Smart cities and their domains – Future challenges for urban researchers?

Abstract

During the last decade, smart cites become a fashionable subject of urban development conferences and urban policy forums. Both in the international scientific literature and public media, discourse about smart cities and their development became considerably popular. This multidisciplinary theme attracts researchers from three main disciplines. The first is telecommunication engaging with the technological infrastructure of smart cities (ICT engineers, programmers, architects). The second is ecology which deals with urban sustainability and viability issues (ecologists, environmentalist professionals). The third discipline is social sciences (sociologists, regional scientists, geographers, economists) investigating the social consequences of smart cities’ development.

The first part of this paper reviews the history and main characteristics of the smart city as a notion in the international literature. It highlights that the role of ICT development and the rise of postindustrial new middle class fundamentally affect trends of smart city visions. Afterwards, it presents those smart city domains which are highly relevant for development strategies. Among them are hard domains where ICT engineering, computing and big data are crucial, and soft domains where the role of social inclusion, participation and democracy is more important. This part of the study highlights those linkages between social sciences and smart city development which can act as research fields for regional and social researchers. Every smart city domain provide promising research themes where the solidity and raison d’étre of “smart” ICT solutions can be tested by social scientists. Finally, the last part of the paper seeks to pinpoint those type of challenges which researchers of space and society need to face if they would like to study smart city development and counsel their innovation. It particularly highlights three issues: refocusing towards the “smart” world, learning to handle “big data” and building relationships with IT firms and programmers for a multidisciplinary teamwork. Because of the increasing role of the digital world and of the ubiquity of the internet in social life, trying to answer these challenges are and will be the essential issue for urban researchers in the 21st century.