Suchergebnisse

Smart city is currently a trendy concept that has been promoted by many international companies, universities and cities, such as IBM, CISCO, MIT, Shanghai, as well as the European Union. This top down, technocratic approach has been severely criticized in many academic publications. Concurrently there is an increasing buzz emerging from citizens – women and men, who are involved in the application of community informatics for self-organization in urban settings. Consequently, the smart city as a contested concept and an initiative is under social and political construction. We argue that the smart city can be better understood and implemented, when framed from a holistic and integrative perspective as a multi-scalar and multi-dimensional endeavor that is approached through "expanded urban planning". The aim of the article is to present and discuss the expanded urban planning approach as an alternative story to smart cities. The relevance of this approach is assessed in the light of a case study of Designing for the Smart City, a course for future architects and planners, at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy.

No building or neighbourhood is an island but a constantly changing complex adaptive system produced by many contemporaneous, mostly interconnected and parallel but sometimes also conflicting processes. By using the development of Aalto University Campus, Finland, as an example of such a complex adaptive system in the course of change processes, the article demonstrates the challenge of transforming the production of our urban environment to truly meet the goals of sustainable development. Ecological sustainability is here understood as the need for regeneration, which is proposed as necessary in the current state of the planet. The article uses the concept of the perceived systemic environment and argues for its paradigmatic role in this context. Perceptions of the systemic environment affect and steer the actual goal setting of the stakeholders/actors in the system and can either enhance or even override the transition towards sustainability. The article suggests a way to steer the change towards a more regenerative perception of the systemic environment.

This book forms a selection of chapters submitted for the CUPUM (Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management) conference, held in the second week of June 2021 at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Chapters were selected from a double-blind review process by the conference's scientific committee. The chapters in the book cover developments and applications with big data and urban analytics, collaborative urban planning, applications of geodesign and innovations, and planning support science.