Urban lifecycle management: System architecture applied to the conception and monitoring of smart cities

Abstract

At date, there is no standardized definition of what a smart city is, in spite many apply to propose a definition that fit with their offer, subsuming the whole of the city in one of its functions (smart grid, smart mobility…). Considering the smart cities as an ecosystem, that is to say a city that has systemic autopoeitic properties that are more than the sum of its parts, we develop an approach of modeling the smartness of the city. To understand how the city may behave as a sustainable ecosystem, we need a framework to design the interactions of the city subsystems. First we define a smart city as an ecosystem that is more than the sum of its parts, where sustainability is maintained through the interactions of urban functions. Second, we present a methodology to sustain the development over time of this ecosystem: Urban Lifecycle Management. Third, we define the tasks to be carried out by an integrator of the functions that constitute the smart city, we assume public administration has to play this role. Fourth, we present what should be a smart government for the smart city and the new capabilities to be developed. Since the advent of the “death of distance” with the revolution of transportation by the middle of the 19th century, the appearance of networks of infrastructure technologies and the spread of the telegraph that transformed the government of the city, critical obstacles to the growth of cities were removed. Today digital technologies amplify this move, providing new tools such as smart phones that became a digital Swiss knife that allows inhabitants to be active actors in the city life, communicating and coordinating with each other, using and feeding databases. Doing this, digital technologies may produce the best and the worst. The point is each city contains the DNA of its own destruction. Smart cities digital infrastructure amplifies the possibilities of manifestation of discontent, worsening the gap between have and have-nots. Smart cities incur the risk to become the digital analogue of the Panopticon Jeremy Bentham's prison design (Townsend 2013). Therefore, architecting the city as a living system is as well technical as political. This paper is based on case studies carried out in various countries, analyzed though the lens of complex system architecture, to envisage how these competencies may be adapted to the modeling of smart cities.