Third Journal - INFORMATIONAL URBANISM: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF SMART CITIES (2017)

Contemporary and future cities are often labeled as “smart cities,” “digital cities” or “ubiquitous cities,” “knowledge cities,” and “creative cities.” Informational urbanism includes all aspects of information and (tacit as well as explicit) knowledge with regard to urban regions. “Informational city” (or “smart city” in a broader sense) is an umbrella term uniting the divergent trends of informationrelated city research. Informational urbanism is an interdisciplinary endeavor incorporating on the one side computer science and information science as well as on the other side urban studies, city planning, architecture, city economics, and city sociology. 

In this article, we present both, a conceptual framework for research on smart cities as well as results from our empirical studies on smart cities all over the world. The framework consists of seven building blocks, namely information and knowledge related infrastructures, economy, politics (e-governance) and administration (e-government), spaces (spaces of flows and spaces of places), location factors, the people’s information behavior, and problem areas.

REASEARCH MODEL-FRAMEWORK

VARIABLE & ITEMS (MEASUREMENTS)

1.      Information and knowledge related infrastructures

 In accordance with Fietkiewicz and Stock, we divide the information and knowledge related infrastructures into two more technological aspects of ubiquitous city and smart city and into more cognitive aspects of knowledge city and creative city. 2817 Digital city. ICs put comprehensive ICT infrastructures into the whole urban area and develop a digital city. There are great differences between the construction of a new IC and the reconstruction of an existing city towards an IC. For new cities, developed from scratch, ICT is integrated into the city as well as into private homes from the very beginning. Here, problems arise in missing urbanity. 

On the other side, old cities with an evolved urbanity are confronted with a reconstruction of the community as a living organism— leading to massive (legal, social and political) adjustment problems during ICT integration. Oulu in Northern Finland is an example of an “old” and at the same time ubiquitous city. In Oulu, we found that media poles (in form of large interactive screens distributed all over the city) are not well accepted by inhabitants due to the much simpler use of their own smartphones. Contrariwise, the offer of city-wide free WiFi is broadly welcomed. Smart city. ICs increase the quality of life of its residents through the use of ICT in green and sustainable projects. Most of them market these actions using the buzzword “smart city.” Smart city actions include projects of “smart mobility and transportation,” as in Shanghai, China, and Tokyo, Japan. 

The advancement of knowledge cities is measurable, by science input indicators (knowledge infrastructures, academics, expenditures on R&D) and output indicators (amount of STM publications and patents as well as number of graduates). In cities on the Arabian Gulf we found world-class infrastructures (as Education City and Qatar University in Doha), mostly imported knowledge and a very problematic transition of the native graduates into the labor markets as natives prefer to work in well-paid routine jobs over knowledge-intensive jobs in private companies or institutions of higher education. 

2.      Economy and labor markets

We were able to identify key branches driving the development towards an informational city. In ICs, we find many companies in the information and communication sector. In London, about 8% of all employees work in such an ICT firm; in Singapore, the share is 6.5%. Further important labor markets are financial and insurance activities (in London 13% and in Singapore 11.8% of the entire work force), professional, scientific and technical activities (in London 13% and in Singapore 16.3%), education (in London 8% and in Singapore 5.4%) and arts, entertainment and recreation (in London 3%, in Singapore 5.4%). Obviously, it is not (or not only) the labor market of ICT itself (with 6 to 8%, its share at the entire labor market is not that high), which dominates an IC, but—based upon ICT and information services—so do knowledge-rich industries as financial services and professional, scientific and technical services. 

In many cities of the world, researchers observed an u-shaped curve of the development of work force. Informatization is accompanied by the automatization of large economic areas. Routine tasks are increasingly being performed by (information) machines; the corresponding jobs (such as accounting or operating machinery) require fewer workers. For the workers, then, there remain the tasks that have not been automatized, and these are divided into manual and analytic and interactive labor. The labor market in developed societies is split into well-paid and well-trained workers and  badly paid workers with limited qualifications—employees in the middle segment of education and income will, tendentially, disappear, due to the increasing automatization of their former activities. In contrast to general job polarization, some ICs exhibit for the native population a j-shaped curve: There is no increase of low-income jobs, but a high increase of well-paid occupations. Low-income jobs are performed by foreign workers who have to leave the country when their job is finished. 

3.      Spaces

Some of the informational world cities occupy prominent positions in the “space of flows.” They have a central position in international money flows (by major stock exchanges; prime examples are New York and London), power flows and information flows through global cooperation in business and science. Face-to-face information flows are fostered through meetings, incentives, conferences and events (MICE). A good example for a prospering MICE economy can be found in Doha, Qatar. Examples are the Qatar Motor Show, the World Climate Summit (2012) and the planned FIFA World Cup (2022). 

ICs are within easy reach in the “space of places,” above all by air traffic and by high-speed trains as, Frankfurt/M., Germany, where air and rail passengers find—inside one complex of buildings—an international airport, a high-speed train station, and a local traffic station. Successful air-rail inter modal agreements lead to benefits for the customers, the airlines and airports, the rail operators and, finally, the environment. Many of the ICs (as well as many other cities) are well aware of short distances, walkability, cycle-friendly traffic and the preference of public transport over private automotive traffic, but they still suffer to extremely heavy car traffic in inner city areas. A positive counterexample is Singapore with very low individual transport (due to high car taxes). In Seoul, Korea, a highway was destructed in favor of the renaturation of a small river. Newly build large metro systems reduce private traffic; environmental-friendly electric or hybrid-busses and lots of green spaces downscale CO2 emissions 

4.      Politics and administration

One of the key objectives for the success of planning and constructing ICs is the political willingness of the city’s administration to build or re-build the city under the conditions of the knowledge society. Mostly those governance-oriented ideas are fixed in master plans; always they are adequately funded either by public or private funds. In Singapore, we are able to identify political programs for the construction of a knowledge society since 1992 (“Intelligent Island”), followed by numerous further master plans as, e.g., “Intelligent Nation 2015” or the current development of the “Smart Nation Platform.” A political objective is to foster citizen participation and to understand citizens as co-creators of the present and future city. 

Some governments communicate with their stakeholders via elaborate websites (in terms of maturity and usability). “Maturity” means to tap the full potential of information dissemination, communication, transaction, interoperability of governmental services, and participation; “usability” refers to not stressing users watching and navigating through websites. 

 All ICs prefer to use additionally social media (especially Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube). In the analyzed ICs, the highest rate of activity was found on Twitter with 135 tweets per month and city on average. Governments in ICs tend to open their non-personal data for reuse by everyone. Open urban data are data from official statistics and from sensor-based services; they are combinable with user-generated content, business data (e.g., opening hours) and other open data (e.g., street maps). Many ICs offer m-apps based upon their open urban data. Those m-apps are produced and financed either by governmental bodies or by private persons or companies (and so for free for government agencies).

5.      Location factors

ICs exert attractive living, working and studying spaces (and other hard locational factors, most important a high wage level) as well as soft location factors (such as a fascinating city and optimal shopping and leisure activities) and a “magnet effect” on potential companies, employees and tourists. London, UK, banks on its historically grown urbanism; most Arabian Gulf cities prefer huge high-end shopping malls and futuristic cityscapes. Former industrial areas near to waterfronts are redeveloped towards attractive wards. But architectural preservation is selective and tries partly to assert historical distinctness. 

6.      Information behavior

Simmel stressed the picture of emotionally affected people in the city due to information overload. In contrast to Simmel’s view on the city around 1900, nowadays informational cities distribute information ubiquitous and provoke information overload to a much higher degree. Residents are living among screens, not only with their smartphones, but also with big screens presenting news or advertising at bus stops, inside public transport and at public places.

 In the upcoming knowledge society the citizens’ information literacy becomes a basic skill. Information literacy includes the abilities of creation and representation as well as of searching and finding information. Many public as well as academic libraries in well-developed ICs offer courses in information literacy. Due to network effects information markets on the Internet tend to quasi-monopolistic structures. There is only one standard service in a certain market and a certain world region. 

7.      Problem areas: Gentrification, exploitation of labor, and loss of identity

 We have to pinpoint negative aspects of some specific informational cities. According to our interview partners, the reasons of these undesirable developments can often be found more in cultural and societal values than in the advancement towards the knowledge society. We see gentrification, from lower-income to higher-income social groups. In some cities people with low incomes are dispelled from attractive downtown locations and we observe people who are not able to migrate into ubiquitous cities due to their low income. In Arab cities, but also in Singapore, the workforce mainly consists of expats. One cannot overlook the fact that well-trained professional groups are welcomed and highly paid, while unskilled foreign workers have to suffer from relatively low incomes and sometimes slave-like exploitation.

 However, the native Arab population is confronted with a massive foreign workforce given up to nearly 90% expat rates (as in Dubai and in Doha). For some citizens in Arab Gulf cities, the dark side of this special kind of globalization leads on to feel as strangers in their own country. Political counteractions as “Emiratization,” “Qatarization,” etc. with the goal of re-integrating domestic workforce into jobs outside public services still fail.Some of our interview partners talked about the possible loss of identity of “their” city: In many cities of the world the same architects and the same construction companies design exchangeable cityscapes, and in their shopping malls and shopping streets always nearly the same products are offered. Due to globalization, there is probably no single IC which does not host at least one Gucci or Cartier shop. Maybe there are further, still unanalyzed, problem areas of ICs.