Tag: cities

Smart Cities in China, Taiwan and Singapore

I’ve just been awarded a year-long SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant, which is surveying and summarizing the literature on (post-)smart cities from China, Taiwan and Singapore, in both Chinese and English languages.

Smart digital technologies are challenging the way we manage and govern our cities, and our imagination of their futures. The combination of technological, policy and social innovation in smart and now, post-smart cities generates both common global concerns and issues of policy-learning, co-operation and competition for Canada. China and the sinophone world are at the core of this cooperation and competition conundrum, with China being one of the largest developers of smart cities and smart technology in the world. This project will create a comprehensive database of national smart and post-smart city academic literature, national and sub-national policies and plans in Chinese and English, for China, Taiwan, and Singapore, with literature and policy summaries and reviews, and a program of government and policy and seminars. The work will be conducted by a combined team of native Chinese and English speakers at CSS/Lab. It is aimed at orienting Canadian policy on the governance of cities and technology, nationally and globally.

These three nation-states are vital to understanding the future governance of post-smart cities. China is a driving force of the worldwide market in the smart city sector, making up 13.8% of the global market in 2023, and estimated to grow from $103Bn US in 2023 and is to $550Bn US in 2030 These three nation-states are vital to understanding the future governance of post-smart cities. China is a driving force of the worldwide market in the smart city sector, making up 13.8% of the global market in 2023, and estimated to grow from $103Bn US in 2023 and is to $550Bn US in 2030 (according to Grand View Research), and with three cities in the Top 20 of the 2024 IMD Smart City Index (and a total of 10 in the Top 100). Singapore is the model for many other developers of post-smart cities, ranked 5th in the world in the 2024 IMD Smart City Index, and is itself a massive market for its size at almost 2% of the global total and estimated to grow from $14.4Bn US in 2023 to $102.0Bn US in 2030 (Grand View Research). Finally, Taiwan offers innovative policies on connected citizenship and state management of data (Chung et al. 2021), with Taipei ranked 16th in the 2024 IMD Smart City Index (IMD 2024). In contrast, despite some high-profile policies like the Smart Cities Challenge program, there are no Canadian Cities in the Top 20, or even the Top 40, of the 2024 IMD Smart City Index.  

There are two types of literature involved here in two different domains.

The first is scholarship. The applicant is already conducting extensive literature reviews of the anglophone and francophone literatures on smart and post-smart cities. Both the active planning and construction of smart and post-smart cities, and the study of smart and post-smart cities, are booming in the sinophone (Chinese-language) world, yet in the west, we are limited to presentations and publications by authors who have chosen to publish in conference proceedings and journals in languages other than Chinese, mainly English. We, in Canada, are therefore missing a great deal of research, which would also tell us more about sinophone understandings of the future governance of cities. This project would carry out a systematic cataloging of the Chinese-language literature on smart and post-smart cities, including translation of all titles, abstracts and keywords. 

The second is policy. The project also proposes to collate, catalog and summarize national and sub-national policy documents on smart and post-smart cities from China, Taiwan and Singapore, the three predominantly (or at least, partly) culturally Chinese governments. This project would carry out a systematic cataloging of Chinese, Taiwanese and Singaporean policy literature, that is policy documents, white papers, official discussion documents, national plans and competitions and so on, concerning smart and post-smart cities, including translation of all titles, summaries and keywords. Where summaries do not exist, they will be provided. 

Together this project offers vital resources that are important for our collective global imagination, but also in the immediate term for orienting Canadian domestic policy on the governance of cities and technology, nationally and globally.  

The City as Battlesuit

A really stimulating article by Matt Jones over at Future Metro, my new favourite site, which I have only just discovered thanks to David Barnard-Wills. This manages to combine several of my interests: urban futures, surveillance, security, ubicomp, SF and comics, into one tasty package – I’ll have to check out Matt’s own blog too.

Finding my feet and losing my head in Sao Paulo

It is my firm belief, yet to be disproved, that any urbanist worthy of the name can find a decent bar within 24 hours of their arrival in any city on the world, and preferably less. Read Ernest Hemingway’s Paris: A Moveable Feast. It’s Chapter 1. No-one knew bars like Hemingway. In Sao Paulo, as in Paris even today, it would be impossible to fail this challenge. I found mine this evening right next to a more famous bar at the corner of Sao Joao and Ipiranga which has started to believe its own mythology and therefore lost everything that once made it a bar worth celebrating in song, and I settled in to watch and learn.

I’ve already got so used to joking with barmen and concierges about my poor Portuguese that it’s almost like an icebreaker. The bar was haphazard, white tiles, and giant freezers which got the beer down to an appreciably glacial degree of cool, decent salgados and two grades of chili source to accompany them (hot and really hot – no-one has the first choice, of course).

Bars are human sociality at their most basic, their most primate-like. I once worked on a zoological expedition studying monkeys in Kalimantan, and there is very little I’ve seen in bars that I haven’t seem being done by other primates (apart from the serving of cold beers, which explains most of what happens in bars that you don’t see in monkey groups). The forced-together bonhomie, the silence amongst the mostly male clientele as some particularly fine example of the female of the species walks by (and that happens an awful lot in Brazil), the arguments about sport and politics, the group-dominance by alpha-males – at least in the absence of any alpha-females – it’s all there and it’s all – excepting the beer and the salgados – monkey.

It makes one depressed and optimistic at the same time. You know that anywhere that humans go, somewhere in the universe, there’s going to be a bar just like this. And yet, it makes you wonder whether we will ever manage to solve the enigma of cities, a solution that will bring in those shadowy figures who lurk just beyond the reach of the bright lights of the bar – the stick-thin figure of the beggar-woman who passed me twice this evening, the guy selling lottery tickets at the last minute, the prostitutes and thieves who have been driven to these ends because of the city, because their existence and the existence of the city don’t quite seem to coincide in the same way, the same spacetime. There’s a reason good urbanists need to find a good bar. It isn’t always for the same reasons as everyone else.