Shaping Smart for Better Cities: Rethinking and Shaping Relationships between Urban Space and Digital Technologies

Shaping Smart for Better Cities powerfully demonstrates the range of theoretical and practical challenges, opportunities and success factors involved in successfully deploying digital technologies in cities, focusing on the importance of recognizing local context and multi-layered urban relationships in designing successful urban interventions. The first section, ‘Rethinking Smart (in) Places’ interrogates the smart city from a theoretical vantage point. The second part, ‘Shaping Smart Places’ examines various case studies critically. Hence the volume offers an intellectual resource that expands on the current literature, but also provides a pedagogical resource to universities as well as a reflective opportunity for practitioners. The cases allow for an examination of the practical implications of smart interventions in space, whilst the theoretical reflections enable expansion of the literature. Students are encouraged to learn from case studies and apply that learning in design. Academics will gain from the learning embedded in the documentation of the case studies in different geographic contexts, while practitioners can apply their learning to the conceptualisation of new forms of technology use.

• Demonstrates how to adapt smart urban interventions for hyper-local context in geographic parameters, spatial relationships, and socio-political characteristics
• Provides a problem-solving approach based on specific smart place examples, applicable to real-life urban management
• Offers insights from numerous case studies of smart cities interventions in real civic spaces

Alessandro Aurigi is Professor of Urban Design and Associate Dean: Research at the University of Plymouth, UK. He was previously Head of the School of Architecture, Design and Environment at Plymouth. He also worked at Newcastle University where he was Director (Head of Department) of Architecture, and as a lecturer at UCL (UK). His research focuses on the relationships between our increasingly digital society and the ways we conceive, design, and manage urban space, to enhance and support place quality. Alex is a member of the Peer-Review College of the AHRC, and has published widely on the topic of digital technology and urban space.

Nancy Odendaal is Associate Professor in City and Regional Planning at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on three interconnected areas of enquiry: infrastructure development, technology innovation and socio-spatial change in cities. She has published extensively on smart cities, with her research focused on the interface between new technologies and marginalised spaces. Previously, Nancy was based at the African Centre for Cities (at the University of Cape Town), where she coordinated the expansion of the Association of African Planning Schools (AAPS), and managed an Africa-wide project on curricula reform of city and regional planning education.