Advertisement

The European Physical Journal Special Topics

, Volume 214, Issue 1, pp 481–518 | Cite as

Smart cities of the future

  • M. BattyEmail author
  • K. W. Axhausen
  • F. Giannotti
  • A. Pozdnoukhov
  • A. Bazzani
  • M. Wachowicz
  • G. Ouzounis
  • Y. Portugali
Open Access
Regular Article
First Online:

Abstract

Here we sketch the rudiments of what constitutes a smart city which we define as a city in which ICT is merged with traditional infrastructures, coordinated and integrated using new digital technologies. We first sketch our vision defining seven goals which concern: developing a new understanding of urban problems; effective and feasible ways to coordinate urban technologies; models and methods for using urban data across spatial and temporal scales; developing new technologies for communication and dissemination; developing new forms of urban governance and organisation; defining critical problems relating to cities, transport, and energy; and identifying risk, uncertainty, and hazards in the smart city. To this, we add six research challenges: to relate the infrastructure of smart cities to their operational functioning and planning through management, control and optimisation; to explore the notion of the city as a laboratory for innovation; to provide portfolios of urban simulation which inform future designs; to develop technologies that ensure equity, fairness and realise a better quality of city life; to develop technologies that ensure informed participation and create shared knowledge for democratic city governance; and to ensure greater and more effective mobility and access to opportunities for urban populations. We begin by defining the state of the art, explaining the science of smart cities. We define six scenarios based on new cities badging themselves as smart, older cities regenerating themselves as smart, the development of science parks, tech cities, and technopoles focused on high technologies, the development of urban services using contemporary ICT, the use of ICT to develop new urban intelligence functions, and the development of online and mobile forms of participation. Seven project areas are then proposed: Integrated Databases for the Smart City, Sensing, Networking and the Impact of New Social Media, Modelling Network Performance, Mobility and Travel Behaviour, Modelling Urban Land Use, Transport and Economic Interactions, Modelling Urban Transactional Activities in Labour and Housing Markets, Decision Support as Urban Intelligence, Participatory Governance and Planning Structures for the Smart City. Finally we anticipate the paradigm shifts that will occur in this research and define a series of key demonstrators which we believe are important to progressing a science of smart cities.

Graphical abstract

Open image in new window

Keywords

Global Position System European Physical Journal Special Topic Travel Behaviour Smart City Human Mobility 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Download to read the full article text

References

  1. 1.
    A. Aurigi. Making the Digital City: The Early Shaping of Urban Internet Space (Ashgate Publishing Company, Farnborough, UK, 2005)Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    K.W. Axhausen, Env. Planning B: Planning Design 35, 981 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  3. 3.
    M. Batty, Technology highs. The Guardian 29 (1989)Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    M. Batty, Env. Planning B: Planning Design 17, 247 (1990)ADSGoogle Scholar
  5. 5.
    M. Batty, International Planning Studies 2, 155 (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  6. 6.
    M. Batty, Cities and Complexity: Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models, and Fractals (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005)Google Scholar
  7. 7.
    M. Batty, Env. Planning B: Planning Design 37, 577 (2010)Google Scholar
  8. 8.
    A. Bazzani, B. Giorgini, L. Giovannini, R. Gallotti, S. Rambald, MIPRO2011, 1615 (2011)Google Scholar
  9. 9.
    A. Bazzani, B. Giorgini, S. Rambaldi, Encyclopaedia of Complexity, Systems Science, edited by R. Meyers 3, 9411 (2009)Google Scholar
  10. 10.
    A. Bazzani, B. Giorgini, S. Rambaldi, R. Gallotti, L. Giovanninii, J. Stat. Mechanics: Theory Exper. 5, P05001 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  11. 11.
    E. Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics (Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008)Google Scholar
  12. 12.
    A. Caragliu, C. Del Bo, P. Nijkamp, Smart Cities in Europe. VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Econometrics, Research Memoranda 0048, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2009Google Scholar
  13. 13.
    W.H. Dutton, J.G. Blumler, K.L. Kraemer, Wired Cities: Shaping the Future of Communications (G. K. Hall, New York, 1987)Google Scholar
  14. 14.
    N. Eagle, A. Pentland, Pers. Ubiquitous Comp. 10, 255 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. 15.
    N. Eagle, A. Pentland, Behavior. Ecol. Sociobiol. 63, 1057 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. 16.
    R.K. Brail (Editor), Planning Support Systems for Cities and Regions (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, MA, 2008)Google Scholar
  17. 17.
    E.O. Fernandes, et al., Smart Cities Initiative: How to Foster a Quick Transition towards Local Sustainable Energy Systems (http://think.eui.eu/) (2011)
  18. 18.
    L.M. Correia, et al., Smart Cities Applications and Requirements. White Paper, 2011-05-20, Net!Works European Technology Platform Expert Working Group (http://www.networks-etp.eu/) (2011)
  19. 19.
    R. Giffinger, et al., Smart Cities Ranking of European Medium-Sized Cities. Centre of Regional Science, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria (http://www.smart-cities.eu/) (2007)
  20. 20.
    P. Expert, T. Evans, V. Blondel, R. Lambiotte, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 108, 7663 (2011)ADSCrossRefGoogle Scholar
  21. 21.
    Edited by F. Giannotti, D. Pedreschi, Mobility, Data Mining and Privacy (Springer, Berlin, 2008)Google Scholar
  22. 22.
    F. Giannotti, M. Nanni, D. Pedreschi, F. Pinelli, C. Renso, S. Rinzivillo, R. Trasarti. Unveiling the complexity of human mobility by querying and mining massive trajectory data. The VLDB Journal, DOI: 10.1007/s00778-011-0244-8, 2011
  23. 23.
    F. Giannotti, M. Nanni, F. Pinelli, D. Pedreschi. Trajectory pattern mining. ACM SIGKDD 2007, Proceedings, International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 330 (2007)Google Scholar
  24. 24.
    M.C. Gonzalez, C.A. Hidalgo, A-L. Barabasi, Nature 453, 779 (2008)ADSCrossRefGoogle Scholar
  25. 25.
    M. Granovetter, Amer. J. Sociol. 78, 1360 (1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  26. 26.
    C. Harrison, B. Eckman, R. Hamilton, P. Hartswick, J. Kalagnanam, J. Paraszczak, P. Williams, IBM J. Res. Develop. 54, 1 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  27. 27.
    IFF. 2020 Forecast: The Future of Cities, Information, and Inclusion: A Planet of Civic Laboratories, Technology Horizons Program, Palo Alto, CA 94301 (http://www.iftf.org/) (2011)
  28. 28.
    J.E. Innes, D.E. Booher, Planning with Complexity: An Introduction to Collaborative Rationality for Public Policy (Routledge, London, 2010)Google Scholar
  29. 29.
    T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL., 1962)Google Scholar
  30. 30.
    R. Lambiotte, V. Blondel, C. De Kerchove, E. Huens, C. Prieur, Z. Smoreda, P. Van Dooren, Physica A: Stat. Mech. Applic. 387, 5317 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  31. 31.
    J. Larsen, J. Urry, K.W. Axhausen, Mobilities, Networks, Geographies (Ashgate Publishing Company, Farnborough, UK, 2002)Google Scholar
  32. 32.
    M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw Hill, New York, 1964)Google Scholar
  33. 33.
    M. Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2011)Google Scholar
  34. 34.
    A. Noulas, S. Scellato, R. Lambiotte, M. Pontil, C.S. Mascolo. A tale of many cities: Universal patterns in human urban mobility [arXiv:1108.5355] (2011)Google Scholar
  35. 35.
    F. Pagliara, M. de Bok, D. Simmonds, A. Wilson (eds.), Employment Location in Cities and Regions: Models and Applications (Springer, Heidelberg, DE, 2013)Google Scholar
  36. 36.
    Y. Portugali, Complexity, Cognition and the City (Springer, Heidelberg, DE, 2011)Google Scholar
  37. 37.
    A. Pozdnoukhov, C. Kaiser, Proceedings of the Location-Based Social Networks Workshop, ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS’2011 19 (2011)Google Scholar
  38. 38.
    J. Reades, F. Calabrese, C. Ratti, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 36, 824 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  39. 39.
    H.J. Rittel, Panel on Policy Sciences, Amer. Association Adv. Sci. 4, 155 (1969)Google Scholar
  40. 40.
    S. Sassen, Talking Back to Your Intelligent City (http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/cities/talking-back-to-your-intelligent-city) (2011)
  41. 41.
    S. Scellato, A. Noulas, R. Lambiotte, C. Mascolo. Socio-spatial properties of online location-based social networks. Proceedings of Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2011), Barcelona, Spain (2011), p. 5Google Scholar
  42. 42.
    S. Schnfelder, K.W. Axhausen, Urban Rhythms and Travel Behaviour: Spatial and Temporal Phenomena of Daily Travel (Ashgate Publishing Company, Farnborough, UK, 2010)Google Scholar
  43. 43.
    IBM Global Business Services, A Vision of Smarter Cities: How Cities Can Lead the Way into a Prosperous and Sustainable Future, (IBM Institute for Business Value, Somers, NY) (http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/gbe03227usen/GBE03227USEN.PDF) (2009)
  44. 44.
    C. Song, Z. Qu, N. Blumm, A-L. Barabsi, Science 327, 1018 (2010)MathSciNetADSzbMATHCrossRefGoogle Scholar
  45. 45.
    F. Walsh, A. Pozdnoukhov, Pervasive Urban Applications workshop at PERVASIVE (2011)Google Scholar
  46. 46.
    D. Wang, D. Pedreschi, C. Song, F. Giannotti, A.-L. Barabasi, Human mobility, social ties, and link prediction. Proceedings, International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (http://users.cis.fiu.edu/˜lzhen001/activities/KDD2011Program/docs/p1100.pdf) (2011)

Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2012

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Authors and Affiliations

  • M. Batty
    • 1
    Email author
  • K. W. Axhausen
    • 2
  • F. Giannotti
    • 3
  • A. Pozdnoukhov
    • 4
  • A. Bazzani
    • 5
  • M. Wachowicz
    • 6
  • G. Ouzounis
    • 7
  • Y. Portugali
    • 8
  1. 1.Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA)University College LondonLondonUK
  2. 2.IVT, ETHZrichSwitzerland
  3. 3.KDD Lab, Istituto ISTI, Area della Ricerca CNR di PisaUniversit di PisaPisaItaly
  4. 4.Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA)National Centre for Geocomputation, Iontas Building, NUI Maynooth, Co.KildareIreland
  5. 5.Department of Physics and National Institute of Nuclear PhysicsUniversity of BolognaBolognaItaly
  6. 6.Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), Department of Geodesy and Geomatics EngineeringUniversity of New BrunswickFrederictonCanada
  7. 7.Geo-Spatial Information Analysis for Global Security and Stability, Institute for the Security and Protection of the Citizen (IPSC) Joint Research CentreEuropean Commission, T.P.,IspraItaly
  8. 8.Department of Geography and the Human EnvironmentTel-Aviv UniversityTel AvivIsrael

Personalised recommendations