Policy making, technology and data are useless without the heart of the people. Much has been written and is being written about smart cities. This suggests, first, that there are no simple answers and, second, that agreement about the topic is not yet total. As smart city projects proliferate worldwide, cultural differences and preferences, which are so difficult to capture in artificial intelligence, must be respected.
Credit: World Scientific
Policy making, technology and data are useless without the heart of the people. Much has been written and is being written about smart cities. This suggests, first, that there are no simple answers and, second, that agreement about the topic is not yet total. As smart city projects proliferate worldwide, cultural differences and preferences, which are so difficult to capture in artificial intelligence, must be respected.
A Smart City cannot rest exclusively on information technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT). The Global Innovation Forum panel’s statements confirmed that we do not want to leave all smart city decisions to corporations and to the profit motive. City officials should become more knowledgeable about the needed technologies instead of outsourcing all decisions to an IT provider.
Decision makers may understand that we need innovation for sustainability, and that this kind of innovation is the common interest of technocities and smart cities. Smart City 2.0 will need to be designed bottom-up, based on dialogs with many constituencies, rather than top-down with functions dictated by a central authority. Here, the role of different ‘actors’ in the innovative smart city system also becomes important, particularly citizens, civic society and media. Efficiency versus innovation in the smart city, and top-down versus bottom-up design and governance are two very important issues explored in >Smart City 2.0: Strategies and Innovations for City Development
>Smart City 2.0 is co-edited by TANDO Institute Fellows Deog-Seong Oh and Fred Phillips, and Monash University Professor Avvari Mohan. It contains chapters by Oh, Phillips, and TANDO Institute Fellow Sheridan Tatsuno. The editors of this volume represent three countries, and the chapter authors offer international perspectives from four continents. These authors are authorities in technology-based economic development and city planning experts. They propose additional technologies for the smart city mix. They urge readers to view smart cities as balancing efficiency, quality of life and entrepreneurial potential.
Smart City 2.0 bookends these issues between Fritz Lang’s 100-year-old film Metropolis and a 2022 piece by columnist George Will. Lang’s film argued that a city must have heart, as well as a head and hands. Will writes that new capabilities for analyzing baseball statistics have led, for the first time, to more strikeouts than on-base hits in the typical game, with base-stealing all but a lost art. He fears this makes baseball less entertaining. He means that spectators do not want to see optimized (head-oriented) baseball; instead, we go to games to see outstanding examples of human heart, acuity, and guts. Like traditional baseball, the new smart cities will balance hands, heart, and head.
Smart City 2.0: Strategies and Innovations for City Development retails for US$148 / £130 (hardcover) and is also available in electronic formats. To order or know more about the book, visit http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/12871.
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About the Editors
Deog-Seong Oh is the President of Woosong University and a former President of Chungnam National University (2016–2022), both in Daejeon, South Korea. Dr. Oh is an expert in public and urban policy, economic development and technology commercialization. Dr. Oh is a member of the UNESCO High Panel on Science for Development and Organizing Committee Chair for UNESCO’s Global Innovation Forum. He is a former Secretary-General of the World Technopolis Association. He received a Master of Urban Planning in 1979 and a Master of Science in Architecture from Seoul National University, Korea, in 1981. He earned a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from Hanover University, Germany, in 1989. He did post-doctoral research at the University of Sheffield, UK, in 1993, and was visiting professor at the University of Dortmund from 2002–2004. He previously served as vice president of the Korean Planners Association (2000–2002) and Korean Urban Management Association (2010–2012). He is also the chief editor of Asian Pacific Planning Review. He has published 250 papers on urban planning and design, sustainable development and regional innovation.
Fred Young Phillips is currently on faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA. He is the 2017 winner of the Kondratieff Medal, awarded by the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the President-Elect of the Academy of Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Knowledge (ACIEK), Spain, a society of innovation and entrepreneurship scholars, and he coordinates TANDO, a think tank recently spun out of the University of Texas at Austin. Fred is a Fellow of the Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET). Dr. Phillips is the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Elsevier’s international journal Technological Forecasting & Social Change. He has consulted worldwide on technology-based regional development. He is a founder of the Austin Technology Council and was also a Board member of the Software Association of Oregon, USA. Dr. Phillips attended the University of Texas, USA and Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, earning a Ph.D. at Texas (1978) in mathematics and management science.
Avvari V Mohan is the Professor and Deputy Head of Engagement & Impact at Monash University Business School, Malaysia. Mohan received his Ph.D. in Marketing and Innovation from the Department of Management Studies of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India, following which he visited South Korea on a Research Fellowship at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Prior to joining Monash University, he was the Associate Professor of Strategy & Innovation and the Director of Research at the Nottingham University Business School (NUBS) in the University of Nottingham Malaysia (UNM). He also served as a member of the Faculty of Management at Multimedia University, Cyberjaya, Malaysia. His research interests are in the areas of Strategy and Innovation with special interest in sustainability-oriented Strategies. He is particularly interested in collaborations or linkages firms develop with other organizations for Innovation and Sustainable Development. He has served as a Council Member of the Consumer Forum (CFM) for the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Industry, as a recourse person in World Technopolis Association (WTA)-UNESCO workshops, and recently as Innovation Auditor for the Malaysian Industry-Government Group for High Technology (MIGHT), Malaysia.
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DOI
10.1142/12871
