URBP7005 Chap.10 Smart Cities and New Planning Paradigms
Smart Cities and New Planning Paradigms
Two sessions, one question from two directions
The first asks what happens to a city when it becomes instrumented, and sets four readings: a foundational statement on smart cities of the future, a review of trends, architectures, components and open challenges in sustainable smart cities, a systematic review of generative urban design covering problem formulation, design generation and decision making, and a treatment of generative artificial intelligence and smart cities in terms of efficiency, cohesion and sustainability.
The second asks what should organise planning at all, and sets four more.
Domains, and the question each reopens
The set paper topic names smart economy, smart governance, smart environment and smart mobility among others, and treats the list as open. The useful move is to attach a planning question to each rather than a technology, because technologies date and questions do not.
Smart governance reopens what counts as a public record, since a decision taken by a model on live data cannot be reviewed later unless the inputs are retained.
Smart environment reopens what is monitored, since a sensor network makes some things continuously visible and leaves everything else as invisible as before.
Where generative design fits
The systematic review organises generative urban design into three stages, and the ordering is the lesson.
Generation attracts attention and matters least to a planner, because producing a thousand candidate layouts decides nothing. Formulation fixes what the method is allowed to optimise, and decision making fixes who chooses among the candidates.
Both of those are planning decisions in the ordinary sense, and both are where a paper on this topic should spend its words.
Four candidates for the next organising idea
The paradigms session sets four readings that each propose a different centre for planning: a claim about entitlement in the right to the city, a claim about proximity in the measurement and evaluation of the ten, fifteen and twenty minute city, a claim about which risk should organise the plan in the shift from sustainable urbanism to climate urbanism, and a claim about what the pandemic revealed.
They are not mutually exclusive, but they rank differently, and a plan that claims all four is usually organised by none of them.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Four readings on the instrumented city, read as one argument
- 02
Application domains and the planning question each one reopens
- 03
Public record, accountability and live data
- 04
What a sensor network makes visible and what it leaves invisible
- 05
Generative design in three stages, and which stage matters
- 06
Four competing centres for planning
- 07
Auditing which centre a real plan is organised around
- 08
The proximity measure as the one you can compute
- 09
The constraints half of the learning outcome
State an opportunity and a risk in the form the topic asks for
- 3State the opportunity as a mechanism.
- 4Give two risks and place each in a domain.
- 2Name the planning question at stake.
Key terms
- Application Domain
- One of the areas of city life a smart city programme is organised into, such as economy, governance, environment or mobility, which the set paper topic asks you to name before assessing anything.
- Generative Urban Design
- Methods that produce candidate designs from a problem formulation rather than from a designer's sketch, reviewed in three stages of formulation, generation and decision making.
- Problem Formulation
- The first stage of a generative design process, which fixes what the method is permitted to optimise and is therefore a planning decision rather than a technical one.
- Climate Urbanism
- A proposed organising centre for planning in which climate risk rather than sustainability in general is the frame that ranks projects.
- Proximity Measure
- A measure of how much of daily life sits within a stated travel time of home, evaluated in the session reading for its usefulness in sustainable urban design.
Smart Cities and New Planning Paradigms FAQ
How should a paper on smart cities be structured?
Follow the set topic, which is also the safest structure. Set out the concept and the domains it is applied in first, then go further and give your own reading of what it makes possible and what it puts at risk, working from one named city.
That order keeps the promotional vocabulary under control, because a domain is a place where an existing planning decision gets re-made and writing the question rather than the device stops the section reading as a procurement brochure.
Which part of generative design should a planner care about?
Formulation and decision making rather than generation. A method that produces a thousand candidate layouts has decided nothing; what the method is allowed to optimise, and who chooses among the results, are ordinary planning decisions with ordinary accountability attached.
The systematic review set for this session organises the field in exactly that order, which is a useful defence when a paper is at risk of becoming a description of software.
What does the course expect beyond a description of the technology?
The learning outcomes ask for an understanding of the theoretical and conceptual propositions behind smart and resilient cities, and separately for an understanding of the constraints and barriers to developing sustainable, smart and resilient cities and regions. The second half is the one students drop. A section that names no constraint and no barrier has answered half of what the course says it wants.
How do I use a paradigm reading without overclaiming?
Comparatively and locally. Take your case city's current plan and work out which of the four centres it is actually organised around by reading the objectives and the budget rather than the introduction. Most plans turn out to be organised around growth with sustainability language attached, which is itself a finding.
Then say what would change if a different centre were adopted: which projects would move up, which would drop, and who would object.
Assessment move
Pick one smart city deployment in a real city and write a two column note: what it makes possible, and what decision it quietly moves out of the planning system. Then find the procurement or contract terms if they are public. The second column is almost always where the interesting material is, and it is the half of the learning outcome most answers leave empty.
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