دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی برنامه ریزی شهر هوشمند از منظر تکاملی - تیلور و فرانسیس 2018

ABSTRACT

In the theory of urban development, the evolutionary perspective is becoming dominant. Cities are understood as complex systems shaped by bottom-up processes with outcomes that are hard to foresee and plan for. This perspective is strengthened by the current turn towards smart cities and the intensive use of digital technologies to optimize urban ecosystems. This paper extends the evolutionary thinking and emerging dynamics of cities to smart city planning. It is based on recent efforts for a smart city strategy in Thessaloniki that enhances the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of the city. Taking advantage of opportunities offered by the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge, the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities, the World Bank, and the EU Horizon 2020 Program, Thessaloniki shaped a strategy for an inclusive economy, resilient infrastructure, participatory governance, and open data. This process, however, does not have the usual features of planning. It reveals the complex dimension of smart city planning as a synthesis of technologies, user engagement, and windows of opportunity, which are fuzzy at the start of the planning process. The evolutionary features of cities, which until now were ascribed to the working of markets, are now shaping the institutional aspects of planning for smart cities.

Conclusions: Towards an Evolutionary Perspective of Smart City Planning

This smart city strategy and action plan formation process challenges not only the concept of top-down planning, but also the capacity for smart city plans being formulated exclusively by state authorities. Smart city planning as a complex process was discussed by Leydesdorff and Deakin (2011) and Deakin (2015). The authors link smart city planning to the rise of triple helix governance and attribute its neo-evolutionary character to three functions that shape the selection environments of the smart city knowledge economy: organized knowledge production, economics of wealth creation, and reflexive control. Reflexivity is not a given, but socially constructed by evolving communication systems and cultural settings.

No doubt, the triple helix is a driver of complexity. All the more so is quadruple helix governance with the wide participation of users and multi-actor decision-making. The evolution of technologies and the case study discussed earlier reveal that strong drivers of complexity are also the innovation push created by initiatives launched by global organizations, bottom-up innovation introducing applications and e-services, and the changing urban behavior of users due to real-time information and participation through social media. Cities take advantage of initiatives, partnerships, and policy frameworks at regional and national levels also, which evolve over time, appear as windows of opportunity, and disappear after a while to give way to other opportunities. At a regional level, for instance, the search for investment opportunities is expressed by the concept of “entrepreneurial discovery” in the context of smart specialization strategies, which is to define a policy mix and actions through a process of discovery and innovation driven by the engagement of companies, closer to “choosing races and placing bets” rather than “picking the winners” (Landabaso, 2014; McCann, 2015).