Scaling the Smart City

Scaling the Smart City engages with the smart city as a problem of scale. It disentangles the smart city from its corporate and technocratic stronghold by presenting an accessible design framework that productively aligns philosophical thinking on technology with foundational technical understandings of urban technology and smart system design.

The knowledge and know-how to design and create urban technologies and smart cities are steadily moving from a niche field to a core industry competency. This book outlines a cross-scalar design framework, developed to teach smart city design to designers and engineers. It unpacks smart city initiatives and demystifies physical computing system design concepts, while complementing and mediating between critical social theory perspectives of the smart city and technically comprehensive case studies. The book’s analysis of real-world case examples and design prototypes demonstrates how design thinking and practice can better engage with the ethical implications of creating urban technologies and smart systems for society. It uses a clear, accessible, and instructive style of writing that synthesizes relevant scholarship and concepts to develop the reader’s foundational understanding of the contemporary smart city paradigm.

This book is an invaluable resource for readers in the established fields and professions of design, architecture, urban design, and city planning, as well as the emerging fields of urban technology and urban interaction design.

• Connects theory and practice to extend understanding of urban technologies and smart cities
• Leverages real-world case examples and design prototypes to explore critical philosophical and ethical questions around the implications of technology in the urban and built environment
• Provides an accessible and illustrative guide to technical principles of urban sensing and sense making apparatus foundational to the design of urban technology and smart cities
• Utilizes visual iconography and diagramming to illustrate urban technology concepts, configurations, sequences, interactivity, and technical systems