Smart Cities: Concepts, Perceptions and Lessons for Planners

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Abstract

What is a “smart” city? This paper examines concepts and perceptions of city officials from six “smart” cities, Boston, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Singapore and Rio de Janeiro. Their “smart” efforts, gathered through interviews and secondary sources, are analyzed against four theories of “smart” cities; (a) “smart machines” and informated organizations, (b) partnerships and collaboration, (c) learning and adaptation, and (d) investing for the future. The findings show that instead of converging toward a single definition of being “smart”, the cities have taken different approaches in planning and implementation, and adopt different combinations of elements from the theories. The cities’ experiences and elements of being “smart” are distilled and presented as learning points and pathways for other cities.

Keywords

Electric Vehicle Smart City Technology Provider Traffic Prediction Informated Organization 
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.
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This chapter is primarily based on the Master’s thesis of Tuan-Yee Ching submitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ching 2013). We also acknowledge the helpful comments of Rob Goodspeed and anonymous reviewers and the partial support of the Singapore National Research Foundation through the “Future Urban Mobility” program of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Urban Redevelopment AuthoritySingaporeSingapore
  2. 2.Department of Urban Studies and PlanningMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyCambridgeUSA

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