behavioral patterns within specific temporal and spatial coordinates; they can be extrapolated from personal devices or other sensors, representing a resource of extreme wealth for researchers [9, 10]. Many studies have been conducted using this methodology to investigate the movement of individuals and their choices regarding paths within the city [11, 12]. In this way, it is observed that a given space can influence the capability to attract people and create new productivity thanks to their in-person connection. Researching the intersection of digital technologies and physical spaces aims at fostering such intellectual and creative collaboration, finding systems as connections between human activity and urban dynamics.
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The prediction that technology would destroy distance and that our physicality would lose relevance cannot be applied; slightly, it holds the power to extend the meaning of physical space by making it more complicated and inseparable from its digital dimension [13]. Malone [14] to express this concept cites the value of hyperconnectivity, as the idea of connecting people to other people at much larger scales and in productive new ways that were never possible before [14]. He states that almost everything that human beings have achieved, every important invention, has been produced by people he defines as superminds, not individuals working alone, but groups of people working together over time and space. Just as hyperconnectivity is changing markets, democracies, communities, it is also impacting urban space. Digital tools are capable in this sense, to aggregate and integrate a more heterogeneous group of people as a facilitator between them and the surrounding environment. If we are innovating together to improve the space and experience of cities, this is something we need to take into account. Furthermore, this digital connectivity is embedded in the urban context, as the way people experience a specific space generating a complex, dense, and reactive proliferation of information landscapes. This phenomenon offers potential benefits both for the research community, planners, and developers, added those who can use these data to generate broad and analytical visions of the uses and future scenario generation.
3 Fostering a Merge Between the Two Layers—Physical and Digital If designers and planners should foster interactions with artifacts and spaces with an immediate dialogue between them, this chapter proposes an overview on some possibilities of merging the digital and physical dimensions through a selection of specific research activities carried out by the MIT Senseable City Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here is presented a highlight of ideas and scenarios in different urban contexts around the world using technology as a powerful tool of connecting people in space in the hopes of fostering innovation. The projects are based on the notion of digitally integrated urban space, where technology transforms the city into a frame where the network of digital systems have a real and robust impact upon the kinds of relationships and social interactions among individuals (Fig. 1). Furthermore, the cases show how the environment can become responsive and dynamically reacting with human interactions. Local Warming project, 2014 (https://senseable.mit.edu/localwarming2014/) presents a vision of architectural climate control during Venice Architecture Biennale (June 7th, 2014).
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Fig. 1 Representation of the research approach by different layers
A staggering amount of energy is wasted; it thoroughly addresses this asymmetry, by synchronizing human presence with climate control. A rank of responsive infrared heating elements is guided by sophisticated motion tracking, creating a precise personal (and personalized) climate for each occupant. Individual thermal ‘clouds’ follow people through space, ensuring ubiquitous comfort while improving overall energy efficiency by orders of magnitude. Within this project, technology allows for the optimization of energy use and greater control of each individual in a particular space (Fig. 2). Community detection project, 2014 (https://senseable.mit.edu/community_detect ion/) illustrates how it is possible to understand the structure of complex networks and ultimately extracting useful information from them. Existing search strategies take one of the following steps to evolve starting partitions: merging two communities, splitting a community into two, or moving nodes between two distinct communities. The proposed algorithm in this project compounds all three actions. It also shows the value of data in understanding networks and communities. Applications are diverse: from healthcare to regional geography, from human interactions and mobility to economics (Fig. 3). Drinking data project, 2014 (https://senseable.mit.edu/ccfs/) This project represents an example of what could indeed turn into a substantive framework for translating data analysis and visualization into physical insights—and back, as people respond.
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Fig. 2 Local Warming project, 2014
Fig. 3 Community detection project, 2014
By visualizing patterns of total consumption, spikes have been found during weekends and dips during weekdays—although people were less likely to fill up a cup on special days like Easter and the 4th of July. Brand loyalty and proportions were also striking, although they tend to vary across the United States. A project such as
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Fig. 4 Drinking data project, 2014
Drinking Data confirms that consumption is a vital force in human activity. Technology here is a mediator to examine how they enable interactions between coworkers and officemates (Fig. 4). A tale of many cities project, 2014 (https://senseable.mit.edu/manycities/) is an intuitive and robust tool for exploring mobile phone traffic and patterns, mapped onto urban space. The application can be implemented by a broad spectrum of users—from specialized to general. Many Cities allows mobile operators to check the completeness of their records quickly, to detect repeating patterns or special events, and to define new development strategies. The tool’s visualization output can inform collective behaviors and offer the possibility to participate and influence global trends. This methodology, in showing the pulse of the city through its phone data, exploring how the patterns of behavior on site can be used to inform design and programming (Fig. 5). Friendly cities project, 2018 (https://senseable.mit.edu/friendly-cities/) presents an improved understanding of how people are connected in physical space serves as valuable information to urban designers, local service providers, and communities at large. As vast human mobility datasets become readily available, it is essential to ask questions about how effectively urban space and places bring together people. With this research, the social roles of a city can now be better evaluated at unprecedented spatiotemporal scales, inspiring new policies and practices that benefit the well-being of people and society. With a higher level of granularity, this type of research could be used to identify spaces in which many different groups interact with each other,
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Fig. 5 Many Cities project, 2014
which could, in turn, become critical sites of intervention to foster innovation and cultivate connections (Fig. 6). Tasty data project, 2019 (https://senseable.mit.edu/tasty-data/) is an exemplar of how socio-economic data is as valuable as it is difficult to come by. Existing data about restaurants are used to predict socio-economic factors. A model is built to take
Fig. 6 Friendly cities project, 2018
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Fig. 7 Friendly cities project, 2018
in restaurant data for nine Chinese cities from Dianping, the Chinese equivalent to Yelp. This data ranges from cuisine type to restaurant ratings. Using this data, we can predict factors like daytime population, nighttime population, company presence, and spending amount. These predictions come at a more granular scale, both in time and space, than traditional census data. Like Drinking Data, this project shows the critical role of food and drink play in social networks (Fig. 7). Singapore calling project, 2019 (https://senseable.mit.edu/singapore-calling/) with a computational framework based on coupling large-scale information on human mobility, social-network connections, and people’s socio-economic status (SES) to provide a breakthrough in our understanding of the dynamics of spatiotemporal and social-network segregation in cities. Building on top of a social similarity measure, the framework can be used to depict segregation dynamics down to the individual level, providing also aggregate measurements at the scale of places and cities, and their evolution over time. By applying the methodology in Singapore using a large-scale mobile phone and socio-economic datasets, relatively higher level. segregation is detected among relatively wealthier classes, a finding that holds for both social and physical space. Similar to Friendly Cities and Community Detection, this sort of investigation into social structures using phone data reveals the level of segregation in a population (Fig. 8).
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Fig. 8 Singapore calling project, 2019
4 Conclusions From a spatial design point of view, it is known how proximity can encourage grouping. Not only at the level of superficial conversations, but it can favor a more significant interaction, and even if the meeting involves unknown people, belonging to the same context facilitates relational dynamics [2, p. 13]. People attract other people and proximity to an existing active space can be an essential feature that should not be underestimated by designing the physical layer. Investigating what stimuli are necessary to foster these dynamics of collocated social interactions and, how to integrate the user is becoming relevant for current research on the field. Relating to the above-cited concept, physical spaces need a new variable of relatedness, meaning the capability of creating experiences due to interactions with other humans/individuals. Dealing with people’s interactions means dealing with another variable that can be crucial and essential to activate public areas and foster creativity: the use of technology. Technology, in the sense of a digital layer embedded in our world that can be a responsive and flexible tool. Detecting human traces and their movement in space, to find successful parameters of the environment, people/relationships, time, services, through technology, is the methodology at the Senseable City Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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is carried out, which has been illustrated through a selection of projects and research carried out; an example of mixture and inter-exchange between digital and physical that need to be the fulcrum of design and re-design of contemporary spaces. Furthermore, finding strategies to combine physically and digitally sustainable interactions and new experiences need to be contemporary objectives for both academic researchers and urban planners, architects, designers, and sociologists. The final objective is the consciousness on how the physical and digital layers can influence people’s communication patterns to achieve connectivity, engagement, new encounters, serendipitous exchange, transversal and multidisciplinary collaborations. Aiming, moreover, not at the creation of unrealistic visions for hypothetical future challenges but rather new directions of development to positively influence the development of urban public spaces’ future growth, stimulating debates, and research initiatives. Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the many researchers at the MIT Senseable City Lab who have worked on these projects. In essence, they were responsible for generating ideas, building and deploying sensors, visualizing the data, and writing scientific papers that discuss in-depth concepts and analysis described in this chapter. This chapter is also a result of the MIT Senseable City Lab collaboration with Lab Campus (www.labcampus.de).
Bibliography 1. Miller F (2017) Aristotle’s political theory. In: Zalta EN (ed) Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win 2017/entries/aristotle-politics/. 2. Gehl J (2011) Life between buildings: using public space. Island Press 3. Thaler RH, Sunstein CR (2009) Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Penguin 4. Dougal C, Parsons CA, Titman S (2015) Urban vibrancy and corporate growth. J Finance 70(1):163–210 5. Bengisu M, Ferrara M (2018) Materials that move: smart materials, intelligent design. Springer, Berlin 6. Rubin VL, Burkell J, Quan-Haase A (2011) Facets of serendipity in everyday chance encounters: a grounded theory approach to blog analysis. Inf Res 16(3) 7. Fischer J, Porcheron M, Lucero A, Quigley A, Scott S, Ciolfi L, Rooksby J, Memarovic N (2016) Collocated interaction: new challenges in ‘same time, same place’ research. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing companion, Feb 2016, pp 465–472 8. Toole JL, de Montjoye Y-A, González MC, (Sandy) Pentland A (2015) Modeling and understanding intrinsic characteristics of human mobility. In: Gonçalves B, Perra N (eds) Social phenomena: from data analysis to models. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 15–35. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14011-7_2 9. Diao M, Zhu Y, Ferreira J Jr, Ratti C (2016) Inferring individual daily activities from mobile phone traces: a Boston example. Environ Plan B: Plan Des 43(5):920–940 10. Reades J, Calabrese F, Sevtsuk A, Ratti C (2007) Cellular census: explorations in urban data collection. IEEE Perv Comput 6(3):30–38
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11. Vanky AP, Verma SK, Courtney TK, Santi P, Ratti C (2017) Effect of weather on pedestrian trip count and duration: city-scale evaluations using mobile phone application data. Prev Med Rep 8:30–37 12. Malleson N, Vanky A, Hashemian B, Santi P, Verma SK, Courtney TK, Ratti C (2018) The characteristics of asymmetric pedestrian behavior: a preliminary study using passive smartphone location data. Trans GIS 22(2):616–634 13. Ratti C, Claudel M (2015) Open source architecture. Thames & Hudson. https://books.google. com/books?id=8IbCoQEACAAJ. 14. Malone TW (2018) Superminds: the surprising power of people and computers thinking together. Little, Brown Spark 15. Claudel M (2018) The civic supermind. https://medium.com/valence-projects/the-civic-sup ermind-cc96c9b206ed. Accessed 04 Mar 2020
Algorithmic Cities: A Dystopic or Utopic Future? Miguel de Castro Neto and Tiago de Melo Cartaxo
Abstract Cities of today face a digital transformation process, leading to a new reality where urban space is taking advantage of information and communication technologies and data science to answer present and future challenges, namely to become more efficient in services and infrastructures management in order to deliver increased quality of life to the people who live, work or visit the city, and addressing at the same time the problems of climate change. This new reality is leveraged by big data produced by the cities Internet of everything (as interconnected systems, sensors and people), information management and data science capabilities, which allow us to measure and describe what happens, predict what can happen, and prescribe what could be the course of actions bringing policy making to a fact-based environment, which had never been possible before. In this work, we will address the opportunities and challenges of this paradigm shift that is leading to the city as a platform reality that supports what we can call the algorithmic city where it is up to us to decide if this will be a dystopic or utopic future for the citizen. Keywords Algorithmic cities · Urban intelligence · City as a platform · Digital transformation
1 Introduction Today, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas and this number is expected to increase to 68% by 2050, at a number of more 2.5 [35]. Cities occupy only 2% of the earth’s surface (land), urban inhabitants generate 80% of the global GDP, consume 75% of global natural resources, produce 50% of global waste and emit 60–80% of greenhouse gases [34]. At the same time, with the development of a large number of innovative technologies, cities are facing a relevant digital transformation process [33: 309]. M. de Castro Neto (B) · T. de Melo Cartaxo NOVA Information Management School (NOVA IMS), Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Campus de Campolide, Lisbon 1070-312 Lisboa, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (ed.), How Smart Is Your City?, Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering 98, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6_6
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This means that urban dwellers, workers, and visitors are living a new reality under a strong influence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and data science [14, 18: 272–280]. Politicians and professionals intend cities to answer day-to-day challenges, such as more efficiency in services and infrastructures management, increased quality of life, and addressing the problems of climate change. Therefore, cities are par excellence places where big data thrives, given that it is produced by the Internet of everything (as interconnected systems, sensors and people). Additionally, information management and data science capabilities allow city managers (and also corporations) to measure and describe the realities that happen in the territory of the city. With these solutions, it is possible to predict what happens (very often in real time) and then take rapid decisions to prescribe what could be the actions and the following course of actions. Policy making can, consequently, more easily adapt to fact-based urban environments. Given that this new way of governing cities has never been possible until our days, this work intends to address the opportunities and challenges of this paradigm shift. The urban areas of the future will be understood as platform realities. This idea of the city as a platform will support the new reality of an algorithmic city, where it is up to those who have the responsibility of governing it (or giving that power the citizens) to decide if the future (and even the present) of cities will be dystopic or utopic for the daily life of the citizens.
2 An Algorithmic Urban Future This new reality of a “Smart City,” an “Analytic City,” or even an “Algorithmic City” is naturally potentiated by big data. It is produced by the Internet of everything (as interconnected systems, sensors and people), information management, and data science capabilities existent in the territory of the city [7]. Although it is possible to find many definitions for this type of urban reality, which is widely acknowledged and recognized as the city of the future (but even of present days), from the current literature, they all seem to share the concept of an urban space which can take advantage of ICTs and data science to perceive and answer today’s urban challenges, measuring the territory and communities and, at the same time, prescribing solutions and more general or concrete actions. Smart city solutions are becoming more efficient in services and infrastructures management and delivering increased quality of life to the people who live, work or visit the city, not forgetting the support to tackle climate change. In order to develop urban intelligence that ensures resource usage efficiency, more sustainable and inclusive cities, and concurrently, promoting economic development by boosting entrepreneurship and technological start-ups in the creation of innovative products and services for new markets, an inescapable challenge must be overcome. This challenge is city data, the true fuel of urban intelligence that should be collected
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or linked for release in the form of “Open Data”—data that can be used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose [26]. This opens a space to a reality where with increasing frequency, governments are using computer algorithms to conduct public affairs, at international, national, and local levels [1: 103]. It encompasses “almost any form of technology-based innovation in the planning, development, and operation of cities” [10, 32]. Within the European Union (EU) the term “smart city” almost has an official status, with the European Parliament having issued a study ranking cities based on their performance in governance, human flourishing, livability, mobility, economy, and environment, assuming that: “the idea of Smart Cities is rooted in the creation and connection of human capital, social capital and Information and Communication technology (ICT) infrastructure in order to generate greater and more sustainable economic development and a better quality of life” [4]. According to the referred study, the European Parliament adopted the following working definition for “smart city”: “a city seeking to address public issues via ICTbased solutions on the basis of a multistakeholder, municipally based partnership” [4, 21]. Nonetheless, other suggestions have been presented, such as the idea that a city is smart when the use of information and communications technology (ICT) makes: “the critical infrastructure components and services of a city—which include city administration, education, healthcare, public safety, real estate, transportation, and utilities—more intelligent, interconnected, and efficient” [36], as well as the approach “that cities are systems of systems, and that there are emerging opportunities to introduce digital nervous systems, intelligent responsiveness, and optimization at every level of system integration” [15]. Other interesting definition is based on the idea that a city may be called “smart” when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure are used to “fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory governance” [2, 30]. As a matter of fact, according to the possible definitions presented above, the inclusion of urban fairness or inclusiveness [24], public participation and sustainability is absolutely accepted to be included in this term, if the so-called intelligence that is present in the city (from ICT to open data) is used for improving those indicators, through innovative, open and analytical solutions, which are available and accessible for all [16]. According to the OECD—Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [22], data produced in cities can be divided into three categories: • Flows—Cities are structured with different types of pervasive infrastructures, e.g., ICTs, transport, water, energy, waste networks, that facilitate movement and flows of resources, products, people and information throughout. Sensors embedded in urban infrastructures increasingly allow the digitization and datafication of these flows.
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• States—Urban inside spaces and outside environments are subject to constant changes, natural and manmade. The particular states of urban spaces and environments—the population density, air temperature and quality, light and sound levels, etc. —are increasingly monitored by sensors, including cameras, through synoptic instruments such as satellites or continual observations from urban vantage points. • Activities—Connected machines and devices used for both personal and professional activities in cities allow measurement of transactions, consumption and communication patterns. These patterns specifically include: people’s activities, communication and interactions; interaction between people and their environment; and interactions among components of their environments such as communicating and autonomous machines and devices. Also in the context of urban intelligence, and its algorithmic capabilities, the spatial dimension is also referred by OECD since it plays an increasing and fundamental role since this data—created through the sensing, measuring and recording of flows, states and activities in cities—generates extraordinary added value potential by being location-specific through: • Stationary sensors embedded in urban infrastructures and environments, producing data describing flows and states in cities; • Geo-locational and geo-referenced data generated in cities, often from mobile devices and sensors, describing the main activities (actions, interactions, transactions) of connected people, machines and devices and; • Other data generated not necessarily displaying geographic properties, e.g., data on financial transactions or energy consumption [22].
3 City as a Platform The process of digital transformation within urban environments has led to the vision of the “city as a platform” [19] where data becomes new raw material, and where true building blocks of urban intelligence can be identified. These building blocks of urban intelligence, as shown schematically in Fig. 1 and detailed below, can be divided into open data (public and private) and collective intelligence. On the one hand, we have open data originating in organizational activity Fig. 1 Urban intelligence building blocks
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and collected from sensors that support these businesses or in transactions they carry out. On the other, we have data sourced from collective intelligence, compiled from citizens actions either actively or passively, which continues to gain increased relevance. An interesting aspect of the emerging class of smart cities regards their evolution into data-opening initiatives. While the collection of mass data from operational systems, equipment, and through sensors linked to a variety of physical infrastructures has always been a feature of the first generation of smart cities, the publication of such data as open data, or its integration with open data published by urban authorities in different aspects of management and life in the city, is a relatively recent phenomenon [23: 2326–2335]. The ability to create, collect and process scattered data and make it openly available is the first and also the most ambitious and disruptive urban intelligence building block. In this respect, municipalities have a key role and opportunity to unleash processes of open innovation, co-creation and collective intelligence. Citizens, companies, management and academia, as well as the third sector, will create new high value-added products and services, many of them still unimaginable, capable of generating new markets. It is up to the municipalities to take the first step and launch open data initiatives (supported, at first, by the internal data sources and their projects based on IoT). Although a definition of open data exists, “data that can be used, modified and shared by anyone for any purpose” [26], the Full Open setting [25] gives precise details about what this means. To summarize the most important characteristics: • Availability and Access—The data must be available as a whole and have no more than a reasonable cost of reproduction, preferably downloaded over the internet. The data must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form; • Reuse and Redistribution—Data must be provided in ways that enable reuse and redistribution, including combinations with other data sets; • Universal Participation—Everyone should be able to use, reuse and distribute; there should be no discrimination in the fields of action or against individuals or groups. For example, “non-commercial” restrictions that would prevent “commercial” use, or restrictions of use for certain purposes, e.g., education only, are not permitted. National and local governments, largely in North American and Europe, have been experimenting sharing their data, what has generated the spread of a vast number of citizen-based applications, the forging of new partnerships between civic organizations, and also an increased involvement in civics by the technology community. In effect, open data has been allowing national and local governments to generate city infrastructure outside formal governmental structures, creating new possibilities for innovation and increasing information sharing, which fosters the generation of new partnerships, more innovation, more start-ups, and civic action [37]. At the same time, open data, public participation and engagement represent instruments of enhancing transparency and accountability, which, while following the
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recommendations of the Aarhus Convention, also close the relation between public officials or representatives and citizens, giving these latter more opportunities of asserting their rights and claiming for a better provision of governmental services. The need for clarity about what it means to be “open” closely relates to interoperability. Interoperability critically achieves the key benefits of data openness: drastic increase in the ability to combine and bring together different datasets and the generation of new or better products and services [12: 46–57]. Open data appears increasingly as a defining element of smart cities, and, therefore, can be conceptually considered as a smart cities’ initiative. Thus, it is important to understand how open data initiatives impact the context of smart cities, as well as how smart city programs affect the associated open data initiatives. By opening data on the environment, transport, education, health, and so forth, municipalities can objectively support companies, start-ups, application developers, civil society organizations, among others, to find new and improved ways of dealing with urban problems. Open data, governmental as well as private company, is undoubtedly an extraordinary and yet largely unexplored resource. While many organizations and individuals collect large amounts of data, the government has a particularly significant role. This is not only because of the quantity and relevance of the data it creates, collects and maintains, but especially because such data should be, by definition, public, since the information results from governmental activity and as such should be available as open data. Also, the data collected by private companies about citizens activities can give us a better understanding of cities metabolism. In fact, private companies increasingly acquire more importance and relevance in this context since they are rapidly becoming the true repositories of relevant urban data. In the case of urban intelligence, open data strategies allow aspiring cities to achieve four key objectives: • Higher levels of transparency—Allowing the citizen to understand, examine and question the action and decisions taken by the municipality requires information. The more that open data becomes public, the more we encourage participation and improve the services delivered; • Citizens Engagement—Increasing citizens’ involvement in city development and services, in decision-making processes and in participatory debate, requires citizens to understand the context in which the municipality operates. Thus, giving citizens and their communities access to operational data from the municipality and, in particular, spatially relevant data (from their “neighborhood”) helps to encourage more active and informed participation; • Service Improvement and Efficiency Gains—Providing open data supports and accelerates the sharing of data from the municipality and other entities with expected results in improving service and gains in efficiency; • Boost Economic Development—The release of data is now considered a “trigger” for the promotion of economic and community activity. Cities around the world already find that the massive availability of open data enables local businesses
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and developers to create new applications, new products and services, opening the door to the emergence of new markets.
4 Algorithmic City Solutions for and by Citizens These days, creating the capacity for collecting citizens behavior is of extreme importance, given that people are in fact the true owners of the city and to whom local governments must provide quality of life. In effect, reality demonstrates that citizen engagement in city governance is one of the most important trends in the construction of the modern algorithmic cities. This reality is also of critical importance in the context of urban collective intelligence. Citizens’ inputs are presently, as it is also demonstrated here, the most important building block to promote urban collective intelligence in the city as a platform vision. This most relevant dimension of citizen involvement consists of adopting crowdsourcing processes to collect people’s active or passive data in order to better understand a city’s immediate reality and its metabolism. Citizen-generated active data Active collective intelligence supports the possibility of taking advantage of citizens engagement through active participation using informal mechanisms fostered by social networks and ICTs to collect their input. Nowadays, we can find a significant number of new processes and tools that allow citizens to be active actors of the city planning and management by providing the city with their “wishes” and concerns through data supply, namely with event reporting tools and new data collection approaches. Regarding event reporting tools, citizens have always had the possibility to make requests or complaints, but now they can make them very easily by using their phone right when they spot the problem in the public space. A significant number of digital tools make it easier and simpler for citizens to report occurrences adopting a “Fix my street” approach. Below we can see an example of a reporting platform (“OeirasEu”) displaying the events reported by the citizens through the associated smart phone application (Fig. 2). New data collection approaches make possible to evaluate instantaneously citizens opinion on phenomena that will affect them. We are today witnessing emerging ways of collecting citizens’ opinions to incorporate in the planning and implementation of municipal policies, such as participatory budgets or ideas contests, that can lead to a new reality of almost “direct democracy.” Figure 3 presents the Lisbon participative budget interface which is publicly available. Anyone can contribute annually with ideas and vote for the projects they wish to be implemented.
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Fig. 2 OeirasEu.pt event reporting platform (https://oeiraseu.pt)
Fig. 3 Lisbon participatory budget (https://www.lisboaparticipa.pt/)
Citizen-generated passive data As the fastest growing building block of urban intelligence, this modality of collective intelligence takes advantage of the sensing capacity leveraged by the data generated in a passive way by the citizens actions. Since we leave a digital footprint of almost everything we do and, respecting personal privacy through data anonymization, we can generate extremely valuable insights about the city’s metabolism.
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The idea of the citizens as sensors is becoming mainstream since the sheer number of people who live or work in cities with mobile phones generating location data is increasingly accepted as a valuable resource for a wide range of purposes, from traffic modeling (people and/or vehicles), urban planning, management of interventions, public health policies, creation of business opportunities, etc. Strava Global Heatmap impressively illustrates this potential by aggregating over 1 billion activities—more than 13 trillion data points—to create heatmaps of athletes’ activities which can be extremely relevant for supporting city infrastructure planning like bike lanes as shown in Fig. 4. This concept of “the citizen as a sensor” is attracting the attention of many organizations. One of the most impressive examples is coming from the analysis of daily business transaction data, which can support not only the new insights but also to create new information, products and services. This can in fact create new data monetization models, as demonstrated by Portuguese telco NOS. This company launched a Tourism Information Portal (https://www.nos.pt/portalturismo) based on roaming metadata supporting detailed knowledge about tourist movements over time and space, including information regarding nationality and purchasing power (the phone model is a good proxy for that purpose). Also the behavior of citizens made available in the social media, in particular social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, is increasingly viewed by local governments as relevant data sources and opportunities to improve city governance. Thanks to the increasing capability to analyze feelings and quantify the “Value” of the issuer of opinion, we can know immediately, and with high detail, the opinions and reactions of citizens.
Fig. 4 Strava global heatmap for bike activities in the Lisbon area (https://www.strava.com/hea tmap)
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Fig. 5 Hitachi visualization predictive crime analytics (https://digitalmediatecs.com/can-we-usesocial-media-to-help-predict-crimes-before-they-happen)
The use of this approach for security purposes is generating significant debate, namely when police squads are beginning to use social media data and text mining techniques to predict crime. Currently, more than 60 American police departments use some form of “predictive policing” to guide their day-to-day operations [5]. Figure 5 presents a screenshot of “CrimeRadar,” a digital platform that uses advanced machine learning to predict crime rates in different neighborhoods at different times. The first version was focused on metropolitan Rio de Janeiro and draws from over five years of crime data (roughly 14 million reported crime events) collected by the state police. By isolating patterns across incidents, locations and time, CrimeRadar is able to determine relative crime risks, tomorrow and into the next week—and also features historical crime trends going back 12 months. These are, just some examples of the fact-based and citizen-based (or collective) urban governance in the algorithmic city that we see emerging around the world in modern smart cities.
5 A Dystopic or Utopic Urban Future The use of urban intelligence and open data solutions can happen for implementing both dystopic or utopic policies [6]. However, the advance in ICTs and data science is inevitable. Therefore, it is up to governing institutions and also citizens to choose the pathway of algorithmic cities. Actually, materializing urban intelligence is a process which is increasingly facing complex legal challenges.
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A recent investigation into the smartphone tracking industry, under The Privacy Project of The New York Times concluded that, every day and all over the planet, a dozens of companies, which are largely unregulated and little scrutinized, have been logging the movements of tens of millions of citizens with mobile phones and their data are being stored in gigantic data files. This study specifically focused on a selection of companies working in the location data business within the reality of the United States intended to alert citizens for the grade of exposure that they are subject to when they choose to share their locations [31] (Fig. 6). In the reality of the European Union (EU), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [8], approved by the Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, intends to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons and in particular their right to the protection of personal data, according to Article 1 GDPR. Nevertheless, the GDPR explicitly provides in its recital 26 that: “principles of data protection should (…) not apply to anonymous information, namely information which does not relate to an identified or identifiable natural person or to personal data rendered anonymous in such a manner that the data subject is not or no longer identifiable.” As a consequence, it is expressly provided in the same recital 26 that the mentioned Regulation “does not therefore concern the processing of such anonymous information, including for statistical or research purposes.” European law, therefore, gives a plentiful flexibility for new perspectives of urban intelligence to coexist with the protection of the fundamental rights of citizens. Data anonymization processes must, in any case, be secured and prudently managed, respecting paramount principles such as lawfulness, fairness and transparency or even integrity and confidentiality, in accordance with the provisions of Article 5. In fact, urban collaborative intelligence intends to enhance governance, information and well-being in the territory of cities and for all citizens, and not only for
Fig. 6 New York Times’ “One Nation, Tracked” (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/ 19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html)
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the rich [9]. Providing a better quality of services to citizens through smart cities’ tools corresponds, naturally and consequently, to continuously improving protections of the rights of dwellers, workers and visitors who are present in that certain territory—from public security, to transportation, environment or even health [11: 207–209]. On the other hand, urban collaborative intelligence may represent a inestimable opportunity for local governments to more easily perceive, measure, decide, and adapt to continuously changing conditions in cities, in accordance with the results that are possible to assess and measure through sensoring devices and IoT tools [13]. Therefore, from a good governance and citizen’s well-being perspective, the benefits of urban collective intelligence will certainly play an increased and essential role at the service of the security of citizen’s personal data, but also of the communities’ and territories’ safety against possible threats, from petty crimes to major terrorist attacks—keeping people free from danger and risk of harm [3, 20]. Other interesting examples which can connect people with the promotion of wellbeing are the experiences where tech solution can crowdsource data on PET plastic by using mobile apps and therefore incentivize citizens to recycle thanks to a reward mechanism powered by blockchain. The idea of Community Inclusion Currencies (CIC), which is now being implemented in some counties of Kenya, intend to enable communities to develop a source of local credit based on productive capacity and local values, creating a monetary system better suited to eradicate poverty. These CICs are vouchers which can be used by citizens (members of the community) to buy and sell basic needs in the face of scarce national currency. CICs are then backed by the local goods and services produced by a certain community [29]. These cases demonstrate that it is up to decision, policy and lawmakers, as well as to citizens (especially to most participative ones) to contribute for the future of their cities to be whether a 1984-style dystopian reality, where citizens’ individual rights are not protected, or otherwise a More’s utopian urban space, in which people’s well-being (or even happiness) is in the center of all city governance [17, 27].
6 Conclusions and Future Challenges For the urban collective intelligence vision to materialize, in a way that can be benefic for citizens, it is essential to move from the logic of reactive urban management to a proactive logic, supported by its digital and knowledge-based transformation, broad data availability and continual updating of information. This is the reason why new solutions are needed in order to describe, predict, and prescribe: the three main verbs of future algorithmic urban governance. An algorithmic city supported in planning, data-driven management, open data, and public participation is focused on providing quality of life to its citizens based on the empowerment of ICTs and advanced techniques of real-time data processing and analysis, in order to efficiently and sustainably operate the various subsystems that support life in cities. Urban collective intelligence in the algorithmic city can
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generate more efficiency and, therefore, contribute directly to the creation of more sustainable and resilient cities and to a better quality of life in urban environments, more focused on utopian than dystopian approaches. The construction of urban collective intelligence in the algorithmic city is based on the digital transformation, on the building clocks of urban intelligence, and on opendata policies. However, this can only succeed in a smart city model which acts as a platform focused on the generation of knowledge, making data widely available and the permanent updating of information, working in a collaborative network involving government and local administration, companies, academia and, most importantly, citizens. It is essential to emphasize that the essential principles for an algorithmic city must always be based on promoting increased transparency in governance, generating synergies with stakeholders (public administration, companies, academia and citizens), working on better quality of services on the part of the administration and service providers with greater participation of citizens in governance and in the day-to-day life of the city. Digital transformation, which is leading to the concept of the “city as a platform,” is a game-changer. The challenge that cities are facing these days is the construction of this new smart, analytical, algorithmic city, primarily focused on protecting wellbeing for their citizens. At this point, ethics are paramount for an algorithmic future. An example was the recent concern demonstrated by the Vatican about the uncontrolled spread of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. For this reason, forces were joined with tech corporations (Microsoft and IBM) to promote the ethical development of AI, call for regulation of intrusive technologies such as facial recognition, and use AI “as a tool for the good of humanity and the planet.” This call pledges for “algor-ethics” based on the principles of (i) transparency; (ii) inclusion; (iii) responsibility; (iv) impartiality; (v) reliability; and (vi) security and privacy [28]. This is an evidence that the world is moving at an unprecedent pace, institutions need to adapt, and the algorithmic pathway can be extremely positive and constructive for the Humankind. Nonetheless, societies must find ways of regulating it and adapt to innovation, while focused on what is better for people’s well-being and even for the planet, such as in climate change issues. In fact, at the end of Book II of his Utopia (or A little, true book, not less beneficial than enjoyable, about how things should be in the new island Utopia), Thomas More concluded that “in the Utopian commonwealth there are very many features that in our societies [he] would wish rather than expect to see” [17]. The utopic city may not be possible. However, what is still possible is to make use of the solutions that are made available by the algorithmic city to improve governance and the lives of its citizens.
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Robots in Smart Cities Matthew E. Studley and Hannah Little
Abstract Robots and Smart Cities seem like natural partners. They both gather data and process it, and could provide added value to each other in a variety of ways. In this chapter, we briefly explore some potential use cases featuring the smart city as an informational entity, and a variety of robots. It becomes clear that robots could have an enormous impact on the way that cities are designed and operate and that the closer integration of such ‘autonomous’ machines into our living, working and public spaces will similarly change the way we interact with the city, and with each other. In order to promote public discussion of these impacts, and in the hope that citizens equipped with knowledge are empowered to actively choose the way their environment develops, we introduced the Robots in Smart Cities Challenge to the European Robotics League. This places robots and researchers in the heart of the Smart City, showing skills and technologies in a variety of relatable and believable use cases, or Episodes. The first such challenge was a tremendous success, and we report briefly on the impacts, and feedback gathered from public and other stakeholders as a result. Keywords Robots · Smart cities · SciRoc · Competition
1 Introduction We believe that Smart Cities and Robots have a lot in common. At different scales, and with different constituents, they sense, process, and act upon the physical world. Many of the same advantages and disadvantages might be posited for both, and these might be magnified when the two technologies come together, sharing data, and delivering services. M. E. Studley (B) Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] H. Little Science Communication Unit, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (ed.), How Smart Is Your City?, Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering 98, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6_7
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These changes will have a great impact on the lives of citizens, so we organized an event to focus robotics developments on Smart City integration, to benchmark current solutions, and to demonstrate the state of the art to stakeholders in the city. We hope that by doing this we can foster a fact-based discussion which might enable us all to take a more active role in deciding what sort of future we want.
2 Smart Cities 2.1 Opportunities and Challenges The label ‘Smart Cities’ is used with increasing frequency in the literature [1], indicating a growing interest in the topic within the academic and wider community. Although some authors have noted that there are considerable differences in the meaning intended or implied through the use of the label [2], the main focus appears to be on the use of engineering approaches within the urban environment to maximize the quality of life of the citizens, even to the extent of considering ‘Smart Cities’ as an implementation of Ambient Intelligence in the urban environment [3]—a sort of ‘Google Voice’ that is always on, wherever you go. These visions present the city as an informational entity, gathering and processing data in support of decision makers and infrastructure, and offering data services to other stakeholders to enable and improve the services they offer [1]. The city senses, processes, and acts, becoming an Embodied Intelligence [4] evolving in symbioses with the other actors in its ecosystem. In as much as it is a system which acts purposively upon receipt of environmental stimuli, the Smart City itself resembles a Robot. We might expect to find some commonality between Smart Cities and Robots, additional advantages from their integration, and also find some common problems on the road to adoption. Recent years have cast into sharp relief the hazards and concerns which can arise through the application of machine learning algorithms to data about our interests, intentions and actions. It has been argued that decision support through big data is a form of coercive control that are hard for individuals to resist [5]. Machine learning often trains on datasets which over-represent cultural habits and racial features from North America though only 4% of the world’s population live there, and incautious training of machine learning algorithms with biased data can result in a sexist or racist bias [6]. It has been widely recognized that the ‘bubbles’ within which incautious users of social media gather support for their beliefs are prone to manipulation by malicious agents [7]. Irrespective of the use to which data may be put by different actors, we may have concerns about our right to privacy, our right to anonymity, the integrity of our identity, and transparency about the method, and basis, of decision making [8, 9]. In China, a variety of schemes from state and commercial actors which indicate financial probity, trust, and ‘loyalty’ have arisen [10], and it has been suggested that here at
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least individuals see these not in terms of the violation of privacy, but as valuable methods of improving reliable, honest dealings [11]. It is clear that we regard the application of machine learning and big data to our lives as, at best, a double-edged sword. It is not surprising that similar concerns have arisen in the works of some authors considering the technological view of the Smart City. Kitchen presents an excellent overview of the developments which challenge our notions of privacy and anonymity in an environment where sensing is ubiquitous, and more especially, where the data from many different networks and sensory modalities can be stitched together [12]. By being in the city it is assumed we give consent not only for our activity to be monitored, but for data about this to be made available to third parties to use in ways which were perhaps not intended by the data gatherers. Even though data may be anonymized to remove or obfuscate the link to individuals, it has been shown that in some cases data used as training sets for machine learning algorithms can be ‘de-anonymized’ [13].
2.2 Robots in Smart Cities Notwithstanding the ethical issues mentioned above, the possibilities inherent in the coming together of robots and smart cities seem many and varied [14]. In the smart city environment, we could regard robots as the effectors—or ‘hands’ of the smart city, affecting the environment in order to supply services. Robots are already routinely in use in delivering food and medicines by land and air in cities in the US, Europe, Scandinavia and China [15]. Robots could interact with citizens directly, as for example, assistive robots in the home [16], or as part of business operations within the urban context [17]. Robots could be involved in shaping the city by building new structures [18], inspecting and maintaining existing infrastructure [19], and changing patterns of use and availability of resources. Perhaps there are few activities which take place in urban environments which might not be changed by adding robots? Robots could share data with each other using the communications infrastructure in the Smart City, in order to do things they couldn’t otherwise do. For example, robots can augment the information they gain from their local sensors with information about the wider environment [20], enabling smarter decision making and resource allocation. Robots could function as the collectors of data from sensors which have no connectivity themselves [21, 22], driving round the city and gathering data, perhaps while engaged in other tasks. Robots can also gather data to support other processes, either explicitly, as for example flying drones providing a less intrusive and resourcehungry alternative to police helicopters [23], or implicitly as a by-product of their operation while going about their allotted tasks [24]. But robots will not just passively fit into our existing urban schemes. The spaces in our cities are designed and evolve to support the activities of citizens and other stakeholders, with the technologies of the time. Mews gave way to tram yards and bus
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depots, and they in turn to multi-storey car parks. Undoubtedly, robots will change the way we design our cities. In the UK, concern has already been raised about the prospect of robots making use of pavements which are intended for the use of human pedestrians [25]. Simulations of the impact of ride sharing in autonomous vehicles predict a reduction in the demand for parking of up to 90% in the urban environment [26]. This space could be used for other purposes. The introduction of robots to smart cities will change the way we use our city spaces, and the ways we interact with each other, and maintaining the livability of these environments will undoubtedly involve planners and architects to expand the perspectives of robotic developers and designers [27]. Since the world’s population is becoming more urban, and the likelihood therefore that more and more people will live in Smart Cities, and given that within these environments robots can not only be applied but can become an integral part of the technological ecosystem, it seems that any ethical challenges that arise from the marriage of Robots and Smart Cities will have particular salience. It has been argued that everything is being increasingly ‘datified’ and any data can plausibly be argued to be personal [28], since the possibility of using machine learning to discover correlations between datasets enable inferences to be drawn about individuals’ lives, likes, locations and actions, and in this way the promise of anonymity becomes illusory [29]. This possibility clearly grows with the variety and mobility of sensors deployed in the urban environment; the periodic data gathering of Google Street View, which raises numerous questions about privacy and ownership [28, 30], might seem like the quaint concerns of a gentler bygone era when we are faced with the possibility that cars and drones continuously gather data all the time. We live in a Surveillance Society [31] where the ability to electronically monitor our movements has grown from being the purview of the State, to that of corporations such as Google and Facebook [32], and perhaps soon, any company with the rights and money to access the data gathered by the multitude of sensors inside and outside our homes. Given the fundamental changes which these technologies bring to our lives, it seems a moral necessity that citizens should be empowered to make informed choices about which uses of technology they welcome, and which they would rather do without. These choices should be underpinned by facts, and every voice within the city should be heard.
3 SciRoc, the European Robotics League, and Smart Cities 3.1 Motivation and Background As a result of a series of initiatives funded by the European Union’s Framework 7 and Horizon 2020 programs, the European Robotics League (ERL) has been organizing competitions for robots and their human helpers throughout Europe. These competitions are based around benchmarking, and aim to provide the robots’ developers
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with data to enable the comparison of different systems, algorithms and approaches to solving complex tasks [33]. The ERL originally consisted of three challenges, which were suitable for Industrial, Service, and Emergency Robots; with the latter challenge requiring that air, land and sea robots should work together to solve a simulated disaster. One feature of the competition events which comprise the ERL, and which they have in common with the majority of similar robotics demonstrations, is that they tend to happen in locations which do not readily lend themselves to public engagement. Robotics competitions are often hidden away from normal view, being removed from daily life by virtue of being co-hosted with robotics conferences or in test facilities in robotics labs (both of which necessarily limit access to the public), or by virtue of their particular requirements for accessible and safe use of outdoor environments spanning marine, land and air domains [34]. We know from surveys that attitudes towards robots are mixed [35], though it is debatable if these attitudes are based on fact or Hollywood fiction. If we want to underpin public discourse with facts, and raise issues around acceptance and desirability of different use cases for robotics, we must move our demonstrations into the arena of everyday life, and therefore we determined to bring the ERL into the light.
3.2 The First SciRoc Robots in Smart Cities Challenge For these reasons, the SciRoc project builds upon the ERL to include the Robotics in Smart Cities Challenge. In this, teams and their robots who have built competences in the other ERL Challenges come together to tackle relatable and realistic tasks in the Smart City environment. It is mandatory that they use the data infrastructure of the Smart City in carrying out these tasks, prototyping the sorts of interactions which will underpin future applications, and demonstrating additional value from the investment already made by the city host. The first such Smart City Challenge took place in Milton Keynes (MK), Buckinghamshire UK in September 2019, the fastest growing city in the UK (in terms of jobs, people and houses). The city has recently been engaged in a large ‘Future City’ program, at the centre of which was the 2014–2017 MK: Smart project, led by the Open University and also including the MK City Council as a core partner. The project has created a state-of-the art data acquisition and management infrastructure (the MK Data Hub) and an Internet of things network with live sensors capturing many aspects of the functionalities of the city (energy and water consumption, transport data, satellite-acquired data, social and economic datasets, and crowdsourced data from social media or specialized applications). The competition was organized in the Centre: MK shopping mall, whose floor plan is based around two main corridors of shops, and a large exhibition area called Middleton Hall which is surrounded by cafés and department stores. The event took
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up most of the space in Middleton Hall, which is a central transit zone for the whole shopping complex.
Floorplan of the Centre: MK, showing Middleton Hall
To benchmark the robots and display their abilities we developed 12 candidate ‘episodes’, each featuring a different Smart City Robotics use case, which were in turn refined to an offer of five through feedback from European robotics stakeholders. These episodes were; • Deliver coffee shop orders. This arena was fitted to replicate a coffee shop. Six tables and various chairs provided by the nearby Costa Coffee outlet (sponsor of the episode) were placed in the arena to create a suitable scenario for the robot to navigate.
Deliver coffee shop orders
• Take the elevator. The central aim of this episode was to evaluate the interaction between the robot and the customers in a restricted space such as an elevator. To achieve this we recreated a mock-up elevator inside the arena, complete with movable doors.
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Take the elevator, inside and outside
• Shopping pick and pack. This episode arena occupied the other public-facing corner of the competition area. The fitting was coordinated and supervised by Ocado Technologies (sponsor of the episode). The core functionality evaluated by this episode was mobile manipulation, in a scenario replicating an autonomous warehouse. Four shelves containing various products were placed at the back of the arena, and the robot had to move the object from the shelf to a container representing a till. The arena was built taking into account two categories of mobile manipulators: a small mobile platform (e.g., Kuka youBot) and tall semihumanoid platform (e.g., PAL Tiago).
Shopping pick and pack
• Through the door. The episode was designed to benchmark the ability of a robot to open and go through a door. To achieve this, a special instrumented door is
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required which can gather data for benchmarking. The door was designed and built by Politecnico di Milano in the scope of the Eurobench project, and installed in a pre-built scaffolding inside the arena.
Through the door
• Fast delivery of emergency pills. This was a drone episode which took place safely in a netted drone cage to avoid any possibility of risk to the public. For this episode the drone is required to deliver a payload to a specific location while avoiding a series of obstacles. The episode was designed with multiple levels of difficulty, the hardest of which required the drone to achieve full 3D navigation. To comply with this requirement we setup the arena with ground obstacles represented by everyday furniture, and aerial obstacles, implemented by hanging banners between the sides of the netting.
Fast delivery of emergency pills
The MK DataHub was used in all episodes, in a variety of ways. It acted both as a source of information, such as the coordinates of the patient who awaited the delivery of medication by drone, and also as a destination for data, allow judges and teams to see the status of the different robots in real time, and also enabling the visualization
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of this as part of our public engagement. Further research is also supported as the data gathered from the robots can be replayed via the MK DataHub at will.
3.3 SciRoc ‘Robots in Smart Cities’ as Experienced by Citizens These activities attracted many passing citizens, who stopped and watched the episodes. Volunteers circulating around the episodes were on hand to interpret the events for them. In addition, we organized a series of engagements around the main competition, including; • A Symposium, with panel discussion. We provided a forum in which to debate the risks and opportunities associated with the emergence of a ‘hybrid society,’ where robots and humans occupy the same urban space, and interaction with robots becomes more and more ubiquitous. The audience comprised people from a variety of organizations associated with the smart city agenda in Milton Keynes, including technologists, scientists, architects and planners, social scientists, members of the local city council, and others. • Workshop on Evaluation and Benchmarking of Human-Centered Ai System. This was co-organized with the AI4EU Horizon2020 project, and was devoted to the discussion of methods and tools to evaluate human-centered AI systems. The topics included the evaluation of techniques supporting human-AI collaboration, performance evaluation of AI systems through competitions, benchmarking of human-centered AI systems, empirical evaluation of human robot interaction and more. • Public Debate: AI Facts versus Fiction. During the Smart City Challenge, we engaged with spectators in a number of ways, through ‘hands-on’ public engagement, attitude surveys, informal conversation and interpretation for spectators. By doing this we were able to gather questions from the public that they would like to put to a panel of experts, and invited people to register to attend this public debate. A panel of experts drawn from the European AI and Robotics communities were joined by representatives from our funders, the EC Horizon 2020 Program. With questions gathered from competition spectators and live questions from the audience, debate about possible impacts, opportunities and threats soon heated up. It was clear that the audience and the panel shared a lot of the same concerns, and that the public and experts are on the same side. • “Hands on” activities for younger children. We built a small arena in which a small group of Thymio Robots [36] demonstrated different reactive behaviors, and allowed children to interact with them to test their guesses about how the robots would react to different situations. This provided a ‘sticky’ experience which promoted our interactions with their parents, gathering input for the Public Debate, and our public perceptions questionnaire.
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3.4 Survey of Public Perceptions of Robots in Smart Cities In addition to the public engagement activities outlined above, we surveyed public perceptions around Robots in Smart Cities. Full ethical approval was given by UWE Bristol. No personal, identifiable details about the participants were recorded, apart from their age. Participants were all given a participant number and contact information to contact the researcher should they wish to withdraw consent for the use of their data. No participants did this. As the Smart City Challenge was held in the middle of the Centre: MK shopping mall, passersby were able to stop and observe the robots as they completed the tasks and were asked to participate in a short survey interview. Sampling was done opportunistically as members of the public stopped to engage with the competition and surrounding exhibitions. Questions were read aloud and answers were recorded that provided both quantitative and qualitative data. 28 responses were recorded from participants aged between 25 and 80, with an average age of 51. Participants were asked if they knew what a smart city was and if they were aware of any data collection that goes on around Milton Keynes. If they were aware, they were asked what they were aware of. Participants were then asked if they were comfortable with the data collection that went on in connection with the smart city and why they were/weren’t comfortable. 50% of participants self-reported knowing what a smart city is. However, only 39% reported being aware of any data collection that goes on around Milton Keynes. Those that were aware, reported being aware of CCTV, public transport and traffic monitoring. 61% reported being comfortable with the data collection that goes on around the smart city with reported reasons for comfort ranging from safety, to efficiency, and the fact that it is regulated by data protection laws. However, there were also some responses stating comfort came from feeling that it was out of the citizen’s control and that there was nothing that could be done about it. A small number (N = 4) said they were not comfortable with the data collection reporting concerns with privacy, the sharing of data and concerns over the fact that people are not aware that it is happening.
Responses to survey questions
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Participants were asked whether an institution being public or private affects whether they trust them when collecting and utilizing their data. 54% of participants reported that it did, with 73% of those indicating a preference trusting public institutions more because they are more transparent, regulated, accountable and less likely to sell the data on to third parties. Participants were asked in which sectors they would be comfortable with having help from robots. Multiple choice responses were as follows: cleaning, health care, home assistance, law enforcement, manufacturing, mobility, rescue, resource management, retail, transport. For those participants reported that they wouldn’t be comfortable with, they were asked why not. The sector that participants were most uncomfortable with was law enforcement, with 79% reporting that they would not be comfortable from help from robots. 36% reported law enforcement as the only sector they were not comfortable to have robot help in. Reasons reported for a lack of comfort around robots in law enforcement was a lack of a ‘human touch,’ the context dependency of law enforcement work, and a discomfort with robots having autonomy in this area. The second highest sector that people were not comfortable with robot help in was transport (18%), with reported reasons relating to the safety of driverless vehicles and a lack of control of vehicles. The third highest sector that people were not comfortable with was health care (14%) with stated reasons again being a lack of a ‘human touch’ and a loss of jobs. Participants were asked which sectors they would be comfortable with having their behavioral data collected for in relation to smart cities, and further, whether they’d be comfortable having their data used by robots. 36% reported being comfortable with data collection and use in every sector. Again, the most common sector participants were not comfortable with was law enforcement. 21% of participants reported not being comfortable with data collection for law enforcement, and more reported not being comfortable with robots using data collected for law enforcement (32%). However, this is not consistent with the 79% previously saying they would not be comfortable with help from robots within law enforcement. This inconsistency may be down to how the question is contextualized, or it may be that it was the last question in the survey and so participants had ceased engaging and were giving the quickest possible answer. Participants were then asked if they had seen any of the robots at the competition. If they had seen a robot, they were asked what the robot was doing and whether they would trust the robot to do that job in the real world and why they would/wouldn’t trust the robot. Of the people who had watched one of the robots trying to complete an episode in the competition (N = 15), 13 reported that they would trust the robot to do that task in the real world. Participants mostly reported that the trust derived from the tasks being simple and repetitive, and the robots being task oriented. The two participants who said they wouldn’t trust the robot to do its task in the real world reported their lack of trust was due to seeing the robots fail at seemingly simple tasks.
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4 Conclusion When we first stated our intention to bring a scientific robotic competition to the heart of a major public space, our ambition was to stimulate fact based discussion by the public about the future rôles of robots in their smart city, to demonstrate that robots and smart cities are natural partners which add value to each other, and to showcase the best of European Robotics to the benefit of the teams, our sponsors, and the wider community. It is true to say that we achieved our aims for our city host; This event brings a lot of value to MK, it’s a great fit with the sectors we’re looking to develop economically in areas such as the digital economy, artificial intelligence, robotics, obviously, and it’s helping bring international attention for those subject areas to the city. Having all these teams from all of Europe helps bring a focus and profile that we’re really keen to build on. Geoff Snelson (Director of Strategy and Future, Milton Keynes Council)
The teams had an opportunity for public engagement which is usually missing in robotics competitions, and helped the volunteers explain the details of what was happening to the public, while they benchmarked their robots on challenging problems which demonstrated the facts of the state-of-the-art in Robotics. This adds tremendous value to the team members’ experience of the event; Doing research just inside a lab, you forget about how it’s going to be used, and how people are going to react, and think about it, and that’s so central to whether this technology, robotics, is going to be acceptable and be useful to society. Robotics Team Member, University College London
Although the sample size was small in our survey, it was interesting to see how accepting the inhabitants of Milton Keynes are to the gathering and use of data within their city, and also the extent to which they would trust robots to perform the everyday tasks which they had seen them attempt in the episodes. We believe that this first Robots in Smart Cities Challenge delivered value to all the stakeholder groups. As robotics develops towards more widespread use, the necessity of benchmarking in the real world will become more pressing, and this benchmarking will need to develop to cover robot-human interactions and co-working. We feel that we have taken some early but important steps in promoting a discussion of future directions, grounded in facts, which we hope will grow to help ensure we build cities where we all want to live. Acknowledgements The European Robotics League is run by the SciRoc project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement n° 780086. The First Smart Cities Challenge in Milton Keynes was generously sponsored by PAL Robotics, Ocado Technology, Costa Coffee, Milton Keynes Council, Cranfield University, and the Centre: MK. The ‘Through the Door’ episode was supported by the EUROBENCH project, funded under EU Horizon 2020 grant agreement n° 779963.
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Technological Approaches to Cultural Heritage—Lessons from ROCK Anthony Colclough and Cécile Houpert
Abstract In smart cities, technology is never for its own sake, but for improving the lives of citizens. As culture is at the heart of well-being, it makes sense that technology should be employed to harness and magnify the incredible potential of local culture. This paper presents a brief survey of some tools and technologies that EUROCITIES smart cities are employing in cultural policy and practice. From crowd monitoring and neuroanalytic cameras, to platforms and videogames, cities in the ROCK project, funded under the Horizon 2020 program, are harnessing technology to improve access to and preservation of culture and cultural heritage. In smart cities, technology is never for its own sake, but for improving the lives of citizens. As culture is at the heart of well-being, it makes sense that technology should be employed to harness and magnify the incredible potential of local culture. This paper presents two ways in which European smart cities are using technology in cultural policy and practice. The first section focuses on data gathering: What technologies are cities using to gather data about cultural heritage engagement, and how are they using this data to modify their cultural policies? The second section focuses on the use of technology to create platforms for user-generated content on culture and cultural heritage: How are cities giving citizens the run of digital spaces to propose and disseminate culture and cultural heritage? Keywords Culture · Technology · Cultural policy · Well-being · Data gathering · Platforms for user-generated content
A. Colclough (B) · C. Houpert EUROCITIES, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] C. Houpert e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (ed.), How Smart Is Your City?, Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering 98, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6_8
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1 Technology for Data Gathering for Better Top-Down Decision Making on Culture and Cultural Heritage The benefits of culture for health, well-being, and the local economy are well documented,1 but it remains famously difficult to measure the impacts of a particular cultural program or policy. A very basic question relates to footfall: How many people are attending cultural events and institutions, and where do they come from? Information like this can influence everything from funding and programming of cultural events, to the planning of mobility strategy and energy infrastructure. However, EUROCITIES member cities, 140 major cities throughout Europe, have reported that this information is tricky to get, especially for free outdoor events, or as it relates to wider areas like heritage walks, or a city’s old town or cultural quarter.
1.1 LBASense Crowd Monitoring One technology that is being tested in the ROCK (Regeneration and Optimization of Cultural heritage in creative and Knowledge cities) project aims to surmount this difficulty. ‘LBASense,’ developed by DFRC, is a sensor that estimates the number of people in an area, evaluates the length of their stay and provides information about their likely country of origin. It does all this using information that is passively broadcasted from people’s mobile phones. In the area of interest, the city installs sensors, for example on existing infrastructure such as lampposts. The sensors measure signals coming from the Wi-fi transmission and cellular protocols (that is, transmission from cellular networks such as 3G, 4G, 5G, and so on). Data privacy is a major concern for European cities, so it is important that data collection methods such as this do not violate people’s privacy. As this operation occurs automatically for all the people carrying phones in an area, there is no way to secure their consent. However, signs posted in areas where sensors are active notify people that they are in operation, and individuals have a right to ask for information on the system. These sensors avoid any breach of privacy as they passively pick up on signals that the phones generate without interfering in any way with the phones or the phones’ communication, and do not acquire any piece of information that could be used to actually identify a single individual, for example a name or mobile phone number. The information that the phones do pick up from the Wi-fi is the Media Access Control address (MAC address), a 48/64-bit number which is part of the phone’s network hardware, or the Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identity (TMSI), a temporary local identity that networks give to phones to stop them from being traced. The sensors 1 Fancourt D, Finn S. What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being?
A scoping review. Copenhagen: WHO Regional Office for Europe; 2019 (Health Evidence Network (HEN) synthesis report 67).
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Fig. 1 Analytics data from the LBASense dashboard showing the dropdown at the end of the festival
are designed so as not to be able to use this or other information to identify individual people. Every precaution is taken with this data once the sensors have received it. They send it to a local server via a secure link and use a strong encryption key to convert it into an internal code. These codes are then aggregated according to the time and region they were collected in, and the initial raw data is immediately deleted to guarantee user security. City officials can then see projections of the data in the form of ‘crowd analytics.’ This gives them a clear impression of how many people attended an event or an area, and for how long. It also gives them information about the country of origin of the people in attendance and the flows of movement in the area. In the ROCK project, these sensors are being operated in Cluj, Skopje and Turin. In Cluj, one test case was the Untold Festival, Romania’s largest electronic music festival. Using this technology, the city was able to determine the most popular days of the festival, and the times that certain areas became very crowded, which will help in designing future iterations of this annual event (Fig. 1). Specifically, the city plans to use the data to improve the attractiveness of areas that are less frequently visited, refining its approach to car and pedestrian traffic, and redesign tourist circuits throughout its territory, among other things. Skopje, which has just installed the sensors in a popular tourist site, the Old Bazaar, is planning to use the data to determine, among other things, how it can regularize flows of people by encouraging the use of different entrances to this cultural heritage area. It could potentially be used for safety and security at cultural events, ensuring that areas are not overcrowded; for improving the effects of tourism on the local economy, testing which policies are effective in drawing people to explore certain neighborhoods; for mobility policy, assessing when more or more frequent mobility options will be necessary for cultural events or heritage areas, and much more.
1.2 Museum Cards The passive nature of the monitoring through LBASense comes with advantages and disadvantages. Some cities would like to have a monitoring tool that can also be used
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as a means of directly influencing and incentivizing certain consumer behavior, such as attending a greater number and variety of cultural offers, and visiting institutions in areas that typically receive less traffic. The city of Turin is achieving this goal with its Abbonamento Musei, a museum card that it first developed back in 1995. This is a single card that allows holders to access a variety of cultural events and locations within and around the city for a low annual fee. The card is valid for one year and the full price is e52, with some lower and higher options. Certain organizations, such as the Slow Food Movement, have an organizational discount allowing their members to buy the card for e48; for senior citizens, those over the age of 65 seniors, the cost is e45; young people, between 15 and 26 pay e32; and children up to 14 pay only e20. There is also an ‘Extra formula,’ also tiered but with a basic rate of e87 that not only includes Turin and its surrounding Piedmont region, but also Milan and its surrounding Lombardy region, and the nearby Valle d’Aosta. Cardholders have free entrance to around 200 cultural and cultural heritage sites, including museums, royal residences, castles, gardens, permanent collections and temporary exhibitions, as well as theatre seasons, cinema, and local festivals. As well as free entrance to this core offer, subscribers are offered discounts to an even wider range of places and events. Aimed at supporting the cultural demand of locals, the card brings together the historic-artistic wealth of the territory in a single network. Museums adhering to the project are reimbursed for a reduced-price ticket for each cardholding visitor. The card is particularly aimed at residents of the city and region, but it is also available for purchase by those living in other parts of Italy, or tourists of any nationality whatsoever. The idea is that the card functions like a loyalty card in a shop or restaurant, encouraging people to take more frequent advantage of the local cultural offer. This means creating more foot-traffic at cultural locations, both by encouraging regular culture-goers to get out more and encouraging people who would not usually choose to engage with the cultural offer to do so. Further, by making a wide range of venues available under one payment, the city incentivizes people to expand their cultural circuit, not just taking advantage of the closest or biggest institutions but adventuring out to the peripheries to enjoy alternative cultural offers. Another function of the Abbonamento Musei is to serve as an integrated communication system—including an app, a newsletter, a magazine, a website, social media pages and special events—to inform and engage the audience (cardholders and noncardholders). It increases cultural engagement by notifying people about current and upcoming events and exhibitions, helping the culture-curious to keep their finger on the pulse of the city. The app lets you keep track of your bookings, the places you have visited and what remains to be seen. It also helps you plan your route with a map showing all the museum locations. Meanwhile, social media functions not just as a location to share interesting images and videos promoting culture, but also to create culturally active online communities. The card also gives the municipality data on user preferences that can be used to work together with cultural institutions to develop the cultural offer. With data
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submitted by the card’s applicants, it is possible to identify categories like the gender and age range of culture-goers, their personal preferences and the scope and frequency of their visits to cultural institutions and events. This information can then be used to correct imbalances by making sure that the cultural offer is inclusive and meets the needs of less represented groups. Data from the Abbonamento Musei is constantly analyzed by Politecnico Torino and the Piemonte Cultural Observatory to help the local institutions improve their cultural offer according to the registered trends. Using this data and exploiting the communication channel that the mechanism of the card opens up between the city and the local cultural institutions, it is possible to systematize the local cultural offer and avoid duplication within the network. It also helps to create a unitary cultural branding for the whole territory. Since its inception in 1995, the card has grown to encompass more and more cultural institutions over a wider and wider territory—and it shows no signs of slowing down! The card is 75% self-financing and generates a turnover of around e5 million annually, most of which is redistributed to the participating cultural institutions. In the interest of transparency, detailed annual budget information is made available to the public.2 Subscription has grown steadily year on year, now with over 118,000 cardholders making 748,000 visits to cultural spots annually, that’s 6.3 visits per cardholder. About 55% of visitors renew their card year on year, and many do so even when they haven’t made enough visits to make an overall financial saving on the card, suggesting that the card’s other facets, such as the newsletter, app and other information are seen as valuable by users. This is borne out by the figures, which show that this communication material has an audience of over 300,000. The number of visits per year for cardholders is well above the average number of museum visits per capita in Italy. Although this may preselect for people already interested in cultural activity, it is taken as an indication of the success of the card. A 2015 study by the Fondazione Fitzcarraldo found that, contrary to their initial hypothesis, the subscription did not lead to ‘specialist use clusters’, that is, specialists in a certain topic frequently visiting the same or same sorts of museums. In fact, the opposite behavior emerged, in which people displayed eclectic tendencies, expanding their horizons by visiting many different types of museums. Thus, the tool can be seen as enabling the reopening of exploration for specialists, at the same time as it provides new opportunities for non-specialists. Until 2103, most of the subscribers were art-lovers who already visited museums pretty often. In recent years, the subscriber group has become much wider and includes many people who would did not previously participate regularly in cultural activity. Surveys also show that the card pushes visitors to go to the same museum several times in a year, more than they would otherwise do, and to go to smaller scale exhibitions that they would not otherwise have visited.
2 See
it at https://www.abbonamentomusei.it/Associazione-trasparente/Bilanci.
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The Abbonamento challenged the different museums to work on a program coordinated by every single museum, so that each one could profit from it. This enabled museum professionals to create a network, to get to know each other and to start collaborations that did not exist before.
1.3 Neuroanalytic Cameras A technology that bears traces of the passive and active modes of monitoring described above is the set of neuroanalytic cameras being tested through the ROCK project in Vilnius. Developed by Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VGTU) and Vilnius Municipality, this technology records people’s facial expressions and assesses their affective attitudes, emotional and physiological states. Emotional states include happiness, anger, surprise and disgust, and the degree to which these emotions are expressed; ‘affective attitudes’ include whether people seem bored or interested; and physiological states relate to heart and breathing rates, as well as the overall makeup of crowds in terms of gender and age. The technology pairs this information with weather data, including temperature and humidity; air quality data, such as carbon monoxide and noise levels; and physical and cultural information about the districts of Vilnius in which the cameras are placed, all of which it takes from other sources. It is helpful when making policy decisions around narcoanalytic measurements that a bunch of extremely unhappy looking people were also facing sub-zero temperature—you might not then conclude that it’s necessary to repaint the local building’s facades. With this information, the city runs a live ‘happiness index.’ Perhaps the first thing to clear up is that this index does not just measure happiness. Rather, it takes stock of 12 different emotions, as well as physical health and even career and educational opportunities, to construct an understanding of the all-round well-being of people in the city. The happiness index is one of three key performance indicators used by Vilnius2in strategy that give the overall picture of an intelligently sustainable and creative city (Fig. 2). The happiness index was born right after launching ROCK when the municipality laid down its city strategy Vilnius2in. The index can be tracked live at https://api. vilnius.lt/happiness-index. A live happiness index may seem like a bit of fun, but it makes a serious point: this tech-savvy city is not concerned with technology for its own sake, but only as a means to improve the lives of its residents. This human-first approach requires that the city not lurch forward mechanically to the latest and greatest innovations. Just as the proliferation of bridges in the nineteenth century put a lot of ferrymen out of work, new technology always comes with a negative side. The city always evaluates new measures, weighing potential losses against the alternatives and the gains that this technology can open up. For the ROCK project, different public spaces were selected for the installation of sensors and cameras: The Old Town; the heavily polluted industrial grey zone;
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Fig. 2 The changes in happiness per day between 15/12/2017 and the St. Casimir’s Fair. Compared to the months analyzed, residents were happier during the St. Casimir’s Fair
the vibrant city centre; and the recreational green areas. Planners are hoping to find out what factors are the most important in creating public spaces. It is important to receive scientific and knowledge-based recommendations on attracting people to public spaces and to create positive emotions that serve their health. According to various surveys (Eurostat, UN,) Vilnius residents are among the happiest people in the world and in Europe. The city believes that high quality public spaces increase the satisfaction index, and this is the focus of short and long-term municipal planning. In Vilnius’Old Town, a UNESCO world heritage site, the technology assesses rates and length of attendance, as well as how much the local cultural offer relates to the well-being of visitors and residents. The technology was able to establish that, overall, people are much happier walking around in the cultural heritage site than in other areas of the city (Fig. 3). Also, people are happier than average when going to cultural activities like festivals or other events. Technologies and applications designed in ROCK are not only intended to be innovative but also accessible and simple to use. They are designed for everyone. It is also very important that ongoing scientific projects provides tangible benefit to citizens and city guests, even now, during the research and data collection. Using this technology to enliven people’s interaction with cultural heritage during the Festival of Light, Vilnius integrated it with the Three Crosses Monument, one of the main symbols of the city. Now people on the street can log their mood to
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change the color of the Three Crosses Monument accordingly. This is an example of how neuroanalytics can be exploited to create unique user experiences of common heritage sites and cultural programming. The city is also testing an ‘opinion analytics’ tool developed by VGTU and Vilnius Municipality. This technology analyses sources such as online reviews and social media to tailor the cultural heritage offer to individual users, personalize the texts they are presented with, and even condense information based on the level of detail the user desires. This technology was developed using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, ‘C#’ programming language and the MS SQL Server 2012 database platform. It is worth noting that devices and systems that make up this technological toolkit are extremely expensive to run. Equipment costs of the video neuroanalytics were about e70,000. The cost of software developed for it by VGTU and Vilnius Municipality, was even higher. The running costs of the video neuroanalytics are about e3000 per month. All the overhead expenses are covered by Horizon 2020, municipal funds, and European Regional Development Funds. Vilnius hopes that a bigger buyin from other cities will help to drive down the cost, as the system is not sustainable at this level of expense.
1.4 GPS for Accessibility To increase the accessibility of its cultural heritage offer, Bologna has been working with Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) to design and pilot an app that uses GPS tracking and user input to better understand how those with disabilities engage with the ‘U-area,’ a cultural hotspot in the city and the main university district. The main goal is not only to ease the access to the U-area for people with disabilities but to design innovative and inclusive ways to discover the U-area and its vast amount of cultural heritage. The GPS tool, prototyped by TU/e, was used in a participatory mapping exercise to highlight the existing paths, points of interest, architectural barriers and issues. The device tracked the routes and geolocalized the feedback of users. In total 273 experiences were registered: 75% were positive (curiosity/interest, fun, joy, inspiration, relax, surprise), 25% negative (confusion, disgust, irritation/anger, boredom, fear) experiences (Fig. 4). With ‘design thinking’ methodologies, and the intervention also used participatory experiences, and leaflets with writing and illustration to support guided tours in a wide range of languages. The final aim was to increase the physical perception of the area and the surrounding environment using all five senses. The experimentation phase included a training for the official tour guides to allow them to properly manage the accessibility of the tour to people with disabilities, and to make the guides aware of the different languages and methods for communicating with deaf or blind people. On the basis of testing in November 2019, Bologna has created two thematic routes that wind along Via Zamboni: one dedicated to historical, artistic and religious heritage, the other dedicated to the scientific heritage. The routes are designed to be
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Fig. 4 Positive and negative experiences in places of interest (POIs), Bologna U-area
followed by the visitor either independently, thanks to the creation of an informative map of support, or accompanied by the specially trained tourist guides of Confguide Bologna. The long-term objective is to physically intervene on the architectural barriers in the city.
2 Technology as a Platform for Content on Culture and Cultural Heritage Beyond data-gathering, technology can be employed by cities to provide platforms to residents and visitors to present their own information, whether this be about cultural events, or itself a repository of cultural value. Here, the city acts as facilitator, with users being both the producers and consumers of information.
2.1 Interpretive Centre Marvila and Beato In one of Lisbon’s socio-economically deprived areas, Marvila and Beato, various processes, including gentrification, are putting intangible cultural heritage at risk
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of disappearing. To combat this erosion of cultural heritage, at the same time as fostering a greater sense of community and a more inclusive society, Lisbon created the Marvila and Beato Interpretive Centre. The Interpretive Centre identifies and maps both built environment and life stories in the area using a participatory method. The local community, including residents, local institutions and entities with a local presence, is called on to participate actively and help the municipality gather knowledge about the cultural, material and immaterial heritage of the neighborhood, making it available to the public in an appealing, playful and innovative way, that allows better access. The end result of this process is a set of interactive screens, where the stories of local people and culturally significant places can be accessed and interacted with by patrons of the area’s local library. Lisbon’s methodology is based on a bottom-up safeguard strategy, encouraging the direct participation of communities. A participatory and open inventory offers the communities an opportunity to highlight and present their own tangible and intangible cultural heritage. It is being developed through a process in which the surrounding community assumes a central role in the recognition, dynamization and legitimation of the local identity axes. Thanks to the active involvement of the community, a set of oral testimonies about the territory in different historical periods and the diverse uses of the local cultural heritage have been collected and disseminated. The method combines tools such as participatory mapping, geo-referencing and cartography to represent the knowledge of local communities and to include information that is now excluded from mainstream or official maps. Invitations were sent to residents that know very well the territory and to relevant stakeholders—to integrate the Interpretive Centre Organizing Committee (OC). The OC meets twice a month and includes historians, sociologists, social service technicians, local political representatives and residents. The committee divides into four teams, each concerned with one part of the neighborhood, being responsible for validating and completing the tangible and intangible cultural heritage municipal inventory (Fig. 5). Fig. 5 An organizing committee meets in Marvila
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Each team gathers information on the cultural heritage of each area and identifies people who can give a privileged testimony of events, practices and experiences related to the history and cultural heritage of these territories. For each cultural heritage item, each team collects textual information, photos, films, and identifies witnesses who have experienced situations and who have stories to tell. All content is later integrated in the interactive multimedia equipment of the Interpretive Centre. The resources gathered by residents are also used to update the municipal and national inventories. The municipal inventory focuses on the classification of municipal tangible cultural heritage. The National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage is a resource for the dissemination of good practices and the enhancement of intangible cultural heritage in Portugal. This inclusive methodology ensures the dissemination of knowledge of Marvila’s cultural heritage, the collective management of cultural heritage, and the valorization, transfer and sharing of community knowledge on local cultural heritage, as well as an enjoyable option for informal learning at the local library. The interpretive centre is financed through the ROCK project. The people who make up the committees are all volunteers, and the library offers the space for free. Most of the budget is dedicated to library staff and technical equipment for recording stories and uploading the content on the multimedia equipment in the library. Once cultural heritage stories are gathered by the interpretive centre, they can be exploited in multiple ways. It will be uploaded on the multimedia equipment and can live forever in the library. It will also be available online and referenced through a metadata system in order to be searchable by researchers or by anyone who is interested and curious about Marvila and Beato territory and history.
2.2 Bibliogamers Also in Lisbon, another initiative in Marvila library is encouraging users to come together and create fresh cultural content that captures cultural heritage in an innovative way. The annual ‘Bibliogamers’ event brings together game designers in the library to use content from the Interpretive Centre together with personal interviews and tours of the area to make videogames that can be downloaded and played online. In typical hackathon style, participants are grouped into diverse teams of different ages and backgrounds, from locals to visitors, from people with knowledge about coding, to scriptwriters, musicians and photographers. The completed demos go before a jury which selects the winners and runner-up prizes. In the most recent instantiation, nine demos were completed based on the theme ‘Marvila’s past, present, and future. The winning game, ‘Marvila in progress,’ is a city management type game in which the player generates and spends resources to manage randomly generated events from the areas’ history. The player must keep local levels of food and comfort at a reasonable level while raising money to rebuild the Afonso Domingues School, which was demolished in an unrealized bridge-building project.
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Another game developed during the Game Jam, ‘Naked Boy Run’ is based on the true story of a local inhabitant. The player is a young naked boy who has to run around finding his clothes while steering clear of the police. This funny conceit comes from less-than-humorous circumstances. During the Portuguese dictatorship many homes in Marvila did not have running water, which meant that people were forced to use public fountains and rivers to wash themselves and their clothes. This was illegal and bore a fine. According to the game designers at the event, it increased their knowledge and understanding of, as well as their interest in local history, and the city hopes that that will be true of players as well.
2.3 WunderBO Choosing the format of an annual event and hackathon style approach like Bibliogamers in Lisbon has many advantages in terms of bringing together people with diverse skill sets who would not otherwise work together, and engaging the local community in a very intimate fashion. However, the city of Bologna decided to go a different route, preferring to give an experienced company a longer time to develop a cultural heritage game that could be marketed en masse to locals and visitors. The result, ‘WunderBO’ is a free mobile app, available in English and Italian that promotes the city and its local cultural offer. It was developed by the city in collaboration with the Medieval Civic Museum and Palazzo Poggi Museum. The city began by launching a call for tenders from game designers to create a game that would promote the cultural heritage of the city. Game designers from all over Italy answered the call. Funded through ROCK, the Municipality of Bologna and the Emilia-Romagna Region, WunderBO was developed by Melazeta game studio. In it, players are presented with puzzles that they must solve by exploring Bologna’s cultural heritage and building up a personal ‘chamber of wonders.’ Famous Bolognian collectors from past centuries act as tour guides who present the city’s story to the player, as well as the hints and clues that will help them grow their hoard (Fig. 6). This is not the kind of mobile app that players can enjoy just from the comfort of their sofa at home—to complete their collection, players have to actually visit the city’s two museums, where they can unlock hidden pieces through an augmented reality interface. Using the phone’s camera, the game places digital images and animations that overlay and integrate with the real museum space. These are triggered by QR codes placed around the museums’ exhibitions. WunderBO also has a social element, designed to allow active players to advertise the game and draw others in. Players can share their progress and the information that they have gleaned from the game on social media, so that their participation becomes contagious. Those who are able to complete the game more quickly than the other players win a Bologna Museum Card, which function like the Turin Museum Card described above.
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Fig. 6 WunderBo app
2.4 3D City Skopje is alco creating an app that allows users to experience the cultural heritage of the city, but in 3D. With this app, users can go to a point of cultural interest, such as the old Jewish Quarter, all of which was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1960s, point their phone and look around through the screen as if they were standing in the past. The app uses a 3D model of the entire area and tells the story of one family from the district, their home and their culture. The model was created on the basis of old city plans, as well as old photographs and personal accounts. Much of the content for the app, as well as its form, was the outcome of a process of citizen and stakeholder engagement, including with the Holocaust Memorial Centre for the Jews of Macedonia, in Skopje Urban Living Lab (SKULL). Here, in a building that is itself a revived cultural heritage site, people, businesses, academia and other organizations from the local community gather contribute their own input into the app.
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As in the case of many of the other technical solutions here, the app is just one point in a virtuous circle: People from all walks of life come together to design and furnish the content for the app, the app awakens people’s interest in and engagement with cultural heritage, and encourages more people to come together and design and furnish more content and ways to engage. All of these tools and technologies have allowed cities to gain insight into how people behave in the context of culture and cultural heritage. These insights can be gained by simple monitoring through tools like cameras, sensors, apps and cards. However, it can also involve a two-way process of dialogue and co-design that leverages the knowledge of users as well as empowering them in relation to the culture and cultural heritage offer of their city. In an ideal case, both of these approaches work together to deliver results that are cutting-edge, responsive to the needs of each context, and optimally attuned to the needs of residents and visitors. Culture and cultural heritage are for everyone, and this growing range of tools can be used by cities to create access and put the power in the people’s hands.3
3 For
more information on these tools and their uses, please visit https://www.rockproject.eu.
Digital Social Markets: Exploring the Opportunities and Impacts of Gamification and Reward Mechanisms in Citizen Engagement and Smart City Services Thomas White and Francesco Marchet Abstract The Digital Social Market (DSM) is a service which incentivises citizen engagement amongst the context of sustainably oriented city services. The approach aims to shift perceptions and behaviours towards city sustainability goals by providing reward mechanisms in exchange for continued and enhanced citizen engagement. There are many forms and examples of incentive mechanisms in existence; however, this approach is unique as it aims to form a value chain which places social and citizen needs first; the DSM is driven by the needs of the city, of fostering meaningful connections with citizens to catalyse change, not profit. By adopting this approach, the outcome is a set of services that aim to facilitate a stronger connection between city and citizen, empowering the latter to take an active role in participating in the collective future of their urban spaces. The DSM framework has been designed and implemented in partnership with three of the most advanced European lighthouse cities: Lisbon, London and Milan. In each location, the project has adopted a different focus such as mobility, domestic energy management or community cohesion. In addition to this, each city model includes a different social component such as schools or local charities, who also benefit from citizen involvement. This social dimension has brought significant complexity but also a great deal of learning around the value of community engagement in the development and deployment of smart city services. The approach to the DSM includes an online and offline component, both of which have been developed through an array of service design methodologies. This approach has enabled the project partners to start at the very beginning of the challenge, co-creating each aspect of the service together. The Digital Social Market is one of the ten measures developed as part of the European Commission Horizon 2020 funded programme Sharing Cities. Launched in 2016, the programme, which involves 35 partners across seven countries, will conclude in December 2020. Keywords Citizen engagement · Smart services integration · Digital social market · Behaviour change · Service Design · Advanced urban services T. White · F. Marchet (B) Connected Places Catapult, Urban Innovation Centre, One Sekforde Street, London EC1R 0BE, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (ed.), How Smart Is Your City?, Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering 98, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6_9
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1 The Challenge The term “Smart City” has become ubiquitous amongst most, if not all globalised nations across the world, however, it’s definition and interpretation remain ambiguous and divisive. There are those who celebrate its dizzying aspirations of seamless connection and integration between technology and services, clean, safe streets, resource and time efficiencies, sensing and sharing our every move, habit and desire in a bid to maximise our urban experiences both at home, work and everything in between. Then there’s an alternative camp, led by those who view the smart city ideals with growing concern and scrutiny. They see it as a mechanism for governments and big corporations to tap, track and extract every facet of our ‘data-selves’ in order to algorithmically deconstruct our democratic agency, bringing a new class of citizen to the fore where only those with a digital reputational prowess are able to prosper in society. Despite these opposing forces, advocates from both positions, often agree on one thing: if humans can’t rebalance the relationship between the planetary boundaries which sustain our homes, our energy needs, our schools, our offices, our lifestyles, our societies, indeed our cities, our very existence remains on a collision course which is set to cross thresholds of no-return (depending on the news outlets we follow) somewhere around the year 2030. One of the more optimistic and pragmatic visions for the smart city comes from Ben Green who articulates a vision of “The Smart Enough City”, where technology no longer exists in a myopic vacuum, applied and valued for its own sake. Instead, Green creates a new narrative of the smart city which moves beyond the notion of normative efficiencies and optimisation, seeking to embrace the “complexity of people and institutions” [1] and recognise the need to think more holistically about their needs – in essence placing person and planet before technology. In this context, Green supports a view that technology can be a profound force for social innovation when deployed in response to user needs, not the other way around. The Digital Social Market (DSM) studies many of the themes and tensions described above as part of its ongoing exploration around the role and relationships between city authorities, citizens and behaviour change. The DSM is a service which incentivises citizen engagement and the adoption of sustainably oriented city services. The approach aims to shift perceptions and behaviours towards city sustainability goals by providing reward mechanisms (via technologies) in exchange for continued and enhanced citizen engagement. On one hand the DSM seeks to unlock ideas and opportunities for city inhabitants to engage first-hand with tangible and attainable city sustainability goals; on the other, it facilitates the generation and sharing of data with city decision-makers, utilising it to inform important decisions which have the potential to affect society at a city-scale; crucial themes which must be considered throughout the life of a service such as the DSM. The initiative has something in common with Green’s hypothesis in that fundamentally it exists to help people access new ways of moving and dwelling in cities in response to what has been dubbed a ‘climate emergency’. As we’ll see, the cities who participated in this research and development project are confronting a myriad of complex
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system-level challenges, such as poor air quality caused by excessive emissionsproducing vehicles; outdated energy usage patterns facilitated by expensive, inefficient, centralised legacy systems, and communities who are so far disconnected and abstracted from these problems that they are prevented from knowing where to start in acting to resolve them. Through its development, the DSM is exploring important questions around the value and impact of deploying technologies and services developed collaboratively with the city stakeholders. In essence, the DSM seeks to facilitate a people-powered movement to help resolve the misalignment between the city authorities, corporations, academic institutions and communities that we all live and work amongst; a misalignment which manifests itself in the challenges described above at multiple societal levels, most compounded in areas of low socio-economic backgrounds. There are clearly many questions to explore in relation to the definition, role and impact of smart cities, most of which are beyond the scope of this essay; although not fully resolved, the DSM has attempted to develop and improve our collective understanding around several key questions: can we rely on the combined efforts of our urban populations to be part of the solution? If yes, how far can and should we turn to them in support of these strategies? Where are the lines between city authorities facilitating change vs authoritarianism? Can digital services be an effective catalyst for behaviour change and citizen engagement? It has been said that human beings are the only species to visualise and design their future before stepping into it; with this in mind, we need to visualise and construct some profoundly convincing alternative futures - and quickly. The DSM approach doesn’t claim to be a panacea, it simply provides an opportunity to enhance and amplify the connections between cities and their inhabitants.
2 What is a Digital Social Market? A Digital Social Market is best described as an approach to public service integration which incentivises and sustains citizen engagement. The DSM is formed around a selection of services which aim to shift perceptions and behaviours towards city sustainability goals by providing reward mechanisms in exchange for continued citizen participation. In essence, the DSM attempts to provide beneficial loops between city and citizen, whereby citizens (residents, commuters, tourists, students) participate in sustainability-focused services such as bike-sharing, walking, community participation activities and reducing energy use, and the city gains through the associated benefits such as improved air quality, reduction in traffic congestion, improved health and community cohesion. Citizens are rewarded for their actions through mechanisms designed to support other important social indicators such as local commerce (discounts in shops), peer-to-peer recognition or micro-donations to local charities. At the user end of the service, there is an app accessible through smart devices which facilitates the bridge between the promoters of the initiative (usually
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the city authority) and citizen – the goal is to utilise digital communication channels to facilitate face-to-face interactions. The Digital Social Market was established through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and development programme. The initiative is intended to explore the potential applications and scalability of pioneering services capable of addressing some of the most pressing urban challenges: mobility, energy efficiency and citizen engagement. In response to these challenges, the programme has developed and implemented eight measures, in demonstrator districts in three European cities (London, Milan and Lisbon) exploring a range of solutions around Building Retrofit, E-Logistics, E-bike-sharing and Sustainable Energy Management Systems (SEMS) to name a few. The DSM was developed in parallel with these services and has a particular focus on utilising human-centred design methodologies in order to support with improved service development and user value in order to maximise uptake amongst the community. The notion of incentive-based digital markets is not new; there are increasing examples of these services in existence today [2]; however, the Sharing Cities approach is unique as it aims to form a value chain which places social and citizen needs first; the Digital ‘Social’ Market is driven by the needs of city users, of fostering meaningful connections with citizens, in order to lead with the change, not profit. This principle is fundamental if a DSM is to maintain its’ integrity amongst users (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 The Digital Social Market Framework
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“A central pillar of SharingMi (the Milanese community) is its capacity to empower citizens to have a voice across a city-wide platform connected to the Municipality. Users are able to share experiences and ideas which aim to stimulate positive social and environmental behaviours – without these communities we feel it would be difficult to replicate this interaction” [3].
3 What Value does a DSM Bring? The hypothesis behind the DSM is relatively simple. Governments, city leaders and citizens are coming to terms with the fact that the kind of system-level change required to tackle the multitude of ecological emergencies which threaten humanity’s most densely populated areas cannot be delivered exclusively through top-down approaches; city-scale solutions require the alignment and support of societies willing to embrace and experiment with change. Quite simply, coordinated citizen participation is essential to the prosperity of our cities—smart or otherwise, and the DSM approach seeks to create the conditions for this idea to flourish. This being said, what is also clear is that city leaders must take a concise and proactive lead on the issues affecting the health and resilience of the planetary systems which safeguard our city populations. Broadly speaking, it can be said that political mechanisms in cities have been efficient (depending on our metrics for efficiency) at facilitating the delivery of mass infrastructures such as roads, street lighting, law enforcement, high-speed trains and internet cables; however, when it comes to sustainability, perhaps the most crucial transformational need is actually more akin to adaptability and behaviour, and less about infrastructure. Of course, the DSM is itself an infrastructure, predominately formed around largely invisible boxes filled with wires and modems in the form of sensors, servers and smart phones (each of which has its own environmental impact). However, through this digital infrastructure, the DSM aims to provide greater clarity around socially and environmentallyoriented issues for both city leaders and citizens alike—It helps to convey complex ideas in an accessible way—attempting to make behaviour change more tacit and reachable. After all, what good is ‘big infrastructure’ if citizens aren’t aware of its existence, motivated to use it, skilled enough to use it, or have little notion or emotional connection to the value or positive impacts that may result from its use? In the pages that follow, a brief overview will be presented of each of the city demonstrators created through the Sharing Cities project. Whilst each has an explicit technological connection, the application of the DSM attempts to deconstruct the prevailing discourse that has convinced us that humans ‘need not change’, that technology will fill the void between our desires and the planet’s capacity to respond to them. The DSM approach tries to re-frame this perception by offering opportunities to re-learn what we’ve unconsciously taken for granted for more than a hundred years. It attempts to promote a deeper level of understanding of the value of community
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engagement and participation and most importantly, the power of ‘small actions’— which when combined with the efforts of others, working in harmony, can have a profoundly positive effect on our environmental, social and mental ‘ecologies’ [4].
4 Strategic Approach 4.1 Designing with Complexity The collective learnings and success of this particular approach to citizen engagement are in no small part the result of the close collaboration and joint participation of representatives from three European cities, Milan, London and Lisbon. Known as “Lighthouse Cities” under the terms of the Horizon 2020 programme; the municipal authorities in each of these locations agree to explore, co-define and implement the Sharing Cities services in the form of demonstrator projects, the intention being that in exchange for funding from the European Commission to support the process, each city is then responsible for sharing their knowledge and experience with other cities seeking to create similar impacts. This approach enables the potential for exchange and scalability of rich insights and experiences across borders and aims to animate the pace of change. There are a great many factors which will inform the success of a Digital Social Market, however, there are two categories in which many of these factors can be grouped. The first is its deep reliance on the quality of the relationships and dialogue between the city authorities, their associated delivery partners, and of course, their citizens. It’s true that each city is unique and is responding to different cultural nuances and levels of ‘smart city maturity’, however, there are patterns that can be drawn from the challenges they face and important experiences which can be shared with one another. Achieving a secure relationship across each of the partnerships, internally within project delivery teams, and externally with the public is a crucial component in the success of the DSM. If these groups of stakeholders aren’t brought into the process of developing the service from the outset, it will be exponentially harder to implement and scale. The second component is inextricably linked with the first, and this is a question of design. The principles and approaches utilised in the discipline of service design played a pivotal role in helping project stakeholders to untangle the complexity of their city challenges and embrace a more human-centred approach to service delivery in their demonstrator areas. The importance of this approach deserves deeper exploration. As Lou Downe explains, quite simply “a service is something that helps someone to do something” [5]. Services are all around us and penetrate every aspect of our existence. Even seemingly ‘static’ objects such as garments or electronic devices have complex networks and service ecosystems which begin long before and continue
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long after our contact with them. For users, services often exist on a spectrum of complexity, they can be as simple as buying a tube of toothpaste, or as complex as arranging care for an elderly relative. However, this spectrum can be deeply subjective depending on the factors affecting the user, such as their own experiences, socioeconomic position, level of physical ability, mental health, digital accessibility and so on. Therefore, as Downe continues, that so often “we barely notice them (services) until we encounter something that stands out as good or bad” [5], and, the same can be said for technology, which in today’s society is the driving force behind so many of our services. Therefore, the quality of our services needs to be judged upon the level of scrutiny and critical rigour (facilitated by in-depth user research) placed on their design and implementation. Service Design can also be described as a form of ‘post discipline’. Through its utilisation and combination with disciplines such as the social and behavioural sciences, product development, systems thinking and strategic development. As a practice, service design often blends these disciplines with more ‘traditional’ forms of research and design practice such as product, interaction and communication design in order to create tangible outputs and prototypes, iterated with end-users in order to transform perceptions around what is ‘viable and desirable’ in a humancentred and societal context—explored in great detail by Lucy Kimbell in her work on service innovation. “Innovation is centrally concerned with creating new patterns of behaviour— not out of nowhere, but rather identifying early signals about cultural changes”. As Kimbell describes, service innovation is ideally placed to guide us through “…situations with high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty, in which the only way forward is to combine creativity with analysis.” Kimbell [6]—a prominent challenge in cities. The original approach to the DSM was developed following an in-depth user research and ideation process in partnership with city stakeholders from each of the three demonstrator cities (Lisbon, London and Milan). This work focused on a number of questions and opportunities linked to people’s perceptions, existing habits and future aspirations around mobility, energy usage and community participation. This work enabled the DSM framework to take shape, and although only a theoretical model at this stage, it provided enough weight to enable each city to develop an implementation strategy which formed the backbone of their service (Fig. 2). Each Lighthouse City had selected a specific challenge area in which to explore the context of the DSM. The teams then sought to operationalise the service through five themes, each deployed in parallel: • Localisation: Establishing an effective DSM implementation strategy, tailored to the needs of each Lighthouse City. • Onboarding: Revealing the key features and motivators in a successful onboarding strategy. A DSM cannot exist without its users. • Maintenance: Once established into the service, how will we maintain engagement with stakeholders over time, whilst continuing to recruit newcomers? • Business Model Development: What would make this unique shared-services platform appeal to multiple stakeholders and partners in the long term?
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Fig. 2 Visualisation of DSM service concept features, tested and iterated amongst project stakeholders ahead of the implementation phase
• Governance Structure: How to support each city with guidance around the strategic and ethical operation of their respective DSMs? Developing a strong strategy which linked these themes was important, particularly as drop-out rates amongst digital platforms is often extremely high. As previously described, a central question of the DSM is to explore its potential for supporting behavioural shifts amongst the users in each community. The work of Osbaldiston and Schott [7] provided a great deal of insight around this subject, particularly with regard to their work on comparing different behaviour change techniques with behaviour change targets. Their work has revealed that under certain conditions, behavioural treatments or interventions can contribute to an increase in pro-environmental behaviours. Of these techniques, Osbaldiston and Scott noted that the most effective interventions in shaping new behaviours involved the resolution of cognitive dissonance, goal setting, social modelling and prompts. Using this as a basis, each of the services in the lighthouse cities attempts to incorporate these principles in its delivery. It’s clear that there is no one technique or ‘silver bullet’ that is effective across all possible pro-environmental behaviours, however, these approaches have proved useful in testing the service strategy in each demonstrator district. Linked with this, it became apparent that in order to attract users and build a community around these important conversations, it’s crucial to see beyond the ideal of ‘information sharing’ as an effective catalyst for long-term behaviour change. There is a common but significant misconception in the notion that simply sharing knowledge, e.g. evidence, data, statistics, news, etc. with users is compelling enough to stimulate new or preferred behaviours, particularly in the context of sustainability.
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The human condition is immensely more complex than this, humans are creatures of habit and can find it extremely difficult to establish new behaviours, therefore, in order to reflect this, our collective approach to service delivery must be far more sophisticated. Once again, this highlights the importance of the role of design in helping to transition our thinking from simply instructing people to embrace ecologically ‘quieter’ lives, where we drive less, use less and waste less; whilst accurate in its motivation, this sentiment originates from a place of compromise or what Allan Stoekl describes as a “beautiful smallness or a prosperous way down” [8]. These messages and sentiments tend to defeat our motivation and capacity to think and act differently, they make us feel judged and create resentment and frustration, and, as Stoekl continues “…is bound to have little appeal in culture”. Putting it another way, if ‘we’ as city leaders or decision-makers would prefer citizens to act and behave differently, in the direction of city sustainability goals, we must design compelling alternatives which can facilitate the desired transformation. Moreover, if we are to be truly inclusive in this journey, we must create entry points into these changes which provide for people at different socio-economic levels, which reinforces the role of design as an enabler of alternative cultures, not just a set of problem solving mechanism. The designer Jack Schulze articulates this sentiment very accurately by helping to dispel the notion of ‘designer as problem solver’. When we see society as a set of problems to solve, it narrows our potential for creating inspiring new worlds for society to embrace. “Some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems. Obviously, designers solve problems but so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention” [9].
The Sharing Cities programme, and specifically the activities around the DSM, have made notable efforts in this regard (as will be explained in the city examples that follow). Make no mistake, adopting a human and planet centred approach to the delivery of public services is extremely difficult and was not entirely resolved within this project. However, the vision and mission set out, has made way for an impressive collection of service innovation tools and approaches applied across each of the Lighthouse Cities: from citizen user diaries, research interviews and focus groups, co-design sessions, service mapping and prototyping, business model development, digital product development and of course community engagement. These processes have enabled us as a group of cities to unlock and implement opportunities within some complex city circumstances, and crucially, to try to create the conditions for new and positive cultures to emerge (Fig. 3).
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Fig. 3 Group co-design workshop exploring user journeys in relation to new services
5 The Story of Three Cities 5.1 Milan Milan’s community, “SharingMi”, is based in the city’s Porta Romana district and encourages users to share stories, experiences and ideas with other members as a means of growing awareness and stimulating action around challenges associated with mobility and energy use. The service seeks to normalise sustainable values and actions amongst citizens by providing space for dialogue and shared experiences around pro-environmental opportunities in the city. SharingMi aims to establish a community with reflective capacity enabling users to consider their mobility and consumer motivations on a deeper level. When considered in parallel with a number of urban ‘pressure points’ in Milan, such as its motorization rate and mobility mix, it’s reliance on fossil fuel energy
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production and consumer products such as plastic bottled water,1 it becomes easier to see the inherent need to include citizens when tackling these legacy challenges. The stories, experiences and ideas described above are created and shared via a smart phone app and can include a wide variety of themes, ranging from: opportunities to volunteer, eco events, screenings, useful websites and literature, eco restaurants and cafes, recipes, advice around avoiding food waste and household waste. Users can post questions or direct others towards sustainably-focused projects or initiatives occurring in Milan. Users can celebrate their own actions within the community, for example, they may have repaired something (delaying its journey to landfill), carpooled, cycled somewhere or saved water—all of these characteristics can be selfreported through the community as a means of normalising these behaviours (and their subsequent solutions) and making them more accessible for others; re-framing them as an engaging, compelling and enjoyable way of spreading knowledge. In addition to the social network aspects, there are a wide range of features that users can interact with inside the community. In exchange for their stories and ideas, users earn “claps” which convert into points and can be redeemed within a range of local businesses in Milan. There are around 35 “Reward Partners” currently featured in the service, providing sustainably-focused goods and services such as clothing and accessories, fitness and wellbeing classes, groceries, eco holidays, eco cosmetics and cafes and restaurants. Users can also increase their point value by connecting their SharingMi account to third-party apps that measure activities such as walking, cycling and in-home energy management. Finally, the service features a “challenges” section where citizens can participate in a range of offline activities designed to stimulate interaction with different users and new environmental opportunities in the city. These challenges are often run in conjunction with other strategic partners in the SharingMi community. For example, if the municipality is seeking to raise awareness and stimulate change around themes such as plastic waste reduction or eco-mobility, a challenge can be launched inside the SharingMi community to amplify this initiative or policy (Fig. 4).
5.2 London London’s DSM utilises a process known as “Residential Demand-Side Response” (DSR). The process aims to mitigate electricity disruption and power outages by establishing a more direct form of communication between energy producers (e.g. the UK’s National Grid) and energy consumers (e.g. residents), via an energy provider 1 Milan’s motorization rate is around 50.5 cars per 100 inhabitants. Motorized mobility is chosen in
more than 30% of journeys [10]. Italy is the highest consumer of bottled water in Europe [11]. Air conditioning demands during the hottest days has, in the past, led to failures in the local power networks [12].
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Fig. 4 Example screens taken from the “SharingMi” app, displaying citizen competitions, community stories and reward outlets
or aggregator2 —this approach has been utilised for many years in the commercial sector. When demand on the energy network is high, consumers are requested to reduce their usage for a temporary period of time in order to ease demand on producers and ease the strain on the network. In exchange for this reduction, consumers are provided with monetary compensation. The eventual goal for the sector is to be able to develop predictive modelling capabilities in order to maintain a consistent provision of electricity. Currently, in order to be able to respond to electricity needs, energy producers are required to maintain emergency backup supplies. This need bares a heavy financial and ecological burden, costing the UK bill payer around £1bn/year [14], which could be mitigated through approaches such as DSR. Studies show that 2GW of reliable demand-side response participants (action was taken by those consuming electricity), could have reduced the wholesale cost of electricity by around £30 million in 2015 if called upon for the top 100 half-hourly periods of greatest electricity demand on the grid [14]. As a society, our energy needs and habits are evolving; through the continued growth of renewables and efforts to reduce our domestic energy demands through initiatives such as building retrofit. However, society also faces a range of continuing challenges such as population growth, the electrification of heating systems, increases in consumerism and the emergence of electric vehicles—all of which place greater strain on the electricity network. It is widely agreed that the residential sector will 2 Aggregators
are defined as third party intermediaries specialising in coordinating or aggregating demand response from individual consumers to better meet industry parties’ technical requirements for specific routes to market [13].
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play an increasing role in demand-side response in the future, perhaps through such mechanisms as time of use tariffs; or smart appliances that automatically respond to notifications from the grid if demand is getting too high, or through the DSR approach described above. The combined outcome of these scenarios is, however, creating a rich area for innovation and experimentation around energy production and use, with variations of DSR being explored in other projects around the world. The Royal Borough of Greenwich is the location for London’s demonstrator district. Their service “Greenwich Energy Hero” aims to explore Demand-Side Response further through the lens of the Digital Social Market. Working with households in Greenwich, the service rewards users for adapting their in-home electricity usage when demand exceeds supply from the national grid. Users earn points by adapting their habits in the home; when they receive a notification asking them to delay doing high energy-demand activities such as laundry or using high energydemand appliances such as kettles or hair dryers. In exchange for this participation, users are rewarded with points which can be converted into cash for personal use, or, donated (via their smart phone app) to local community projects or charities, thus sharing their reward with others. In addition to their rewards, users can access real-time and legacy electricity usage information, receive energy saving tips, and can review their own community’s “Hero status”—a means to track and progress through the platforms point thresholds. In order to join the service, residents are visited by a community engagement specialist who is an expert in home heating and energy efficiency. In addition to providing energy advice the advisor installs a small electricity monitoring device (similar to a smart meter) to the resident’s electricity meter which communicates with the Greenwich Energy Hero app. “This is no small challenge. DSR is a tough subject to get excited about (unless you’re already a fan). If you don’t get this right, recruitment becomes a big challenge” [15].
In the UK, there are very few periods throughout the year when demand exceeds the capacity to supply, in fact, the greatest 2GW of electricity demand occurs just 0.6% of the time [14], meaning that if deployed at scale, services such as Greenwich Energy Hero, could provide a viable alternative to managing peak energy-demand. This solution doesn’t resolve a parallel but connected challenge around the decarbonisation of our broader energy network, through solutions such as Deep Retrofit, but it provides another angle from which to consider the role of citizen participation in the collective resolution of important city challenges. Additionally, as well as changing our energy use patterns, the platform aims to build a closer relationship between end-users and their understanding of what happens ‘behind the plug’, it seeks to foster a better understanding of the issues around peak demand and how citizens can be encouraged and rewarded to take a more active role in their household electricity usage and remove ambiguity around the ways in which citizens can act to reduce these challenges. Automated versions of DSR are available and being explored in other research and development projects [16] which involve the use of connected IoT devices being
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Fig. 5 Example screens taken from the “Greenwich Energy Hero” app, displaying a user’s real-time electricity usage, ‘hero status’ and their collective community electricity saving
installed or smart plugs being fitted to appliances in the home which are able to reduce or cut power to appliances at certain times, without affecting the user’s ‘inhome experience’. However, the type of smart appliances and plugs required to carry out these actions are still prohibitively expensive to many households in comparison to the savings on offer through DSR. Moreover, it seems that “user-managed DSR” provides the all-important entry point into a discussion which includes residents around energy habits more broadly. This approach aims to use gamification themes and a social marketplace to bring people together to share knowledge and to make these themes more conscious and easier to understand, less passive and more engaging (Fig. 5).
5.3 Lisbon Lisbon’s DSM community is formed around a service called “Sharing Lisboa”. As with Milan and London, the model seeks to provide citizens with a tangible and accessible entry point into tackling issues around sustainable behaviour change in urban environments. In Lisbon’s case, the service facilitates a connection between the city authority, local businesses, citizens, and a third-party public beneficiary, in this case, a network of schools who compete through the platform to gain access to a city fund enabling them to make sustainability-oriented improvements to their school infrastructure.
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As with the other demonstrator city DSMs, the Sharing Lisboa service revolves around a digital interface (a web app) which enables citizens to earn points through the use of strategic city services such as cycling, walking and electric vehicle charging. In addition to this, over the course of the competition, each user (teachers, students and those living in the pilot area) was encouraged to participate in engagement activities (such as quizzes), in order to increase his or her school’s leaderboard score. Students also participated in specialist lessons focusing on sustainability issues, which also enhanced their school’s position. Each school’s score was calculated based on a range of factors and was divided into two main categories: points generated by the school’s energy savings and points obtained by service users. Additionally, each school was able to earn points whenever its monthly energy consumption was lower than that of the same month of the previous year. Sharing Lisboa provides the integration required to enable access to a growing number of mixed-mobility and energy management options in Lisbon. Historically, Portugal has experienced some of the lowest levels of cycling in Europe and the highest levels of motor vehicle ownership, however, services such as these indicate a proactive move to shift this perception [17]. Additionally, according to the Urban Mobility Index, the city of Lisbon now has around 30% coverage of low emission zones, (placing Lisbon in 6th place out the 38 European cities measured) [18], providing further infrastructure and incentive for citizens to shift their mobility habits towards pedal and walking power. Finally, in the last 10 years, bike lanes in Lisbon have increased from 10 to 90 km, with an increase to 200 km of bike lanes expected in 2021 [19]. These efforts to shift the infrastructural capacity of Lisbon can be amplified by services such as Sharing Lisboa as although designed and launched separately, they are extremely complimentary; on one side there is the infrastructure (e.g. bikes, bike lanes and chargers), on the other, there is a DSM which helps to spread the word, encourage uptake, stimulate and excite—with the goal of drawing in users. Three schools participated in the competition, each seeking to win a share of a e30,000 prize. The prizes on offer included a choice of sustainability-focused “packages” made up of equipment or services which aimed to improve the energy efficiency of the school (Fig. 6).
6 Conclusion At the time of writing, the city DSMs and the majority of the services linked with Sharing Cities are in their final year of operation. Throughout this project, we, as a collective team of partners have embarked upon a significant journey with a shared aspiration and determination to make the cities in which we live more engaging, to make pro-environmental ideas, experiences and opportunities more shareable inspirational and familiar for ourselves and our fellow citizens. At times, this journey has been immensely complex; not least through the translation of the Digital Social Market’s theoretical model into three separate local
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Fig. 6 Example screens taken from the “Sharing Lisboa” web app, displaying the point progress of a users’ selected school, opportunities to connect to the third-party services and reward outlets
strategies, establishing and maintaining new partnerships, identifying and deploying unique local skills, working amongst local governance structures, revealing and building data sets, exploring in-depth citizen needs around complex systems such energy, mobility and community, defining and deploying detailed services, crafting complex end-user apps and integrating these with pioneering smart city services, recruiting and sustaining large numbers of citizens, exploring innovative business models and new approaches to governance. Along the way, we’ve observed and discussed some of the key learnings from this work which we hope others can embrace and adopt in their own pursuit of humancentred and sustainably-focused smart city services, which seek to build sustainably oriented value chains between citizens, businesses and city authorities. Whilst too early to define these services as fully established examples of smart cities deploying technology ‘smartly’, as they are, after all, pilots and demonstrators which are intended to make way for learning at scale, to be experimental in their approach and to carve a path for others to follow and iterate upon. However, amongst this work, there are a range of successes, ethical tensions and open questions which are important to acknowledge by way of a conclusion.
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6.1 Unintended Consequences To begin with, it’s important, from the outset, to ensure that the service is indeed a human-centred one, that is intricately linked with the inclusive design agenda. Digital exclusion will continue to act as a significant symbol of societal inequality, often excluding those in greatest need of public services. It’s important to consider the ethical direction of your city service before design and development decisions are ‘locked in’. Whilst each city DSM incorporates an opportunity to include oftendisparate groups such as the elderly, it includes them only as a recipient of the service (e.g. through reward donations), not as active community participants, and there is a significant difference. The potential for exclusion is indeed an unintended side effect in the growth of smart city services, but we must keep exploring ways in which to bring ‘everyone’ along on the journey. As an example, consider the variation in the social conditions of a potential DSM community. Digital platforms, if not deployed with a high level of critical rigour, run the risk of becoming blunt instruments for which to engage with citizens. For instance, it’s quite feasible for energy service providers to group users by household or dwelling size when comparing results, however, it’s important that reward mechanisms group and analyse people with a greater degree of granularity, e.g. a fourbedroom household with five occupants and young children will have very different energy needs to that of a four-bedroom household with a single occupant; the level of insulation in the fabric of the home, quality of heating system and the type and quantity of appliances and devices will each play a role. It’s important that we reward people fairly, not just those that can afford the best levels of energy management. Additionally, if a service facilitates a competition between different city institutions (such as schools), how might it be ensured that the schools share the same socio-cultural influences? Is one school located in an area that’s more affluent, does it have access to better quality services, enjoy better connections with its local community networks? If yes, then it will likely come out on top when pitched against a school from a poorer community, meaning that the DSM may actually serve to amplify the effects of inequality, creating resentment - dissolving the social fabric, not enriching it. The central lesson here is no matter how difficult, expensive or time-consuming, we must design with users, not for them. It’s also important to acknowledge that the gamification of city services and their ability to affect behaviour (in the long term) remains an emergent field. There are counter-arguments to the effectiveness of reward mechanisms and incentivisation which should be considered when developing (and baselining) intended behaviour changes. Whilst the DSM model does not rely purely on user incentivisation, it is indeed a key factor in the approach. “As for productivity, at least two dozen studies over the last three decades have conclusively shown that people who expect to receive a reward for completing a task or for doing that task successfully simply do not perform as well as those who expect no reward at all.” Kohn [20]
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It’s also important to acknowledge the darker side of digital engagement platforms. As described earlier, the rise of so-called ‘surveillance capitalism’ or ‘reputational economies’ has the potential to lead to worrying levels of autocracy in city systems—a subject covered in great detail by Shoshana Zuboff [21]. This view has been discussed widely in the mainstream press [22]; whereby citizens that are not deemed to be acting on behalf of the ‘good’ of the city are gradually ostracised from society through the denial of access to a range of services ranging from public toilets to train or air travel tickets; the risk of this approach being that ‘good behaviour’ is an immensely subjective and ever-shifting metric, and, has the potential to facilitate a fundamentally top-down approach to defining values. Linked to this we also run the risk of misunderstanding the conundrum of personal identity in digital platforms. As Cameron Tonkinwise highlights in his portrayal of our ‘digital selves’: “I invest in cultivating a reputation that will attract ‘trust’ from strangers-like-me. In so doing, I must make the least authentic role-play in service of others, my most authentic self.” Tonkinwise [23].
The premise being that when interacting with digital social platforms, humans have a tendency to filter their true identity at the risk of jeopardising their digital credibility amongst peers. Finally, whilst efforts to enhance the connection between citizens and ‘digital public services’ can be viewed broadly as a good thing, it seems there are a growing number of instances where our public digital participation can come unstuck, particularly if these services are owned or rely on databases within local authority digital boundaries. Sarah Holder speaks at length about the “unsettling rise of urban narc apps” Holder [24]. To explore this idea she discusses ‘public services apps’ such as San Francisco based “Safe Lanes”, whereby citizens share photos of cars and vans blocking cycle lanes on a public digital noticeboard in a bid to improve road safety and to ensure drivers are fined or have their vehicles removed by authorities, as well as being “publicly shamed” in the platform’s online pages. “Safe Lanes will take your image and run it through a license plate reader. Then, it will use the ID to automatically fill out a complaint form and submit it directly to the city’s non-emergency 311 service.”
As Holder later points out, there are inherent risks of these services being linked to other databases and being used to publicly judge citizens in other contexts way beyond that of the initial parking offence, for example: “…once that information is collected, the layers of power get much more tangled… What if that car blocking the bike lane belongs to someone whose immigration status is uncertain, and their license plate information—and location—is used to speed their deportation?”
Although extreme, we must see these examples as a compass by which to navigate the strategic objectives and their relationship to power and governance in the delivery
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of smart city services. Whilst unlikely that city services would be developed to intentionally create civic unrest; through data collection, sharing and processing, there is room for these services to become abstracted from their original intentions. Therefore, digital services and platforms (such as the DSM) still need to prove their legitimacy, that they can be trusted to rally participation in a safe and participatory way, treat citizen data with care, be transparent about their city social and environmental problems and how such services can help to resolve them. The work of the recently closed UK based think tank “Doteveryone” [25] has provided a great deal of insight and practical approaches to exploring the intended and unintended consequences of technologies in an urban context.
6.2 Cultural Versus Infrastructural In each of the lighthouse cities, it became clear that there were tensions around how people view the service and its importance in tackling environmental and social issues. Perceptions of the service were mixed and sat between luxury and necessity in terms of a city’s hierarchy of importance. There was a sense that city authorities must continue to focus on tackling seemingly direct interventions, e.g. “we (the city authority) want to reduce particulate matter in our worst affected areas by air by 10% within a year”, whereas services such as the DSM, have a perception of being less tangible or quantitatively focused. The counter-argument to this view is that in order for these targets to be achieved, city authorities must go significantly further than taxing car users and seek to implement services and initiatives which connect with people’s values and habits. This is an area which certainly needs further exploration around the long-term benefits of both scenarios. As we have heard, of course, the DSM has an infrastructure and of course, bikesharing has a cultural connection. However, in addition to its reward mechanisms, the DSM is perfectly placed to offer two unique value propositions: First, activation is a key theme in this approach. The DSM can act as a key enabler of other smart city services such as cycling and EV usage. The service has the potential to grow and integrate awareness thus speeding up adoption rates amongst citizens—which should not be taken for granted. Additionally, the DSM model provides an effective means for industry and business to reconsider their role and proposition in the ‘city’ and ‘community’ context - encouraging businesses to think and act more socially and ecologically responsibly. As a demonstrator project, the DSM shows businesses that citizens and municipalities are thinking about this and reminds corporations that they have a duty to act. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it is clear that in order for cities to secure a sustainable and inclusive future, it is critical that city authorities are leading and pioneering the promotion of socially and environmentally-oriented solutions. The collective work in implementing the DSM with city partners has demonstrated that all too often, it seems that citizens can in fact be relied upon to participate and that there is indeed a motivated critical mass ready to contribute, they just need compelling
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contexts and clarity about how and where to focus their energy, they need to see the impact of their participation and commitment visualised and held alongside others in their community, the DSM provides a powerful means of harnessing, steering and catalysing this commitment. “…There has to be a cultural shift at a global level towards the attitude of lifestyles and what is meaningful for a person and what is a meaningful experience of being part of a community - taking care of your environment at a local level… it’s a good thing if a city has an understanding and a maturity on this topic, raising a deeper sense of awareness, causing a cultural shift in social norms.”
6.3 Balancing Power Another challenging but important tension to explore is the dynamic of DSM ‘ownership’ between city authority, the service facilitators (who are often private organisations), and citizens. For the DSM to prosper, as a minimum, it needs all three entities working together, but it’s worth highlighting that each entity is far from equal in its agency and reach across the service. There are different methods of delivering a Digital Social Market, the most popular of which in the case of Sharing Cities placed the municipalities name on the front of the service—in essence, to the user at least, the service is being delivered by the city authority. As has been discussed, there are occasions where doubt and suspicion around the agenda and competencies of governments in their role as digital service provider and data controller have been questioned, however, this project found that to include the city authority’s name, on the whole, provided greater integrity and peace of mind amongst citizens and local businesses. A central value of the DSM framework is that it seeks to empower and enable citizens to act on important issues affecting the health and wellbeing of the systemic systems which support the environmental and social health of the city. This being said, the DSM remains a top-down structure. It certainly aims to amplify the voices and actions of the citizens who join its communities; however, this highlights the imbalance between these entities. If this were untrue, then it’s clear that the corporate and governmental institutions would have been compelled to take far more radical action on vehicle and building emissions long ago in order to safeguard the health and wellbeing of citizens. Putting it another way, quite simply a citizen’s right to breathe clean air should be far greater than a manufactures right to pollute it. Yet if this were true, the polluting culprits would have remedied their environmental shortcomings by now. In short, we must not overstate the position of the citizen in this context, they are not equally matched against the might of the city authority or the corporation. The DSM has the potential to enhance the dialogue between these different groups, but arguably, the DSM might not be so urgently required if the crisis had been acted on sooner.
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6.4 Building on the DSM As a closing thought, for those who are looking embark on a similar journey and build on this work it may be useful to keep a selection of these lessons close by. To begin with, as was described in the introduction, the DSM is not a panacea—it is not one size fits all (or fix all) solution to citizen engagement or behaviour change in the context of citizen urban services, however, it provides a powerfully engaging alternative to complex or ambiguous environmental messaging around these themes. Additionally, in contrast to the many technologies and approaches to city services, the DSM framework isn’t seeking to replace people, or the wisdom, excitement or value of person-to-person exchanges, on the contrary, it seeks to amplify them—the community only exists if the people are there to enable it. In the context of Sharing Cities, the DSM model was applied to three key city challenges, mobility, energy use and community cohesion, however, the boundaries of the DSM don’t stop here. The model can be applied to anything; water saving, waste management, food—in theory, whatever the city challenge, the DSM model can be adapted to suit, and this is an important value for beginning the process of implementation. The DSM model advocates a citizen-centred approach to identifying and resolving city challenges. As a city, this means that we must start where are. What are these challenges, what are the impacts, what would success look like for the environment if we solved them, how can we align these successes with pioneering new citizen-services? The chances are, the city is already engaging with experts and citizen-led organisations trying to tackle these challenges. How might we leverage this passion from a behavioural perspective. As with so many challenges, it’s a misconception, that the solution needs everyone to respond immediately. It doesn’t need everyone; it just needs a critical mass to kick start the idea and allow it to grow organically. This takes time, and it needs commitment and investment from the decision-makers—it’s not the faint-hearted. Finally, we can take comfort in the idea that on some levels, it’s already happening. A 2018 report from the Mckinsey Centre for Government has shown that “the usage of social connection smart solutions is already quite high in a number of cities… up to 30% of citizens have used social interaction apps to facilitate social interaction on the local and city level” [26]. The report adds that “Socially active people live longer than those who are socially isolated. Loneliness causes as much damage to the human body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Strong social links stimulate healthy brain activity and minimize memory loss. The scope of social interaction at the age of 20 and its quality at the age of 30 raise the level of happiness at the age of 50.” These observations help to redefine our perceptions around cities, their authorities and their responsibilities in delivering public services. There is a clear role for cities to think about the need to “unlearn” or at least reimagine its traditional approach to city services. There is a responsibility in providing citizens with the means to change their behaviours; which goes far beyond that of information sharing, instead, we need to actually provoke change through these services – this requires a cultural, not just infrastructural change. In order to facilitate this new culture, we must do
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this by design, not by accident. To achieve this, we must embrace the strategic and human-centred approaches explored in this project in order to create safe spaces for experimentation which can enable inspiring new relationships between cities, businesses and citizens. Acknowledgements The authors (Future Cities Catapult) would like to acknowledge the effort and support of multiple Sharing Cities partners in the development and completion of this work. In Milan, colleagues from Poliedra, Legambiente, DAStU, Teicos, greenApes, NEU were also responsible for aspects of the development and dissemination activities in the DSM’s implementation. In London, colleagues from the Royal Borough of Greenwich, Kiwi Power, Groundwork London. In Lisbon, colleagues from Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, EDP-D, Instituto Superior Técnico, Empresa Municipal de Mobilidade e Estacionamento de Lisboa, Reabilita, Altice Labs, Centro de Excelência e Inovação para a IndústriaAutomóvel and Agência Municipal de Energia e Ambiente, Lisboa E-Nova. We would also like to extend particular thanks to the project leadership team from the Greater London Authority for its support throughout the programme delivery. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 691895.
References 1. Green B (2019) The smart enough city. MIT Press 2. Better Points. Our Platform. https://www.betterpoints.ltd/. Mi Rewards. How It Works. https:// mi-rewards.com/ SweatCoin. How It Works. https://sweatco.in/. Accessed 3 Sep 2020 3. Interview conducted by the author with a project partner in Milan (2019) 4. Guattari F (2000) The three ecologies. The Athlone Press 5. Downe L (2020) Good services. BIS Publishers 6. Kimbell L (2014) The Service innovation handbook. BIS Publishers 7. Osbaldiston R, Schott J (2012) Environmental sustainability and behavioural science: metaanalysis of proenvironmental behaviour experiments. Sage Publishing 8. Stoekl A (2007) Bataille’s peak: energy. University of Minnesota Press, Religion and Postsustainability 9. Schulze J (2008) Berg talks. http://berglondon.com/talks/escalante/?slide=4. Accessed 3 Sep 2020 10. Sevino Valentino (AMAT) (2019) Shared mobility in Milan: a successful experience. Available via SlideShare. https://www.slideshare.net/CharlotteOtten/shared-mobility-in-milan-bysevino. Accessed 18 Feb 2020 11. Statista (2017) Per capita consumption of bottled water in Europe in 2017, by country https://www.statista.com/statistics/455422/bottled-water-consumption-in-europe-percapita/. Accessed 18 Feb 2020 12. Graham K, Digital Journal (2019) Wildfires and power cuts in Europe as heatwave breaks records. http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/wildfires-and-power-cuts-ineurope-as-heatwave-breaks-records/article/553055#ixzz6ER1iFNoP. Accessed 18 Feb 2020 13. PA Consulting (on behalf of Ofgem) (2016) Aggregators —barriers and external impacts 14. Good Energy (2016) Demand Side response: reducing demand to reduce costs. https://www. goodenergy.co.uk/blog/2016/10/20/demand-side-response/. Accessed 18 Feb 2020 15. Interview conducted by the author with a project partner in London (2018)
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16. REPLICATE Project (Connecting Bristol) (2019) Smart connected homes. https://www.con nectingbristol.org/projects/replicate/smart-homes/smart-connected-homes/. Accessed 18 Feb 2020 17. Laker L (Guardian Online) (2017) Hilly Lisbon launches electric bike share system in bid to solve congestion. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/aug/03/hilly-lisbon-portugalelectric-bike-share-congestion. Accessed 18 Feb 2020 18. Urban Mobility Index. See Lisbon in Motion. https://urbanmobilityindex.here.com/city/lisbon/. Accessed 18 Feb 2020 19. Lisboa. Cycle Network. https://www.lisboa.pt/cidade/mobilidade/entrada. Accessed 18 Feb 2020 20. Alfie Kohn, Harvard Business Review (Sept-Oct 1993). Boards. https://hbr.org/1993/09/whyincentive-plans-cannot-work. Accessed 18 Feb 2020 21. Kavenna J (2019) Guardian Online (2019). Surveillance capitalism is an assault on human autonomy. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/04/shoshana-zuboff-survei llance-capitalism-assault-human-automomy-digital-privacy. Accessed 18 Feb 2020 22. Kobie N (2019) Wired Magazine (2019) The complicated truth about China’s social credit system. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained. Accessed 18 Feb 2020 23. Tonkinwise C (2014) Sharing you can Believe in, The awkward potential within sharing economy encounters. https://medium.com/@camerontw/sharing-you-can-believe-in-9b6871 8c4b33Accessed 18 Feb 2020 24. Holder S, City Lab (2019). The Unsettling Rise of the Urban Narc Apps. https://www.cit ylab.com/transportation/2019/08/311-app-parking-ticket-traffic-citation-bike-lane-privacy/ 596260/?utm_campaign=citylab-daily-newsletter&utm_medium=email&silverid=%25%25R ECIPIENT_ID%25%25&utm_source=newsletter. Accessed 18 Feb 2020 25. Dot Everyone (2019). Consequence Scanning. https://www.doteveryone.org.uk/project/conseq uence-scanning/. Accessed 18 Feb 2020 26. Woetzel J, Kuznetsova E (2018) Smart city solutions: what drives citizen adoption around the globe? Mckinsey Centre for government
Stockholm—Smart City Gustaf Landahl
Abstract For Stockholm, a smart city is quite simply a city that utilizes digitalization and new technology to simplify and improve life for its residents, its visitors and businesses. This is manifested in the city strategy for a smart and connected city. The city-owned company Stokab leases, since 1994, fibre optic networks that telecom operators, businesses, local authorities and organizations use for digital communications. Efficient public e-services are key factors in a thriving city and are characterized by a common desire to prioritize citizens’ different needs and desires. To easily apply for permits, find your way around town and being able to run errands around-the-clock should be possible for all of our citizens. As part of this goal, the city offers e-services that make it more convenient than ever to be a Stockholm resident. Since 2011, Stockholm has published open data in several areas. The goal is to promote innovation and openness, and the city works actively to provide open data through the portal Open Stockholm. Since 1995 the city has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions per capita by 60%. Much of this has been accomplished by the transition from single oil furnaces in buildings to more district heating with co-generation of heat using renewable fuels. Now the city needs new smart solutions to go further in reducing its emissions. These solutions need to better engage the inhabitants themselves who stand for most of the emission by the way they use energy for transport and heat/hot water. GrowSmarter (https://www.grow-smarter.eu/solutions/) was a five-year project (2015–2019) supported by the European Commission led by the city of Stockholm. It focused on implementing smart solutions in refurbishments that help the city reach its ambitious climate goals. Keywords Innovation · Openness · Connectivity · Democracy · Sustainability
G. Landahl (B) Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (ed.), How Smart Is Your City?, Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering 98, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6_10
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1 Introduction 1.1 What Do We Consider a Smart City? For Stockholm, a smart city is quite simply a city that utilizes digitalization and new technology to simplify and improve life for its residents, its visitors and businesses, offering, this way, the highest quality of life for citizens and the best environment for business. The way forward to make Stockholm a smart and connected city is via innovation, openness and connectivity, make the city more economically, ecologically, democratically and socially sustainable. A smart city is also a sustainable city reaching the city’s goals to be sustainable from different aspects. One of these being fossil fuel-free by 2040 as a way of reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions. In 2019, the city was awarded the smart city for its GrowSmarter project at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona. The Swedish capital was commended for its ‘innovation, openness and connectivity’ and efforts to improve living conditions for residents. Stockholm also has a long history of being a leader in information and communications technology with many prominent companies, start-ups as well as established multinationals. Swedes were already known for their innovation: companies like Ericsson, Electrolux, Volvo, IKEA and H&M set the standard, building world-leading international corporations. Then 20 years ago the city decided to invest heavily in an open fibre network. This turned out to be a brilliant move that today has generated billions in returns and fibre access to 100% of businesses and 95% of homes. The company is owned by the city of Stockholm itself and private corporations are able to lease fibre on equal terms with service providers (Fig. 1).
1.2 Plan for a Smart and Connected City On April 3, 2017, the City Council adopted a strategy to further develop the smart city through coordination of the city’s work on digitalization. In order to reach its vision of becoming a smart city, Stockholm stimulates guides and coordinates different digitalization projects. The strategy for Stockholm as a smart and connected city, together with the city’s digitalization program, describes how this should be done. There are already many good local examples from the city of activities and projects that make the city smarter. All new investments will be based on the needs of the people who live or work in the city—and also those just visiting. The way forward to develop Stockholm a smart and connected city is innovation, openness and connectivity.
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Fig. 1 The city of Stockholm is a globally renowned Smart city
1.3 Developed in Cooperation The strategy to become a smart and connected city was developed together with residents, academia, business and analysis of global developments. • The City invited inhabitants of all ages to direct dialogue at the Stockholm City Hall. • Dialogues were also held through social media. More than 3350 people provided feedback through digital channels. Here, they expressed their views on the vision to become a smart and connected city, evaluated the city’s current digital interfaces as well as made suggestions for solutions that could be part of the smart city. • Meetings were also held with employees of the City of Stockholm, as well as with representatives from start-ups, academia and business. • The city of Stockholm, in cooperation with the Royal Institute of Technology, Ericsson, Vattenfall, ABB, Skanska and Scania, established the innovation arena Digital Demo Stockholm. The arena will run projects to develop sustainable, innovative, digital solutions that contribute to improving the quality of life for the people of Stockholm. Another partnership is Urban ICT Arena in Kista Science city, where the city together with the industry and universities test new technologies and services. • An analysis of global developments was carried out to gain a broader understanding of the experiences of other countries and cities. Selected initiatives in other smart cities have been used as inspiration in working meetings.
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Fig. 2 The City of Stockholm’s strategy for a smart and connected city builds on all aspects of sustainability to support the highest quality of life for its citizens and the best environment for business
• An active exchange of best practices was also done with other cities that have made progress in their efforts to become smart cities. Brochure: Smart & Connected. Summary of the strategy for Stockholm as a smart and connected city (Fig. 2).
2 What Makes Stockholm a Super Smart City? 2.1 Extensive Fibre Network One important part of Stockholm’s modern ICT history is the company Stokab,1 founded by the city of Stockholm in 1994. The deregulation of the telecom market, which had taken place the year before, was the reason for establishing the company. Despite proposals by a number of national parliamentary parties to divide up what was
1 https://www.stokab.se/In-english/.
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then the Telecommunications Administration into an independent, neutral infrastructure organization and a service organization, it remained intact and instead became the company Telia. Stockholm’s politicians believed that a neutral stakeholder was needed who could provide basic IT infrastructure to all on equal terms in order to generate competition, diversity and a range of choice within telecommunications and data. To achieve this, the IT infrastructure company Stokab2 was formed through a political consensus. The company’s mission is to build, lease and maintain a passive fibre optic network to help foster favourable conditions for IT development and the positive development of the Stockholm region. Because Sweden was among the first EU countries to open its telecom market to competition, it was difficult to simply copy others’ solutions. One creative institutional solutions is known as the Stokab Model; that is, the way in which the fibreoptic-based municipal network in Stockholm is organized. This model’s organization of the new network industry differed radically from the traditional approach to organizing such industries.
2.2 The Stokab Model was based on two Important Insights • The first was that dynamic development of the new markets opened up by the Internet and broadband required competition between operators with a free right of establishment. • The second was that the high fixed costs of building networks in the city. It was neither desirable nor possible to justify the cost of digging up streets and running cable or pipes to properties multiple times for multiple suppliers. Since Stokab started in 1994, the goal of the municipally-owned company has been to build a competition-neutral infrastructure capable of meeting future communication needs, spur economic activity, diversity and freedom of choice, as well as minimising disruption to the city’s streets. Stokab leases fibre optic networks that telecom operators, businesses, local authorities and organizations use for digital communications. Leasing agreements are structured on favourable terms to encourage IT development and strong growth in the Stockholm region. In addition to fibre optics, Stokab3 provides space in nodes/hubs where customers can install communication equipment needed to connect their own networks to others’ networks. Over the years, Stockholm’s network has grown. In 2015, more than 90% of households and nearly 100% of businesses in the city of Stockholm, are able to connect to the network. The fibre optic network has also been extended to cover 2 https://www.stokab.se/Documents/Nyheter%20bilagor/Stokab_eng.pdf. 3 https://video.stockholm.se/video/9432050/fibre-network-in-stockholm.
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Fig. 3 The Stokab fibre network now incorporates most separate municipal networks in the Mälardalen region
Stockholm’s archipelago so that all its larger, inhabited islands are connected. It has also been extended via Mälarringen, which connects separate municipal networks around the Mälardalen region. The network is used by more than 100 telecom operators and 500 companies in Stockholm. Since the company is self-funded, it does so at no expense for public finances. Benefits to end-users include low commercial offers and flexibility of services supporting the city’s competitiveness and innovation capacity (Fig. 3). According to the research institute (Marco Forzati, 2013), Stokab’s network has generated a national economic profit of at least SEK 16 billion. This profit takes the form of more jobs, increased property values and lower broadband prices. The network has also allowed for the extension of the 4G mobile networks, with four operators. It also creates conditions conducive to developing services, including cloud services, smart e-services and other innovations. Thanks to its well-developed open fibre network, Stockholm is well equipped to meet today’s challenges, and tomorrow’s. In 2015 the City of Stockholm was awarded the European Broadband Award from the European Commission with the jury saying that “Stokab has been a European pioneering model for municipal broadband development.”
3 E-services The city of Stockholm’s e-services play an important part in the mission to offer fast, easy and top class service to stockholmers, based on individual choice and preference.
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To achieve this objective, the city of Stockholm has prepared an e-strategy4 describing the road ahead. Efficient public services are key factors in a thriving city and they should be characterized by a common desire to prioritize citizens’ different needs and desires. The city’s responsibility is to provide support and facilitate everyday life. To easily apply for permits, find your way around town and being able to run errands aroundthe-clock should be possible for all of our citizens. As part of this goal, the city of Stockholm offers e-services that make it more convenient than ever to be a Stockholm resident. Stockholm’s well-developed fibre network is one of the pre-conditions for achieving this.
4 Examples of E-services Below are some of the numerous e-services5,6 offered by the city of Stockholm. The list of services total several hundred.7
4.1 Preschool Portal One of the first services in the e-service programme was the ability to apply for preschool. The service is available both as an open application and as one requiring login with digital identification. Applicants log in using their digital ID to accept or reject an offer. With the new version of this e-service improves services for parents, while also making administration and information easier for pre-schools. Both staff and parents can use a central flat screen to find out about day-to-day information, such as activities and what food is served for lunch. They can also make bookings and report an absence. Preschool staff can use interactive screens to find and manage important information quickly and easily. The service makes administration easier when it comes to pupil withdrawals and charges.
4 https://international.stockholm.se/globalassets/ovriga-bilder-och-filer/e-strategy-city-of-stockh
olm.pdf. 5 https://international.stockholm.se/governance/e-governance/. 6 https://international.stockholm.se/globalassets/ovriga-bilder-och-filer/e-tjanster_broschyr-16-
sid_4.pdf. 7 https://www.stockholm.se/-/Om-webbplatsen/Alla-e-tjanster/#index_A.
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4.2 Residents’ Parking Permits Another service relates to residents’ parking permits. To get a permit, you need to own a car and live at an address where residents’ parking applies. It is also possible to record a payment for a period of time. With their digital ID, users can log in and register a permanent or temporary change of vehicle or service suspension. The service is available to around 60,000 citizens.
4.3 Report Problems in Traffic and Outdoor Environment File a complaint or leave your point of view on Stockholm’s traffic and outdoor environment. You can choose between praise, error report, question, idea and complaint. This service is available both as an app for smart phones and as an e-service. When used as an app the service is very simple. If a person finds for example graffiti or a broken park-benches the person can simply with the app report the location by GPS and send a photo and file under a heading. The maintenance teams then easily can prioritize repair. The person reporting can also get feedback if he/she wishes. The app received more than one hundred thousand reports already in 2017 (Fig. 4).
4.4 Radon Reading Search One more basic e-service is the radon reading search, which was developed by the Environment and Health Administration. Radon readings in Stockholm’s residential areas are collected in a database, which can be searched by a building name and/or street address. The Environment and Health Administration previously used an external phone service for enquiries about radon, for instance. Now that the radon e-service is property-based, administrators can focus on informing property owners what they can do to reduce their radon levels.
4.5 Heat Pump Licence Applications The e-service apply for a heat pump licence makes life far easier for property owners, while at the same time ensuring that the Environment and Health Administration receives correct applications directly in its operations system. To make it possible to provide an e-service, all 14,000 borehole licences were digitalized to create a map view. Around 60% of all the applications are received via the e-service, and everyday building owners and heat pump suppliers alike use the site to find out how to apply, and how the situation stands in the vicinity of their properties (Fig. 5).
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Fig. 4 The application “Tyck till” (in English “give your opinion”) has made it possible for the citizens to easily report faults to the maintenance teams, facilitating and speeding up repair
4.6 Care Diary Elderly people themselves can use the Care Diary as an easy way of keeping track of decisions and documentation, for example, personal details, implementation plans and day-to-day records of measures that have been taken. With their consent, close friends and relatives can also access this documentation. Records are taken from the city of Stockholm operations system for elderly care. A digital ID is required to log in and view the information.
4.7 Apply for a School This service deals with applications for school and makes it easier for parents to choose a school for their children. Parents can also track where their application is in the school selection process. The service covers both public and independent
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Fig. 5 In the heatpump application, citizens that want to apply for a permit to drill a hole in the beadrock for a heat pump can easily site it and get quicker feedback about the permission
schools. It also means that head teachers have more time to plan ahead of the new school year, which makes staff planning far easier.
4.8 Apply for a Building Permit The City Planning Administration deals with around 9,000 planning issues a year. The e-service is divided into several parts and informs people how to apply for a building permit, where to find current plans and how to interpret them. You can also order maps ahead of an application, and track your application through the process. It is also possible to register when construction work begins.
5 Open Data Since 2011, Stockholm City has published open data in several areas. The goal is to promote innovation and openness, the city is working actively to provide open data through the portal Open Stockholm.8
8 https://international.stockholm.se/governance/smart-and-connected-city/open-data/.
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Public information is not only be used by authorities, but also by businesses and the public to create new services. The data is open to anyone (free) and can be accessed digitally via APIs/Web services. Stockholm City provides one-third of all open data from the Swedish public sector with information from more than 100 open data sources.
5.1 Culture and Archive Data Among the city’s cultural and archival data, there are links to the city’s Building Registers. Here is also available 35,000 pictures and documents from Stockholm’s history and associated meta-data.
5.2 Population Data The city of Stockholm City collects population statistics as a basis for planning the service that is under the responsibility of the municipality; as childcare, school, planning of social services activities and forecasts for tax revenues.
5.3 Traffic and Parking Data The traffic data contains road and traffic-related data that Stockholm City collects for traffic planning, maintenance and project planning.
5.4 Environmental Data The environmental data contains maps and measurement data that the city of Stockholm has produced in order to describe the environmental situation within the municipality. There are also data from regional and national environmental monitoring.
5.5 Activities and Satisfaction Surveys The unit database contains information about all of Stockholm’s business locations and is also the basis for Compare Service on stockholm.se.
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5.6 Geodata Stockholm City is responsible for maintaining basic geographical data across the city. Among our geographic data are different types of maps and aerial photos.
6 The Stockholm Open Award The city of Stockholm also organizes the Open Stockholm Award competition to stimulate new ideas and increase accessibility to the city’s service through the development of mobile services and apps based on the city’s open data. The ambition of the competition is that a winning project can be completed when the competition is completed.
7 Innovative Solutions and International Smart City Cooperation The city of Stockholm is aware of the great potential that smart city solutions can have on reducing the city’s impact on the environment. Since 1995 the city has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions per capita by 60%. Much of this has been accomplished by the transition from single oil furnaces in buildings to more district heating with co-generation of heat using renewable fuels. Now the city needs new smart solutions to go further in reducing its emissions. These solutions need to better engage the inhabitants themselves who stand for most of the emission by the way they use energy for transport and heat/hot water (Fig. 6).
8 Hammarby Sjöstad 8.1 Hammarby Sjöstad—A Neighbourhood with Integrated Environmental Solutions Stockholm City has put tough environmental demands on buildings, technical installations and traffic environments in Hammarby Sjöstad. The urban area received its own environmental program with the aim of reducing the total environmental impact by half compared to an area built in the early 1990s. Hammarby Sjöstad also received his own cycle, the Hammarby model, which describes the environmental solutions for energy, water and sewage and waste.
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Fig. 6 Greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced by 60% per capita in 20 years. The challenge to completely abolish emissions and also become climate positive call for new smart solutions
Sweden’s export council has developed a model for the sustainable city—Symbiocity, which is based on experiences from Hammarby Sjöstad (Fig. 7).
Fig. 7 The Hammarby model illustrates the circular model on how water, waste and energy are produced and used in Stockholm
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8.2 Stockholm Royal Seaport In 2009, the Stockholm City Council decided that Stockholm Royal Seaport would be designated an area with an environmental profile with the mandate to become a model of sustainable urban development The built environment is robust over time which requires that buildings and facilities are designed with high quality. Materials, water and energy are resources that must be used efficiently by, for example, creating eco-cycles. Using non-hazardous materials reduces impacts on human health and the environment. The generation and use of renewable energy are encouraged to make the area fossil fuel-free. Key figures 2018: • The energy consumption is 15% lower than the national requirements. • 100% of the properties are connected to a vacuum waste collection system. • The amount of residual waste in 2018, 213 kg/dwelling/year compared with the Swedish average of 520 kg/dwelling/year. • 22% of the soil has been remediated so far, equating to 40 football fields. • 28% fill material has been re-used (Fig. 8).
Fig. 8 The Royal Seaport is the follower of Hammarby Sjöstad. This area with more than 15 thousand new dwellings is Stockholm’s largest new development area, testing smart solutions and using far-reaching environmental technologies
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8.3 The GrowSmarter Project, Smart Refurbishment GrowSmarter9 was a five-year project (2015–2019) supported by the European Commission led by the city of Stockholm. It focused on implementing smart solutions in refurbishments. This is extra important as refurbishment is often neglected compared to the flashy new built areas in cities. Just in areas from 1960: ies and − 70: ies, more than 200 million Europeans live and these buildings are now in need of renovation. Here is an enormous potential for including energy-efficient and smart solutions both in the buildings and into the neighbourhoods. The GrowSmarter project included three Lighthouse cities, Stockholm Cologne and Barcelona, as well as five follower cities, Valletta, Suceava, Porto, Cork and Graz. GrowSmarter received funding from the European Commission’s Smart Cities and Communities Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The scope of the project was to: • demonstrate and validate 12 economically and environmentally sustainable integrated smart solutions in the three Lighthouse cities; • foster collaboration between cities, businesses and academia to transform the smart solutions into business models to be rolled out across Europe; • improve the quality of life for European citizens, reduce environmental impact and create sustainable economic development. GrowSmarter took a holistic approach to sustainable growth. The demonstrations in the Lighthouse cities were not the primary aim, but a means to contribute to solving city challenges and create validated business cases to initiate a market roll-out of the smart solutions to follower cities and the rest of the European market, thus helping Europe Grow Smarter. The 12 solutions were designed to meet the three pillars of sustainability: economic, social and environmental concerns. The main goal of the project is to demonstrate and market 12 smart solutions for: • Low energy districts. • Integrated infrastructures. • Sustainable urban mobility (Fig. 9). GrowSmarter evaluated these solutions against targets related to climate change, energy usage, transport emissions and jobs. The demonstrations both helped induce replication in other international cities and in other areas in Stockholm. Introducing innovations is often regarded with scepticism. Why introduce smart streetlights with sensors when the existing system with one switch turning them all on at dusk and off at dawn has worked for over one hundred years? Once demonstrated and evaluated it was shown that these solutions worked and saved half the energy needed for convention streetlights. After that, the city has decided to exchange 24 thousand of them. 9 https://www.grow-smarter.eu/solutions/.
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Fig. 9 The GrowSmarter project demonstrated 12 smart solutions for smarter cities in Europe. The practical demonstrations were replicated in many other cities and helped create a market for solutions that both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and creates new jobs thus helping Europe grow smarter
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This is just one of numerous examples of how the project has helped overcome the anxiety for innovations and change. The GrowSmarter project is an example of how Stockholm shares its experiences outside of its borders and together with other cities puts effort to help cities Grow Smarter stimulating economic growth and simultaneously reducing Green House Gas emissions (Fig. 10).
Fig. 10 In Stockholm the GrowSmarter project has renovated several buildings from 1960: ies into energy-efficient and smart buildings
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9 Conclusions The city of Stockholm is in many ways a smart city. The city utilizes digitalization and new technologies to simplify and improve life for its residents, visitors and businesses. As for all large organizations, testing new ideas through pilot projects has also been a successful method to get past the reluctance for change. Testing new technologies and methodologies before introducing them on a larger scale has helped avoid backlashes and help replicate the smart measures as the good examples easily are taken up by others up once shown. In several reports and city-comparisons have also pointed out Stockholm as a leading smart city. This work continues and is developed further to help meet the city’s goals to both be fossil fuel-free and the world’s smartest city by the year 2040 (Fig. 11).
Fig. 11 Stockholm was awarded the 2019 Smart City Award at the World Smart City Expo and Congress in Barcelona
Creating a Smart Ecosystem in Lisbon David Cunha
Abstract While Lisbon has enjoyed a very dynamic and burgeoning innovation ecosystem, attracting tech start-ups and flagship corporations alike, the municipality saw an opportunity to further encourage its growth. For this purpose, the municipality has taken a very focused and pragmatic approach on creating a solid smart city ecosystem that would enable and foster research and development of new products and services, promoting economic and technological growth, while at the same time supporting a paradigm shift through the intensive use of data and its refining into knowledge. Based on the paramount values of efficiency, transparency and participation, the municipality has designed a number of core projects that will allow the smart city and innovation ecosystem to grow incrementally, making existing services more sustainable and efficient, while allowing the creation of new services that were not possible before. Lisbon’s Intelligent Management Platform, a state-of-the-art urban management platform at the core of our strategy, is showing remarkable potential and attracting national and international recognition. By actively engaging and involving key city stakeholders, like industry, public institutions, regulatory bodies, academia and citizens, this strategy has already shown to be the right course for the smart future of Lisbon. Keywords Smart cities · Open data · Urban intelligence · Participation · Transparency
D. Cunha (B) Senior Adviser, Information Technology and Digital Transformation, Lisbon Municipality, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] Lisbon’s City Lead, H2020 Sharing Cities Programme, Lisbon, Portugal © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (ed.), How Smart Is Your City?, Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering 98, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6_11
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1 Introduction Lisbon is a historic city, with over two millenniums of history and the concerns of a modern metropolis. With over 500,000 inhabitants and roughly the same number of people entering the city every working day, the strain sustained by its infrastructures is a major concern for the City Council. These infrastructures have often been designed to support a fraction of today’s population. The need to expand, coupled with the inevitable need for maintenance, adaptation and innovation, creates enormous challenges for the entities responsible for their management, due to the rapid technological developments we know today. Although cities house roughly 60% of the world’s population, it is estimated that its energy needs are 75% of the world’s needs, while regarding greenhouse gases, the estimation points to 80% of global emissions. In order to be sustainable, cities must tackle these challenges and strive to lower emissions, energy consumption and waste production, among other needs.1 On the other side, nowadays citizens demand their city to deliver not only more but faster, better and more reliable services than ever. Their participation is active and their engagement is critical for the success of public policies. With the increase of scrutiny also come new solutions and proposals, that contribute to better suit the policies to the needs. The expected efficiency from the city’s services is also everincreasing, by eliminating waste of resources—human and material—and enhancing the service levels. Information, transparency and participation should be the foundation for all of the city’s policies. This can only be possible when there are enough data and knowledge to enable these principles. This is not possible when data is dispersed in organizational silos, with restricted access to other departments within the organization. Communication is also a critical part of a modern smart city and only through sharing data, making it accessible through the organization, can it be transformed into knowledge and, further down the path, into insights. The massification of smartphone use, increased the development of sensoring technology at an amazing rate and the volume of production and sales contributed to push the technological costs down, making acquiring quality sensoring data easier than ever. With it, the cost of communications also became more affordable, enabling real-time data transmission and the development of new technologies dedicated to Internet of Things devices, such as LoRa or Narrow Band IoT. With this idea in mind, it is imperative to develop objective planning, as acquiring sensor data has often become an end in itself, hoarding massive amounts of data—and its inherent costs—without a foreseeable use or the critical assurances of the data quality and integrity. Lisbon has long been a city with a mindset for innovation and, in a certain sense, what is nowadays labelled a smart city. There has always been a proliferation of smart 1 https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/corp_ext_content/ifc_external_corporate_site/annual+rep
ort+2015/2015+online+report/private+sector+impact/building+resilience+-+urbanization.
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initiatives and a will to continuously improve the operational procedures, making them more efficient and delivering a better service. It is in this setting that the Lisbon City Council, assuming the aims of modern smart city concepts, around a decade ago, started taking the steps to integrate this mindset, the initiatives and the will, in order to create a global and integrated ecosystem, where this kind of ideas could not only be possible but also encouraged and simple to put to test and production. Although this strategy was built around a core of initiatives that were designed to be the underlying foundation of this ecosystem, and which we will speak about in detail below, there was also another key factor that was needed to be implemented. Any modern organization, especially one funded by public funds, must have a mindset of data-driven management culture, across all levels of the organization, that promotes efficiency, transparency, innovation and the development of new services. Most of all, this strategy enshrines that technology should never be an end in itself, but the means to modernize and drive innovation across the municipality and the city’s economy. Although critical for success, technology should be the vehicle to obtain quality data and information, critical to monitoring the city’s vital operations, to promote dialog with citizens and transparency in the policy application. The end goal must be to change processes and people, so that procedures are reviewed and changed, in order to provide more efficiency, better services and, most importantly, a better quality of life for everyone who lives, visits or works in the city. A smart city should not focus on the city’s own operation and procedures, but on the people it serves, their needs and their quality of life. This chapter will give the reader a birds-eye-view of Lisbon’s ecosystem. There are several vectors that, due to their complexity, could not be addressed here, like cybersecurity, funding or infrastructures, for example. So, this chapter should be seen as a highlight of some of the projects and features that currently position Lisbon as a technological and entrepreneurial hub with a great capacity to attract talent, start-ups and global corporations alike.
2 Lisbon’s Ecosystem Lisbon is a city of knowledge, with openness to social and technological innovations. With a network of universities and research centers, with 141,266 university students in its metropolitan area (117,000 in the city), 68 higher education establishments and more than 10,000 teachers in 2017/2018. The city also had 11,125 Ph.D. researchers who develop projects in centers financed by the Science and Technology Foundation, in the same year. This setting provides a great environment for the transfer of knowledge from academia to the public and private sector and for the attraction and retention of the best national and international talents. Building on top of this, with the goal of further promoting economy and innovation, the municipality is engaged in a set of projects.
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2.1 Web Summit The world’s largest tech conference moved to Lisbon in 2016, for a period of three years, which soon was confirmed to be extended for another ten years. One of the largest and most important events of entrepreneurship, innovation and technology, hosting several parallel events and attracting some of the biggest technology corporations, with an impact throughout the city. Its reach extends largely beyond the main areas, covering such diverse areas like policymaking or sports. In its 2019 editions, Web Summit attracted 70,469 attendees, with 163 countries represented, with 1206 speakers and 2150 start-ups.2
2.2 Hub Creativo do Beato Located at an old Army facility, the future Hub Creativo do Beato is set to become an innovation hub, combining cutting edge technology with the preservation of its heritage. The project aims to build a space for open innovation, where work, leisure and cultural areas intertwine, creating a mix of entrepreneurs, freelancers, start-ups and scaleups, as well as large companies. Currently being developed and implemented by Startup Lisboa, a business incubator, that assumes as its vision “to enhance the city as an international entrepreneurship hub without draining the existing dynamics, functioning as a pole to attract and retain new talent, new projects and new players, to add value to the community and the country”. When complete, it will be one of the largest entrepreneurship hubs in Europe, with about 50,000 m2 distributed across 18 buildings and will create an estimated 3000 new jobs.
2.3 Smart Open Lisboa Smart Open Lisboa, the city’s flagship program for open innovation, is designed to accelerate start-ups in creating or developing solutions to specific challenges. The program is designed to focus on a vertical operational area on each edition, having the previous edition focused on mobility and housing, two of the main priorities for Lisbon. The municipality and other stakeholders define a set of challenges that they would like to see addressed. A large number of competing start-ups will try to create, adapt or develop solutions, with the support of the program’s partners, which include enterprises with extensive experience in key areas like technology and communications. As the program unfolds, through the stages of Preparation, Scouting and Selection, 2 https://websummit.com/.
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Bootcamp, Experimentation and Demo Day, the number of start-ups is reduced, with only the best solutions progressing, ending in a set of solutions that can then be tested in real conditions, using the city’s urban environment as its living lab. The results achieved by this program have been excellent, with several solutions being acquired by the city or the partners, while others were then adapted and entered the market with good results. For 2020, Smart Open Lisboa will focus on sustainability and environmental verticals, with Lisbon as European Green Capital as a theme.
2.4 Lisbon’s Fablab In July 2013, Lisbon’s municipality decided to create and develop its own Fablab, which it regards as a key element in supporting the creation and prototyping of ideas and concepts for new products and services. In this workshop, everyone can have access to industrial equipment, in a safe and supported environment, like large and small millings machines, laser cutters and vinyl cutters, 3D printers, as well as computers, specific software and tools. Lisbon’s Fablab aims to be accessible to everyone, even those without specific knowledge of the tools available. Ideas walk in through the door and, with the help of trained staff and a community of creators, are refined and developed, until they reach a stage where they will then be prototyped.
2.5 Lisboa Robotics Lisboa Robotics Cluster is an association of ecosystem stakeholders, like research institutions, enterprises or start-ups, and a way to contribute to the development and promotion of robotics in the city. With the goal of developing several activities like meetings and talks, enabling knowledge sharing, it also created a network of spaces for testing and experimentation, called hotspots, which provide a safe and controlled space to develop new equipment and products. This network of hotspots includes landfills, a water reservoir and special facilities.
2.6 Free Internet of Things (IoT) Network As a way to foster open innovation and prototyping of IoT devices and services, while also supporting the municipality’s operational needs, Lisbon will be deploying a free LoRa network, which will cover the entire city territory. This project will enable start-ups, corporations or even hobbyists, to experiment and test IoT devices across the city, without having the cost of creating or maintaining the infrastructure. It will also enable the municipalities to rapidly test and/or deploy networks of sensors for its
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own operational needs. Although free and accessible to everyone, this network will have embedded encryption, which will ensure the privacy of the data it will convey.
3 The Challenges Every organization tends to structure itself in areas of expertise, which in turn tend to operate in silos, leading to compartmentalization of information, which although not critical could often be very important for decision-making in other areas of organizational governance. Public institutions, in this regard, behave like all other organization types, perhaps with even more communicational problems. As a result, this leads to a decision-making process that doesn’t take into account all the information existing in the organization, simply because it wasn’t available or accessible when a report is compiled. In a data-driven decision management, the removal of informational silos is one of the biggest challenges, as it is often not a technological problem but a cultural one, although the technology can play an important role in democratizing the information after the initial reluctance has been overcome. Large organizations, much like metropolises’ municipal services, also often display a diverse range of technological skills across their departments, making the adoption of a given unique strategy a challenge. To tackle this problem, a strategy must encompass means of addressing different types of technological needs and ensure that no part of the organization is excluded or relegated behind in the process. A dedicated structure to implement and support a smart city strategy can be especially important to address this kind of challenge, as it allows us to have a customized approach to each problem while, at the same time, ensuring the coherence of the organizational and technological solutions. When addressing a given challenge, a municipal service has a natural tendency to design a solution that fits with their pre-existing bureaucratic and operational procedures. This returns the best optimal solution for the municipal service which is not the same—and, in reality, is often very far—as the best solution for the citizen. Therefore, this is also another cultural challenge that needs to be tackled, as the approach to every challenge, especially when redesigning the process, should be focused on providing the best answer to a citizen’s needs, in the fastest and less bureaucratic way possible. Here too, the focus should not be the city, but he who needs something from its services. Lastly, but not least, funding for smart city and innovation projects is a common challenge to be addressed. Although some problems need significant amounts of investment, others can be dealt with less capital but by redesigning the way they are currently performed. For the projects which require a greater deal of investment, European funds are a common means of funding.
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4 Defining a Strategy A city strategy, even if sectorial, could render a book, so for the sake of brevity, it will be summarized, trying to leave technology aside and focusing on values and approach. The strategy of Lisbon to be a smart city is a never-ending journey of continuous innovation and reinvention, based on the core values of Efficiency, Transparency and Participation: • By Efficiency we can understand less waste of resources (human, material or financial), a decrease in response time, better and more customized responses and services, better quality of life and less time consumed (due to improvements in mobility, simplification of bureaucratic procedures and others); • Transparency is making the decision-making process available and accessible or understandable to everyone, free of charge, in machine-readable formats but also in humanized form. Information is vital to citizenship and only by allowing themselves to be scrutinized, can cities truly be democratic; • Participation is enabling all citizens—who desire to do so—to be an active partner, to provide inputs and suggestions to challenges faced by the city, making them meaningful and with an impact on the outcomes achieved. In order to implement these values, the municipality believes that technology is not the solution to overcome challenges, but merely the tool to do so. As stated above, the essence of a smart city is the constant innovation and reinvention of itself and its processes, aided by technology. One of the biggest—and often seen—mistakes in implementation technology is the digitalization of processes as they existed before, progressing from an inefficient process to an inefficient digitalized process. Whenever there is an application of new technology—if not before and cyclically—cities should analyze each and every process impacted by it, checking if the process is still adjusted or it can be made quicker, simpler or with less resources. Likewise, the redesigning of processes often requires a change in the way people interact with them. These should be designed with the ease of use for the citizen in mind, this often comes as counter-intuitive for the public institutions and servants, who usually design them to fit with pre-existing procedures, categories or ways of interacting. Therefore, although technology is at the heart of the smart cities concept—probably because it derived from a commercial concept in its inception—Lisbon’s municipality is deeply focused on people and processes. From this trio—technology, people and processes—technology is probably the easiest to change, design or implement. But in the end, no city can be smart if it does not act on all three alike.
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4.1 Governance and Structure A key factor to the success of any strategy is a clear definition of governance, the stakeholders involved and the roles they have. In transversal areas, such as information systems and technological adoption, this can be a critical requirement and was therefore given particular attention. It was considered that there should be a dedicated unit to ensure the development, promotion and coherence of smart initiatives, specialized in this type of project and staffed with differentiated technical skills. For this purpose, the municipality decided to create a municipal department, the Lisbon Urban Management and Intelligence Center, that was tasked with spearheading data integration, curation and redistribution throughout the municipal services and promoting data-driven management and decision-making within the municipality. It is also tasked with promoting the use of open data, by delivering quality municipal data, and support operational services in process reengineering and smart initiatives design and implementation. The other critical factor considered was the empowerment of this unit, avoiding any ambiguity regarding the importance that this matter held for the municipality and its strategy. With this in mind, the department that was created reported directly to a City Council member, ensuring a high level of engagement between the political and executive layers of governance.
5 The Pillars of a Strong Smart City Ecosystem Lisbon has always been a city open to innovation and, as any large organization, a plethora of smart initiatives emerged throughout the municipality, as a way to increase operational efficiency, save human resources and provide better services. About a decade ago, the municipality started to take steps to maximize the potential value of these initiatives, through the adoption of common standards, data sharing and technological convergence. Although useful and effective, the irregular sprawling of these solutions and projects showed there was a clear margin to increase the outcomes while at the same time eliminating a significant amount of resource inefficiency from fragmented and disaggregated approaches. The creation of a supporting framework for smart initiatives started to take place, through the implementation of a core number of projects, which can be considered today as the pillars of a strong smart city ecosystem in Lisbon.
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5.1 Lisbon’s Intelligent Management Platform (PGIL) In 2016, the municipality opened a public international tendering process to acquire software to support this vision. The contract was awarded in 2017 to NEC Portugal, soon becoming the cornerstone for the smart cities vision of the municipality. PGIL, named with the acronym in Portuguese for Lisbon’s Intelligent Management Platform, is a data integration platform, with the capacity to receive and handle large amounts of data in real-time. Enhanced with artificial intelligence analytical capabilities, and connected to several internal and external systems, it can process data from several simultaneous sources, such as video cameras and sensors, and deliver actionable information in real-time to several operational departments and municipal partners. Powered by FIWARE, an open-source initiative, that ensures that the platform is compliant with a set of open standards and can be enhanced with modules from different providers, avoiding vendor lock-in. It also provides integration of systems at a low cost and the capability to connect and integrate legacy systems. Currently, PGIL is connected to 26 systems and features 180 layers of information, several of them in real-time, enabling monitoring of the city’s “vitals” like mobility, waste management, water supply and others. It’s able to support up to 60,000 simultaneous users, with different requirements, dashboards and informational needs. In the future, all IT systems of the municipality, existing or previewed, should have the ability to integrate with this platform, sharing and receiving data, preferably in real-time. In turn, PGIL will acquire and process this data, delivering actionable information to users and other systems, enhancing the information available for decision-making and shortening the response times.
5.2 Operational Integrated Center Although technological integration and data sharing within the organization can be a significant leap forward and solve numerous problems, there is a layer of operational coordination that is only possible by having a physical presence within the same space. Although available in the same technological infrastructure, some information cannot be shared between departments, for confidentiality, security or other reasons. An obvious case would be the real-time position of police vehicles, which although it could be useful to provide help in an emergency, cannot be accessed by anyone else for security reasons. In these situations, having operators of several different services operating in the same physical shared space is a necessity to maximize the efficiency of communications and articulation. Another example of the synergies created by operating in a shared space is the identification of procedural revision needs, as it becomes clear that some procedures taken individually by some of the services can become more efficient when understood by all parties involved.
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For this purpose, the municipality will be implementing Lisbon’s Operational Integrated Center, currently in the final design stage, to be a high-level operational management room, from where several critical operational services can be coordinated at any time. With its operation based on the Intelligent Management Platform, all services will have access to all available information, ensuring a holistic and integrated view of the city, in real-time. With a mission to “ensure the intelligent management of the city, through monitoring, foresight and operational management of all activities with implications on safety, security, prevention, emergency response and quality of life”, it will operate 24 h a day, 365 days a year.
5.3 Lisbon’s Urban Data Laboratory The municipality is acquiring large amounts of data, static and in real-time, available in the PGIL and also storing it as historical information. This data is generated through the progressive integration of existing information systems, but also from the increasing sensoring devices being deployed by the municipality and other partners. The number of deployed sensors will increase exponentially, enabling the municipality to have access to always increasing datasets, with historical data that can be analyzed and correlated. The municipality has strived to develop analytical and visualization solutions that can improve decision-making, based on available information. However, a deeper analysis of this information requires very high levels of specialization, with technical human resources that are not available to the municipality—nor it is foreseeable that they will be available—due to the salaries awarded. In fact, even between global corporations, there has been a talent hunt for these highly specialized human resources, driving salaries even higher. On the other hand, research institutions need access to real data, to train students and researchers, in data analytics and visualization. Cities generate and own large databases, regarding its operation domains, with great potential for these uses. In a context of cooperation and close relation with other stakeholders, the municipality created, in May 2019, Lisbon’s Urban Data Laboratory. This partnership will enable the municipality to share its data with public organizations with high levels of technical knowledge, in a safe and controlled way, ensuring the confidentiality of the data. Students, teachers and researchers from partner institutions will be able to have access to high-level analytical tools, available through Lisbon’s IntelligentManagement Platform, enabling them to develop new processes and algorithms that can help the city predict and respond to different scenarios and situations, based on available data. With this partnership, the institutions will have access to real data, critical to their teaching and research programs, retaining the intellectual property of the processes and algorithms developed within the laboratory. The municipality, on its side, will
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have the right to use these processes and algorithms, by all municipal services that can benefit from them. While at this moment only public institutions are eligible, the city will soon open the possibility of private companies joining the laboratory, providing an even broader set of highly technical and differentiated skills, creating even more value from the data it generates.
5.4 Open Data It can be defined as open, data that can be accessed, used, modified and shared, with the only obligation to, at most, acknowledge their source and keeping the license they were provided with. It is, therefore, accessed and used without any associated cost. Open data, with special emphasis on those provided by public institutions, are considered worldwide as a fundamental resource to promote development, innovation and transparency. According to the EU, in 2018 it was estimated that the value of data with origin in public institutions would be e52 billion, with this number increasing to e194 billion by 2030. Recently, the European Union, through its Directive 2019/204, reinforced the importance of open data, especially those provided by public institutions, companies controlled by the public sector and even private companies when in performing public services. Lisbon’s strategy for open data has its origins long before this. Currently, it is enshrined in a Charter of Principles approved in 2016, with principles very alike those defined by the European Union. In January 2017, the Open Data Plan for the City of Lisbon was published, an instrument for planning and coordination of the yearly activities that the municipality and its partners are committed to implement. Today, Lisbon’s Open Data Portal3 enables the distribution of all open data with interest to the city, produced and curated not only by the municipality but also by the municipal companies and by private partners. It currently hosts 343 datasets, categorized by 18 groups of data and sourced by 20 different entities. Most of this data is georeferenced and some are already in real-time. In the future, Lisbon’s Intelligent Management Platform will broaden the datasets even more, by delivering real-time data.
3 https://lisboaaberta.cm-lisboa.pt.
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5.5 Data Workshop In order to foster a data-driven culture and decision-making supported by data, the municipality created, in May 2019, a program designed to support the municipal services in the Digital Transformation projects. The goal is to support departments to develop their own innovation projects, share experiences with other departments and cities, design and implementation of new innovation projects, deploying sensors to acquire data and its integration into the municipal platform and process reengineering. The work developed by this program is deeply intertwined with the challenges that are created in Lisbon’s Urban Data Laboratory.
5.6 Na Minha Rua—Events Reporting At a local level, no one knows more about the city, its problems and the challenges it presents, than the people that live in it and experience them first-hand. To create value from this knowledge and foster participation and engagement with the citizens, the municipality created a portal named “NaMinhaRua Lx”,4 available through a desktop or on smartphones, that enables them to report problems found, on a daily basis. The service then sends these reports directly to the operational teams that will resolve them, whether they are municipal teams, the parishes or partner companies. When they are resolved (or should any delay occur) the citizen gets feedback directly through the portal or the mobile app, creating a direct communicational bridge. In 2019, there were 185,347 events reported, an average of 15,446 per month, with the large majority of events in the category of Urban Cleaning.
5.7 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) The approval in 2016, by the European Parliament, of the General Data Protection Regulation, created a new complex challenge, although it should be seen as an opportunity rather than a hurdle, due to the complexity of the application and the wide scope it encompasses. This new legal framework brought significant changes to personal data processing and to its recirculation and reuse, foreseeing different impacts in the lives of organizations, according to its nature, area of activity, dimensions and type of processing produced on personal data. Daily, Lisbon’s municipality performs numerous operations of personal data processing, in order to provide public service, needing to ensure that these procedures comply with the requirements defined by the GDPR. 4 Roughly
translated to “On My Street”.
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The City Council, aware of the opportunity for the organization, created, in May 2018, a dedicated Project Team to implement the General Data Protection Regulation in the municipality, perform an audit to the current state of procedures and define a work plan to make the city’s procedures compliant with the requirements. It was also defined as a Data Protection Officer.
6 Showcases 6.1 Sharing Cities The Sharing Cities is a 60 months (2016–2020) programme, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Through the joint work of three “lighthouse” cities—Lisbon, London and Milan— and three “follower” cities—Bordeaux, Warsaw and Burgas—the program set out to create, developed and test smart cities technologies across all the consortia. This consortium was composed of a total of 35 partners from cities, industry representatives, non-governmental organizations and academia. By fostering the international collaboration between industry and cities, the goal was to focus on solutions and implementations on key measures: • • • • • •
Citizen engagement; Building retrofit; Smart lamp posts; Urban platform; Energy management; eMobility: – – – – –
eBikes; EV logistics; EV charging; EV car sharing; Smart parking.
Although the approaches to each of the challenges varied from city to city, in Lisbon some were indeed very successful, like help kickstarting GIRA—Bicicletas de Lisboa, the shared public bike scheme of the city, which has grown exponentially rapid and is now scaling citywide. Another remarkable success case was the retrofitting of the City Hall, a centuries-old building, with energy efficiency solutions, demonstrating that in heritage buildings is possible to deploy technology, reducing energy consumption, without impacting the architectural value and beauty. The project draws on e24 million of EU funding and aims to trigger e500 million in investment and to engage with over 100 municipalities across Europe.
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6.2 Noise Control Nightlife, although important to the vitality and economic growth of a city, can create a set of challenges to those who live nearby these places. The cohabitation of commercial and residential uses can be difficult due to disturbances felt by the population, namely due to the noise produced by the operating establishments, and also due to high volume music, audible in the public space and it the surrounding households. Trying to enable both uses, private initiative and the residents’ right to rest, not compromising the residential use of nightlife areas, the municipality started a process to limit the noise sources. For this purpose, every establishment that operates after 23 h and has live or recorded amplified music must abide by a set of requirements, being one of those the existence of a certified noise limiter, connected and reporting in real-time. Currently, the municipality (and its police force) can monitor the noise levels produced inside an establishment and, soon, warn the owners of the establishment of the infraction by SMS, appealing to correct behaviour, or dispatch a police unit, in case of reiterated infraction.
6.3 LxAnalyticsHub Ensuring the service levels of the municipal firefighters requires the ability to foresee the best location for the physical assets, human resources and fleet, in order to reach any event in under 5 min. As cities are living entities where conditions vary significantly every day and the number of variables that influence foresight is numerous, performing this task with 24 h in advance could be an invaluable tool to increase the efficacy and decrease the response times of these teams. Using this premise presented by the firefighters as a challenge, the municipality invited a set of partners to design a tool that could take into account some of these variables, like weather, traffic conditions, roadworks, events happening on public space, and others. The partners invited to work on this project were SAP, Microsoft, Nova Information Management School, Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa and Altice. Currently, in its final stage, this project has shown great potential to be put into production, making it available as a daily tool to support the positioning of its assets across the city.
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6.4 Urban CoCreation Data Lab Co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union, Urban CoCreation Data Lab5 is a project with the goal of creating an analytical tool and insights that can support decision-making, at city level, enhancing the municipal services in areas like security, emergency, operational management and planning. The consortium is composed of Lisbon’s municipality, Nova Information Management School (NovaIMS), the Portuguese Agency for Administrative Modernization, NEC Corporation and Barcelona Supercomputing Center. The project will focus on five use cases: • Mobility: by supporting new planning and management approaches altogether with new tools to evaluate the impact and prediction of behaviours; • Waste management: by identifying patterns to support the prediction of the production of urban waste associated with a variety of context information (e.g. events, climate situation, etc.); • Parking: by creating new models either to predict or to generate viable alternatives for illegal parking in the city; • Pollution: by developing predictive models for the propagation of liquid and atmospheric pollutants; • Crowd management: by building impact prediction models based on the mobility/people flows in large events. With the conclusion of the project, the outcomes are expected to enter production in Lisbon’s Intelligent Management Platform, but also shared so they can be adapted and reused by other cities.
6.5 Urban Waste Sensoring Lisbon is deploying smart sensors in waste containers throughout the city, with the ability to monitor filling levels and temperatures, estimating to reach 2600 installed units soon. With this technology, it’s possible to monitor the containers in real-time through a dedicated platform and customize the collecting routes with this information. This allows the municipality to maximize efficiency of the collection fleet, human resources and greatly reduce time lost, verifying containers that didn’t need to be collected. In the future, with the analysis of historical data being collected, it will be possible to go further and predict the necessary routes with days in advance, increasing even further the planning efficiency and resource management.
5 www.urbandatalab.pt.
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6.6 Awards Lisbon’s municipality, with the work done in the design and implementation of its Intelligent Management Platform, has been recognized by the 2019 Smart 50 awards, by the Smart Cities Connect, US Ignite and Smart Cities Connect Foundation, in the Digital Transformation category. Still in 2019, it was also awarded the “Best Digital Project for a Municipality”, by ACEPI —Associação da Economia Digital, also for the work done on Lisbon’s Intelligent Management Platform.
Being Smart in the Context of a Crisis: Ethical Paradoxes Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira
People and their rights Must be front and centre The virus threatens everyone, Human rights uplift everyone António Guterres
Abstract The present chapter discusses how generalised acute crises, as the one brought by Covid-19, and the need to quickly overcome them, may potentially foster the loosen or drop off of ethical values previously regarded as unquestionable, not only on the part of individuals but also at an institutional level. The author claims that it is precise during a crisis, as the one that characterises the present global sanitary threat, that ethical guidelines grounded on unquestionable human rights must clearly and strongly uphold the whole societal edifice. Keywords Ethics · Emergency frameworks · Human dignity · Human rights · The right to live and die with dignity · Ethical paradoxes
1 Human Rights: The Question of Human Dignity Fiction, namely cinema, has frequently depicted futuristic cities, generally in a very dark way, alerting to the Janus character that irresponsible technological innovation or its unruled deployment always assumes. By showing us decadent, degraded urban environments where nature’s beauty is forever gone; where all the other life forms are nearly inexistent; where being in the world is no longer the result of the interaction of the physical body, but where sensations, representations even love are just virtually motivated; where freedom is lost to an invisible “eye”; these fiction works raise our awareness, ask for our attention to the dangers of an ethically ungrounded reality.
M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (B) Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira (ed.), How Smart Is Your City?, Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering 98, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6_12
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Ethical approaches to distinct dimensions of contemporary human existence, namely those that are already undergoing the impact of socio-technical systems have proliferated in the last decade, grounded on the definition of Human Rights, alerting to their fundamental character in the construction of a better world, of a “good society”. But though human rights and ethics have moved to the centre of political and governance discourse nearly all over the world, as Harvey [1] points out for the most part they do not fundamentally introduce any significant change in the dominant modes of state action. Fundamental to the Human Rights conceptual framework and also very present in the institutional discourses, legal formulations and political assumptions and intentions is the concept of Human Dignity. Both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights1 and the EU Charter of Fundamental Human Rights2 take the concept of Human Dignity as their grounding stone. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that the dignity of the human person is not a human right per se, but it constitutes the real basis of a fundamental set of rights: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world […]”. The concept of human dignity as it appeared in post-war is closely associated with the commitment that never again should there be atrocities of the kind humanity had experienced during WW2. In the year 2000, in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the same commitment to respect and protect human beings is made by opening chapter 1 under the title-Dignity- and by having article 1 stating that “Human dignity is inviolable. It must be respected and protected”. In the present day, the concept of human dignity features in ethical, legal, and political discourse as a foundational commitment to human value or to human status. However the existence of these distinct discourses and the distinct focusing provided by their specific disciplinary fields, plus the way different cultural frameworks view the concept,3 or the distinct interpretations provided by different schools of thought4 throughout time, have blurred its meaning, its objective dimension causing some to argue for its emptiness, nonutility or even harmful character5 [2].
1 Proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948, as a common
standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. https://www.un.org/en/universal-declar ation-human-rights/. 2 Proclaimed by the European Parliament on the 18th of December 2000 https://www.europarl.eur opa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf. 3 In some oriental cultures dignity is not an inherent human characteristic, but a quality that is achieved with effort and eventually sacrifice. 4 A cosmo-centric interpretation, a Christo-centric; a Modern and a Contemporary one. Cf., Lebeche, M. (2009) On the problem of Dignity: A hermeneutic and a phenomenologic investigation. Koningshausen and Neumann. 5 Cf Pinker, S. (2008) https://www.ub.edu/valors/Estilos%20UB/imatges/Documents/The%20stup idity%20of%20dignity.pdf.
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We will not enroll here in the analysis of the contributes of each of those discourses to the semantic substance of the concept6 or reflect on the presence or absence of interpretative overlap within distinct cultural mindsets, but we will try to identify the semantic content that the concept embodies, according to its etymology and on the basis of our current common linguistic experience. To achieve this we will compare the definitions provided by lexicographers which are rooted in contemporary language corpora and that consequently reflect the present use of language. In what concerns its etymology, we can read [3]. Dignity: “state of being worthy,” from Old French dignite “dignity, privilege, honour,” from Latin dignitatem (nominativen dignitas) “worthiness,” from dignus “worth (n.), worthy, proper, fitting,” from PIE *dek-no-, suffixed form of root *dek“to take, accept.” Relatively to the present use of the concept we verify that In the OUP dictionary7 [dignity] is defined as: (i) The state or quality of being worthy of honour or respect (ii) A composed or serious manner or style On its hand, the Cambridge University Dictionary [4] defines the concept as: (i) calm, serious and controlled behaviour that makes people respect you (ii) the importance and value that a person has, that makes other people respect them or makes them respect themselves Finally, the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines [dignity] as [5] (i) formal reserve or seriousness of manner, appearance, or language (ii) the quality or state of being worthy, honoured, or esteemed By looking at these definitions we exclude the one referring to an “appearance, a composed behavior” that could be also referred as “acting with dignity” and we will only retain the one corresponding to “the importance, the value that a person has”. Looking at the core features present in the etymology and in the definitions provided by the three dictionaries, relatively to this meaning, we conclude that the core feature sustaining the concept of dignity is [worthiness]. Human dignity conceived as [human worthiness] is here understood as the inalienable value a human being has, by the “simple” fact of being unique and nonreplicable in his/her physical, mental/emotional and social dimensions.8 It is this uniqueness embodying all the potential for action and flourishing that each human carries that constitute their intrinsic value. 6 Cf
on the different discourses or philosophical approaches to the topic https://www.iep.utm.edu/ hum-dign/. 7 https://www.google.com/search?q=dignity+meaning&rlz=1C1AOHY_pt-PTPT708PT708&oq= dignity%2B&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j0l5.7066j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8. 8 Even if we could imagine a biological replicate, a clone, this individual would never be the copy of the original, because his/her life experiences would mould a distinct persona.
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All the definitions of the concept are, as we see, human-focused. However, we may wonder if there is no such thing as “animal dignity” and we can easily conclude that there is and that it stands for its intrinsic worthiness as a life form. Articulated with the concept of human dignity, human rights9 act as general standards10 for respecting, preserving and promoting this inalienable worthiness that each human being embodies. Some of these rights even extending themselves out of the mere individual existential framework and concerning the respect for their memory and for the inviolable character of the physical remains of those that once existed.11 This individual worthiness calls for an attitude of compassion towards the other, compassion meaning the capacity to be aware of the damaging physical, mental, emotional effects a certain action, event or circumstance may impose on the condition or state of an individual. This attitude of compassion will foster care towards the other, their living conditions, their needs, their expectation and will ensure respect for different values, distinct cultures.
2 Human Dignity and Crisis Context In all life contexts, the concept of human dignity and the “general standards”12 defined by human rights must be the benchmark to assess the correctness, the goodness for humanity in general, and for individuals in particular of specific actions. Being aware of the importance of the concept and bearing in mind the Human Rights is the safeguard against political error and social and individual damage. Epidemics have ravaged humanity throughout history [6], often causing the altering of the society’s tissue, changing prevailing modes of production, social structuring, introducing new behaviors, new social practices, new routines, new cultural frameworks and perspectives, new worlds. Depending on its potential for damage, epidemics outbursts are always accompanied by a justified feeling of anxiety and fear on the part of the population. This fear, a normal psycho/biological reaction, usually leads to positive actions as those of following the right hygienic procedures, developing the recommended protection actions in order to prevent the epidemics’ spreading. But fear can also be translated in violence towards the other, in their blind rejection, their chasing, their exclusion from society and their confinement in solitude. We have all learned at school of plague periods when sick people had to hide in caves or run away to forests, condemned to live alone, carrying a bell to signal their passage even 9 Animal
rights as well.
10 https://www.iep.utm.edu/hum-rts/. 11 As in the preservation of burial grounds. A sensible issue in what concerns this topic is the public exhibition of individuals of past civilizations in museums, as it is the case of mummies and the invasion of tombs in archeological research. 12 Cf https://www.iep.utm.edu/hum-rts/.
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when walking in deserted zones. Was it because we were very young that we found it scary and horrible? We live in very different times, in a distinct civilizational context, our being in the world cannot even be comparable to those, not even our world can, we are technologically hiper developed, we even have intelligent tools that can help us to handle crisis and yet, during the sanitary emergency, we heard of hundreds found dead in residential houses because they were left alone without anyone to take care of them; we heard of people being prevented of saying good-bye to their dying loved ones; we heard of hundreds of people being buried without proper identification, without a proper ritual; we heard of ships with sick people that could not come ashore….
2.1 ICT’s Technological Roadmap in the Covid-19 Crisis The COVID 19 pandemics created the opportunity for the most recent socio-technical systems, namely AI applications and robotics, to play a role and they have not failed us allowing global communication in real-time and the exchange of experience and knowledge; communication between set apart loved ones; the maintenance of fundamental services and business through online work; the making of education and learning possible; the recovery of disrupted supplies chains, the fast home delivery of essential goods in many cities, the quick production of health products, namely ventilator parts, the gift of joy and amusement to confined people by opening up virtually the museums, the art galleries, by animating through music and performance. It would be possible to define a long roadmap signaling the role played by different intelligent tools in the course of the lockdown times. We have just chosen a few instances whose ethical complexity, already object of discussion in recent years, have become more prominent with the urge for its real deployment. These define a short roadmap constituted on the basis of a small sample, randomly collected from the news in different days throughout the lockdown period13 : 6th of March 2020 • In South Korea safety guidance texts sent by authorities to citizens’ smartphones expose private lives and fuel social stigma [7]14 8th of March 2020 • For Chinese citizens getting into one’s apartment, compound or workplace requires scanning a QR code, writing down one’s name and ID number, temperature and recent travel history. 13 The
days signaled correspond to the release of the news, when it wasn’t possible to accurately refer to the day, there’s only reference to the month it was made public. 14 Source: The Guardian.
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• Telecom operators track people’s movements while social media platforms have special lines to report others who may be sick. Some cities are offering people rewards for informing on sick neighbours. • Chinese companies are producing face recognition technology that can detect elevated temperatures in a crowd or pick up citizens not wearing a face mask. • A range of apps use the personal health information of citizens to alert others of their proximity to infected patients or whether they have been in close contact. • A system called Health Code which users can sign up for through Alipay or WeChat assigns individuals one of three colour codes based on their travel history, time spent in outbreak hotspots and exposure to potential carriers of the virus.15 16th of March 2020 • To track coronavirus, Israel moves to tap secret trove of cellphone data16 25th of March 2020 • The police in cities across China are being equipped with smart helmets to help to contain the spread of the virus. Powered by AI technology and using infrared sensors, these helmets screen body temperatures identifying those who may be sick from up to 5 m away.17 27th of March • Watchdog approves use of UK phone data to help fight coronavirus18 April 2020 • Google and Facebook are discussing plans with the White House to share collective data on people’s movements during the coronavirus pandemic. The data collected would show patterns of user movements.19 2nd of April 2020 • Russia looks to surveillance technology to enforce lockdown. Surveillance plans could include mobile apps that track users’ locations, CCTV cameras with facial recognition software, QR codes, mobile phone data and credit card records.20 4th of April 2020 15 Source:
The Guardian. New York Times. 17 Vídeo posted in Linkedin by Karel