Identifying communities within the smart-cultural city of Singapore: A network analysis approach

Abstract

This article investigates the intersection and convergence of Smart Cities and Creative Cities that emerge with the availability of social media data, technology—smart technologies—and the shifting mode of cultural production—creative economies—forming a new nexus of Smart-Cultural Cities. It starts with a short review of literature surrounding Smart Cities and Creative Cities to establish domain criteria on Smart-Cultural Cities for Singapore. The article draws on a database of actors from authorities, industries, academia, and artists established by the research community in Singapore. Actors and domains are described using bipartite graphs and then analyzed by solving a deterministic optimization problem rather than computing a statistic. The result of this analysis reveals new clusters, nodes, and connections in the actor–domain network of the Singapore Smart-Cultural Cities discourse. The identified clusters are called “Urban Scenario Makers”, “Digital Cultural Transformers” and “Public Engagers”. The method gives significant insights on the number of clusters, the composition of each cluster, and the relationship between clusters that serve to locate and describe a next iteration of the Smart City that focusses on human interaction, culture, and technology.