Talk:Smart city

List of smart cities

In Germany a test-city, the 'T-City' Friedrichshafen, exists. Also see de:T-City. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.187.57.48 (talk) 08:06, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

In Slovenia, the capitol Ljubljana has recently become the Green Capitol of Europe being an example of a city of the future. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.161.20.174 (talk) 08:22, 11 April 2016 (UTC) In Singapore the IDA is leading the development of the first smart nation, but to be honest the city-state is of course a smart city. See: http://www.ida.gov.sg/Infocomm-Landscape/Smart-Nation-Vision — Preceding unsigned comment added by Huggi (talk • contribs) 07:34, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

The list of flagship cases has been rearranged into alphabetical order for ease of reference, and Manchester's CityVerve project (launched earlier this year) has also been included — Preceding unsigned comment added by WillPritchard (talk • contribs) 15:58, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

Added full definition

We've put together a full definition to replace the previous disambiguation page (keeping the existing links to MAlt and Kochi Smart Cities). Currently contacting some experts in the field for feedback, after which I will start adding link to this page in other relevant entries.

Comments and suggestions would be appreciated on this page. Thanks

--Spartakan (talk) 11:21, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Crosslinking now done --Spartakan (talk) 15:24, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

It is a valiant effort to define this concept when there is no generally accepted definition. While I agree it is useful to disambiguate Smart vs Digital Cities. Primarily through the focus on "Intellectual and Social Capital" in Smart Cities. Note that I would remove "The latter form of capital is decisive for urban competitiveness", as social capital is ONE of the factors in urban competitiveness, but I find no evidence to prove it is more "decisive" than the many other factors. In fact the most decisive factor is probably economies of scale.

The differentiation between Smart vs Intelligent Cities seems more forced as, in general, these terms are considered synonyms, and the fact that knowledge communication and intellectual capital are state as part of Smart Cities, goes towards emphasising this link.

-- Neilireson (talk) 06:53, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

This does not seem very informative or encyclopedic

Honestly, I didn't get past the lead paragraph. The article immediately seems laden with jargon, vague concepts, and perhaps even an ideology... I feel like I'm being sold something. I also don't feel the lead tells me anything about what a "Smart City" is.

This looks like the article is in critical need of a fix, and I'm not in a position to do so, knowing nothing about the topic. zadignose (talk) 09:53, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

• I do agree. The key ideas may all be within the article somewhere, but the presentation is very messy. A good start would be 'A smart city is xxx' where xxx is replaced by a one sentence synthesis of the definitions given elsewhere in the article. The lead should of course note that the definition is not yet firm, and should also summarise the article better. Should we give the article a bit of a spring clean? Thoughts? PeterEastern (talk) 11:26, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

• I have now cleaned up the lead and the correctly/sorted some of the references. Do note however that although I am reasonably experienced with WP and do work in the transport info sector I am not a expert on the subject of smart cities. I am learning as I go along, but do please dive in if the text doe not accurately reflect the many sources. PeterEastern (talk) 19:25, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

• I have now trimmed a couple of sections heavily. There is certainly content to add, but first I have been removing content which doesn't not seem to add anything to the article. I did also removed a 'multiple issues' banner added anonymously re POV and Accuracy - such banners should only be added after discussion on the talk page. I for one would welcome discussion on the subject here. PeterEastern (talk) 07:03, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Sterling work, well done! I once had a keen interest in eco-city planning, Slow Cities etc. but don't have the time to analyse this article closely and spend a lot of time on it, apart from to agree with the above comment that it was a bit of a promotional mess! It's already looking 100% better. It could potentially be a valuable inclusion for Wikipedia, but had become a place for every Tom, Dick and Harry to promote their city or tech product. Well done PeterEastern so far! Sionk (talk) 10:58, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

You could argue that it's important to make the reader aware that there is more to "Smart Cities" than nice ways to spend public money on private sector projects (which is what the reference to neo-liberalism is about). But entropy has been eating away at the article, so it definitely needs a refresh and an update. See also my comment below. --Spartakan (talk) 11:04, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

• Thanks. Happy to work on this and appreciate the support. I think the timing is good in that smart cities are getting a high profile in the media, the term is possibly also getting more tightly defined and there is good usage of the article (circa 20K views a month). PeterEastern (talk) 12:24, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
• I am continuing to work on the article. Yesterday I added am image to the lead from a hackathon in New York which seems appropriate and emphasises the importance of citizen engagement. I added links to 'external resources', trimmed the 'see also' section and removed the list of cities entirely. I removed the list because most entries didn't have citations, lists often get completely out of hand in WP and there is no obvious way to indicate notability. I do intend to add mentions to the most notably early ones, based on an official source from a good organisation to provide notability. For now I am continuing to slowly weed out materials that I don't believe helps the article, giving time for people to feedback if they don't like the direction I am taking. PeterEastern (talk) 08:59, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
• I have worked on the characteristics section (see section below), integrated some good material from Intelligent Cities and reorganised the citations into a more academic format where we can refer multiple times to the same source, quoting a different page on each occasion. It gets a bit more fiddly to get the citations right when done this way, but for more academic articles I think it is worth the effort. Ordinary citations can still be used, the complex format is only used for longer works that are likely to be referenced multiple times.PeterEastern (talk) 08:17, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Integral city design

Perhaps the most important issue isn't mentioned, namely that by making integral city designs (so including power supply, water, transport, ...) and selling these designs, there is much environmental and economic benefit to be made. A downside is that the entire city becomes part of a single project developer, in some cases. See Studio de Stad article in Dutch and New Towns Institute 2A02:A03F:12AE:9500:F16A:1646:502:7A0F (talk) 13:20, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Do you have any references to support the above comment? PeterEastern (talk) 08:31, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Characteristics section - start again?

What is this section trying to say? I find it almost meaningless and wonder if it might be best to delete it and start again. Any objections to erasing it? We can of course reintegrate any relevant parts of the deleted content and any important references into the content. I will leave a note on the talk pages of people who have contributed to the article to encourage them to engage. PeterEastern (talk) 08:23, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

This page was created as part of an academic-led Smart Cities project which is maybe why the approach seems "jargonistic". I agree that it is probably due and update / refresh but the references did represent a consensus view of the position 5 years ago. I'm no longer working in the area so I'm not going to get involved in editing now. For what it's worth, my concern though is that the definition of "Smart City" allows that the term is about more than cool transport and power infrastructures. Lesson learning (knowledge management) by city managers and citizen participation in agenda setting are also important aspects of a "Smart City". You may also want to look at Intelligent city - can the pages be merged? Spartakan (talk) 10:56, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

• Thanks for the feedback and context. Totally agree re citizen participation. I do agree that Intelligent city and indeed also Ubiquitous city should be considered for merging - I have put a formal merge proposal banner on Ubiquitous city and responded to an informal merge proposal on Intelligent city. I realise that I have not notified this article about the proposed merge into it, which I should do. Currently waiting for comments. PeterEastern (talk) 12:19, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
• I have reworked this section, boiling it down to a few simple points. I hope I haven't simplified it too far, but I think the article is now usable by the average reader. PeterEastern (talk) 07:15, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Merging

I have now put merge banners of Intelligent city, Ubiquitous city and MESH city‎ and am awaiting comments on those articles. None so far. Unless I get comments without resolution to support the move, I will convert them into redirects to this article early next week and integrate an relevant materials. None of these other articles have high readership and don't seem to be very active. As such, I am confident personally that we are doing the merge in the right direction. PeterEastern (talk) 08:52, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

• I have completed to merging of these three articles, which are now all redirects to this one. PeterEastern (talk) 06:39, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
• I have now created a merge proposal for Digital city, which is another short article about a very similar concept. PeterEastern (talk) 02:34, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
• I have just converted Digital City to a redirect to this article. PeterEastern (talk) 21:10, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
• To note that I have also put a merge banner on Smart Nation, proposing that it is converted to a redirect to here, with a brief mention of the Singapore project of that name in this article. I have added a note to talk:Singapore suggesting that people may want to integrate more detail into the Singapore article. No one has taken me up on that yet. I think... that will complete the rationalisation of the articles, all mentioned in this section, with all of redirecting to here with no objections to date. PeterEastern (talk) 21:21, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

That seems a bit hasty. I've just had a look at the Intelligent city article, which had a number of believable sources about that very subject, so clearly wasn't an invention of someone's mind. I would tend to give more than 10 days to allow people to comment on the proposals (people lead busy lives and the concepts are not straightforward to disentangle).

From what I can see from a cusory reading of each article, the Smart City concept seems much more practical and grounded in reality, while the Intelligent City idea seems more conceptual (and no evidence it's yet been explicitly applied).

I would be inclined to revert the removal of the Intelligent city article. There's no evidence it has been merged at all into this article and it would be a shame to lose it.

-- Sionk (talk) 23:33, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Sionk. I have responded to this to on talk:Intelligent city. Totally support discussion on the subject, but suggest we do it all in one place and use talk:Intelligent city for that purpose. When we have a conclusion our conversation there we can close this thread off with a brief note on what we decided. Does that makes sense? PeterEastern (talk) 12:36, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Sounds fine. Sionk (talk) 14:17, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

To note that a proposal was added to this article recently proposing a merge of Spatial intelligence of cities. PeterEastern (talk) 11:08, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Integration of content

This article now contains content from a number sources that have been cut/pasted from other places, notably from Intelligent city and Spatial intelligence of cities. The next stage is to create a single readable article which ideally be shorter and clearer than the current text as duplicated concepts are merged. I will have a go at that over the coming weeks, but it would be much better if this was a joint project with others getting involved, so do please WP:be bold and get editing! PeterEastern (talk) 11:29, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

I have now completed a pass to clean up references and do some basic integration of existing content. I have to say that I don't like this article as it stands. It seems a rag bag of concepts with a lot of overlap. It is also very academic, and was, I understand initially created with a lot of academic viewpoint. It is also very much frozen in about 2007-2009, which for a fast moving concept like this is old. I will continue to work on the article, integrating ideas from more recent material and weeding out the old over the coming weeks. Would very much encourage others to get involved. PeterEastern (talk) 18:53, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

I have just completed a big edit to the article, trimming a considerable amount of the words to try to get closer to the essence of the article and remove duplication. PeterEastern (talk) 20:33, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

I hope you can revamp this cumbersome system--having notes (linked to a list of citations where the name "Komninos" is ommipresent)) and references, besides a "Further Reading" list, is overkill and makes for difficult editing. Thanks. Drmies (talk) 18:49, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

• I agree that Komnios is too dominant which is why I have collected the further reading and external links that I have done. Will weed the links now, but please can we keep them associated with the article until I have had a chance to use some of them as references? As for the 'cumbersome system', I suggest it is the best way to organise sources when one has multiple references to different pages of the same source. If you can suggest a better way then please let me know. PeterEastern (talk) 20:10, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

That's not difficult to solve: you do all the references in one system, like in Bramshill House. Right now you have bibliographical notes in two different systems. Drmies (talk) 01:47, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, much simpler. Have adjusted as per Bramshill House. Is that better? PeterEastern (talk) 02:00, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

• Have trimmed further reading of some older materials, and also edited out the references to Komninos 2002 and Komninos 2006 to reduce the over-reliance on his work. Still loads of work to do on the article, and probably still worth doing a but more pruning, but soon at the point to review the materials in external links and either use them as reference or probably ditch most of them from external links. Have just read the Townsend book 'Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia' which is full of great stuff. Do please get involved in the process - this is an important article, and needs loads of input. PeterEastern (talk) 20:29, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Links cut from 'external link'

Following prompt by Drmies, I have removed these links from the article, as they don't belong in a WP article. They may however be useful when developing the article:

• Smart Cities Group at MIT
• IBM Smarter city challenge - IBM
• The Smarter City - IBM
• CityNext - Microsoft
• Smart connected communities - Cisco Systems

-- PeterEastern (talk) 07:13, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

History?

The article is self-absorbed to me, and the criticicm by zadignose above is still completely valid even though there seems to have been some work since. the definition is so slopppily referenced and presented I cant make head or tail of it. A definition must include time, some words where the term comes from etc.--Wuerzele (talk) 20:45, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

Totally agree with the above. To date I have successfully merged a bunch of articles on overlapping concepts and then removed the duplications. I am currently reading around the subject and my next move is going to be to add a history section and improve the definition. Would love to have some help with this if anyone is up for that.. PeterEastern (talk) 02:12, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Future

How to link to: Lpwan and Lorawan, these two technologies/topics/protocols are now developing, one of the early adopters is Swisscom, see: http://lpn.swisscom.com/E/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Huggi (talk • contribs) 07:37, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Mesh City

This comment has been copied here from talk:MESH city. The MESH city article has now been converted into a redirect to this article PeterEastern (talk) 04:17, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

MESH Cities are an evolution of the concept of smart cities and, because of that, deserve recognition as a distinct entity. The late Dr. William Mitchell of MIT embraced the term Smart Cities in the 1990s. As someone who was advised by Dr. Mitchell, I'd suggest that he did not envision the term being a final, generic descriptor. He would have encouraged that intelligent cities be shaped by new methods and approaches never envisioned under the Smart Cities umbrella. MESH Cities are to Smart Cities what a Boeing 787 is to the general topic of commercial passenger aircraft. We allow those distinctions in fields like aviation, why lump distinct innovations in a category back to the initial concept? In the past MESH Cities was linked as a reference in Smart Cities. I suggest we return to that approach. Many thanks for your reply. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Robertyyz (talk • contribs) 17:32, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. I suggest that we add content to this effect to the Smart City article rather than reinstate the MESH City article. I intend to get to this soon, but others are of course welcome to do so before then. PeterEastern (talk) 04:17, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Criticism

Beyond previous comments that challenge the encyclopedic character of the writing, the 'Criticism' section needs to be expanded. There is plenty of critical views (from academia as well as civil society) on the concept. I will add to that progressively in the coming weeks, further contributions/additions are needed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Adrienberlin (talk • contribs) 13:52, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Please do! This was clearly a dumping ground for all sorts of groups trying to market the latest buzzword. Use neutral language please, and see WP:SOLUTION for example. Thanks. W Nowicki (talk) 23:20, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

The opening paragraph is being used by thousands of people on their PowerPoint slides as the definition of a smart city, and as others have alluded to above, it's not reflective of where the smart city agenda is now and is heading. I tried to apply some very minor edits to rectify this issue, e.g. by alluding to the current focus away from a technocratic / tech vendor perspective and towards one that focusses on people and sustainability. Fountains_of_Bryn_Mawr thinks my edit was "just too fluffy/promotional" – I obviously disagree with them, and welcome others to chime in, as this page needs to be updated urgently considering how many page views it gets on a regular basis. To see my version, please access the page history. sunday9pm (talk) 01:53, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia articles should follow a WP:TONE. The lead change simply reworded everything in the form of WP:BUZZWORDS such as "foster sustainability", "Urban assets", "achieve sustainability". Not an improvement. Who said what did what where and when is what the article needs, its not a promotional template for PowerPoint presentations. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 16:03, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

The term "assets" was and now still is used heavily in the opening paragraph. I did not add that, it was already there. It is not a buzzword. The re-focus of the smart city agenda in recent years on people and sustainability rather than simplistic tech solutions is real, and anyone who actually knows something about smart city research and practice will confirm that. Just look up any smart city event, research paper published after 2013, city government policy direction, and check what they focus on. Neither people nor sustainability are buzzwords or fluffy or promotional. Your blunt reversal of my edit is not an improvement, it just represents protectionism it seems for no reason. Further, you may not want the article to be "a promotional template for PowerPoint presentations" – but my experience going to such events and reading student papers shows that the definition is used on such PowerPoint presentations, and it is wrong. I'm a Professor of Urban Informatics, I have researched and worked in this space since 2002, and I'm working with hundreds of colleagues in academia, in local municipalities around the world, and in industry. What are your credentials to tell me I'm wrong? Your user page does not tell me. sunday9pm (talk) 20:25, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

Please take a look through Wikipedia policy and guidelines, its not a matter of what you know, its what you can cite. If you are an expert on this then you can readily bring up reliable citations on it. The corollary of that is anyone else can edit an article on any given topic because they can also look up the citations. Please note, Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal, an article should be able to explain something to an average reader and follow WP:TECHNICAL. In other words, how would you explain this to a non-student who just walked through your office door? I took a whack at the lead re: basic definition referenced to a secondary source. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 20:50, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you. That's much better and constructive advice than just reverting an edit willy-nilly. I have edited your edit, and added further references. However, I believe your edit removed crucial references to other Wikipedia articles that should be kept, so I have re-inserted them. sunday9pm (talk) 21:17, 17 October 2017 (UTC)