Encyclopedia
Please note this is a comparison between Version 1 by Oleg Golubchikov and Version 3 by Mary J. Thornbush.
Hard and soft approaches to smart cities have been a contributedommon language in academic and policy literature, lending to the compartmentalizatioorigin of the smart city concept itself. The binary of the hard (, with the original technocratic) and soft (societal) focus now increasingly reframed as “citizen-centric”. The binary of the hard and soft is also often presented as a choice of pathways in the development of smart cities. This conceptualization has developed, however, with the original technocratic focus now increasingly reframed as “citizen-centric.”
- city strategies
- digital governance
- digital spaces
- smart city
CThe idea of the “smart city” ies around the world have embrace the "smart city" and launched initiatives to place people amid evolving piecemeal strategies. Central to such smart-city programs are digitization and developments in Information and s bringing a number of key and disruptive innovations into the operation of urban life, affecting social dynamics, governance, and markets. Developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the Internet of Things (IoT) make it possible to digitally connect myriads of devices, sensors, actuators, and smartphones and to simultaneously collect Big Data for analyzing, managing, and controlling the ever-increasing number of aspects of urban life. The uninterrupted high-resolution flow of users’ data, real-time responses to it, and the customization of services to tailor people’s individual needs, desires, and trajectories bring the promise of combined efficiency, integration, transparency, inclusiveness, and participation.
Consequently, mmunication Technologies (ICT), which are part of "hard" approaches in a any cities around the world have launched smart city initiatives, often supported by strategic city-level programs. Discursively, these strategies “place people at the center.” Meanwhile, at the core of the emergence of the smart city remain digitalization and ICT. This has produced the dichotomist framework. Among suchexpression of “hard” and “soft” approaches areto the smart city (e.g., [1,2]), where “hard” refers to ICT-centered applications as well as nd physical infrastructure, whereas soft approachess such as buildings, energy grids, natural resources, water and waste management, mobility, and logistics, while “soft” points to innovations, education, culture, social inclusion, and governance. Respectively, they represent a This discursive dichotomy referred to as of “hard” and “soft” may also appear in other forms such as “technical or ” or “social parts” or as part of an integrated (systems) approach [3].
The binary of the nature of unintegrated approaches forceshard and soft is also often presented as a choice of pathway choices in smart city s in the development. These can be framed as sectors frequently employed to encapsulate the of smart cities. It has become rare that a smart city vision does not include a form of a pie diagram plotting a circle in the middle that reads “smart city (e.g., fragmented into ” and is surrounded by sectors for “smart people, ”, “smart living, ”, “smart economy, ”, “smart government, ”, “smart environment, m”, and “smart mobility). However, this dichotomy of technology versus society is becoming increasingly difficult to practice and can pose an epistemological obstruction to” and their variations. This is supposed to demonstrate that the “soft” approach dominates. The smart city has quickly development, both conceptually and practically. Ultimately, technical approaches will need to be justified based on their societal purpose in expensive real-world applicationsed a dialogue with longer-standing principles of sustainable cities [8]. This lenads to a broader and varied engagement with smart cities necessarily, now involving stthe notions of multiple stakeholders, participation, citizens, and other soft/ social aspects [9]. MLetaifa [10], fore realistically is aexample, discusses the importance of approaching smart cities as complex innovation ecosystems approach thatwith integratesd socioeconomic, environmental, culturcological, and political sub-systems withinhile adopting a sustainability framapproach.
Nevework.
Amid thieless, there remain political tensions between hthe hard and soft pathways to achieving the the smart city remain. It is often the case that soft domains are emphasized in a discursive way to justify the rationale for the deployment of smart city. Imbalances exist in agendas that are dies, but that specific areas of real-life smart city application shift the emphasis back to the hard domains such as dataization, its enabling infrastructure, and the deployment of various ICT-based technological solutions. Many authors are cautious about imbalances when the smart city agenda is dominated by digital technology, with. They question whether so-called smart solutions are all about a technological pushes driven by high-tech corporations a(e.g., [11,12,13,14]). This brindgs forth the entrepreneurial stimulation of smart development by the ICT industries and markets. Citizen e associated with their products and services [15,16].
Mangy authors hagement needs to be leveraged with greaterve similarly questioned the extent of inclusiveness of smart interventions regardless of their capacity to boost sustainability inputs as its currency. Cities like Barcelona are multiscalar and empowand spur economic growth in cities. Some call the smart city a “hollow signifier” built upon elitist control that only renders further exclusions and injustices, triggering tcommodification amid a weak economy [19,20]. This peir citizerspective considers smart city solutions as places where technology is oriented to serve local residents asneoliberal “techno-environmental fixes” that involve the depoliticization of city governance and the outsourcing of public services to money-grabbing initiatives by technology commonsfunders, utility, and ICT companies [14,17,21].
What Avoemerges here iding top-down approaches to smart city development could promote inclusiveness (e.g., community-led initiatives) and help to boost sustainability while spurring economic growth, although not through commodification and techno-environmental fixes.
Thus,s key to the issue of governance. If the “soft” strategy is chosen, sustaining it in practice may be problematic given the strong impulses for marketization via digitalization more aligned with the “hard” strategy offered by technology proponents. Yet, an important extension from that is the deliberation of whether it is still meaningful to make the dichotomist distinction between the “hard” and “soft” domains or whether it is necessary to accept their co-production. That would require acknowledging both the changing nature (digitalization) of society and the political nature of technology and, consequently, the social responsibility, politics, and ethics of governing technological hardware, and software, and other infrastructure a.
Acknowled software become importging smart cities as a strategy to promulgate technological and instrumentalist agendas in the name of social agendas and citizen empowerment [4], we, nevertheless, argue thant t considerations in a multifaceted (inclusive) approach. A systems thinking approach - rather than other-replacing - is rhis is more than a discursive diversion. What is happening is rather symptomatic of the ever-deepening interpenetration and hybridization of technical, governance, and sociocultural elements in an increasingly digitalized society, where the dichotomy of technology versus society is increasingly difficult to sustain in practice and, indeed, becomes an epistemological obstruction to addressing the smart city as an analytical category.
The mulevant to consider integration and the complexity of the systemtifaceted nature of smart cities, therefore, necessitates a different approach that is more in line with systems thinking, where hard and soft domains are co-occurrent and combined in their operation rather than other-replacing.
