Research Talk - Dr Will Brown, Title - SMARTEEE: A Framework for Developing Holistic Socio-Technical Conceptualisations of Smart Urbanism

Abstract : Grounded in the notion that the utilisation of ICTs, the ‘internet of things’ and the extraction of data can be leveraged to enhance the city, smart urbanism, and the smart cities which are produced as a result, is an undertaking being avidly pursued by many aspirational cities across the globe. However, despite the laudable goals of such an endeavour, often bound in notions of increased efficiencies, sustainability and inter-urban competitiveness, there is an acute risk that through this digitally mediated pursuit, already existing inequalities in the urban realm could be further entrenched; alongside concerns over increased surveillance, creeping privatisation and gentrification. Such concerns follow in the wake of techno-centric and technocratic implementations of smart urbanism, where faith in these emergent technologies places them as a panacea for uniquely urban ills, such as (but not limited to) congestion, poor air quality and concerns around growth. Yet, cities are not closed systems in need of management and control, but rather are deeply complex environments which span numerous factors, elements and realms of expertise. To act in the city is to work with wicked problems, where simple solutions are doomed to failure. To this end, smart cities are socio-technical endeavours, requiring a plethora of insights, expertise and worldviews to be successfully implemented, thereby lending themselves to the development of transdisciplinary research and methods. Therefore, for a city to become truly ‘smart’, a holistic conceptualisation of not only the technical domain, but also the social (and vice-versa) is required. Yet, for many stakeholders within smart city projects, such perspectives and worldviews are alien to their expertise and disciplinary backgrounds. As a means of remedying this, the philosophical works of Martin Heidegger - who argued that the essence of technology is that of ‘revealing’ new insights and entities into the world - and Roy Bhaskar - who argued that events often occur beyond our experience of them - have been utilised to deconstruct the nature of smart urbanism, arguing that its essence lies in the experience of previously in-experienceable events which are revealed in order to attain a set goal or vision. This philosophical argument has been subsequently structured around a mnemonic - SMARTEEE - which has been utilised to create a framework for the elucidation of socio-technical conceptualisations of smart urbanism. SMARTEEE stands for eight elements of smart urbanism, identified through extensive literature review, case studies and interviews - namely: situation, make-up, actors, reveal, tools and technique, events, experience and enframement: to assist in the utilisation of the framework a tool has been simultaneously developed. The initial manifestations of this undertaking were presented and assessed through interviewing delegates at the 2022 Transdisciplinary Engineering Conference, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through applying the SMARTEEE framework to a socio-technical case study; the shift towards remote working as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Following on from the interview data, a range of adaptations and refinements to the framework and tool were undertaken. The SMARTEEE framework serves as not only a means of elucidating and developing holistic, socio-technical conceptualisations of smart urbanism, but has also illustrated a means of structuring them, whilst implicitly binding together the social and technological realms of smart urbanism.

Key Words: Smart City, Smart Urbanism, Framework, Heidegger, Bhaskar