Contribution to the Knowledge Development for Smart Cities

Abstract

The complexity inherent to cities and urban systems is the core challenge in the attempts to measure their “smartness”. Numerous debates about Smart Cities reveal opinions split among scientific groups, stakeholders and urban actors, all competing for the Smart City idea. The debate about the direction towards which cities should develop is as persistent as the magnitude of the impact that the on-going, worldwide urbanisation has on the environment and quality of life. Despite the different viewpoints regarding components defining a Smart City, there seems to be consensus on the need for urgent transformation beyond a simple reproduction of state-of-the-art. To achieve this transformation, an in-depth understanding of the existing and potential interactions between the urban energy systems and their context is required for effective solutions containing the prospect of fitting the complex nature of urban environments. “Making” a Smart City is an attempt to embed new concepts, processes, and technologies coupling specific knowledge with specific actions in the first place. However, it also raises difficult questions. Taking a wider urban context as an argumentative background, this article navigates between the inconsistencies in definitions of Smart City and development concepts in search for answers and approaches that would be capable to disentangle the complex and interlinked urban networks, systems, and respective forces in play. The article highlights the ambiguous relationship between the individually framed technological development and its urban context, exposed by specific Austrian examples that provide an insight into concrete challenges, barriers and solutions. Finally, the article proposes to explore the Smart City as a relational system between concepts, technologies and processes that reflect on the importance of knowledge exchange in a multi-layered urban set-up.