Lincoln, Yvonna, and Egon Guba, "Postpositivism and the Naturalist Paradigm," pp. 14-46 in Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry . Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985.*

The power of feedback.

As the term “smart city” gains wider and wider currency, there is still confusion about what a smart city is, especially since several similar terms are often used interchangeably. This paper aims to clarify the meaning of the word “smart” in the context of cities through an approach based on an in-depth literature review of relevant studies as well as official documents of international institutions. It also identifies the main dimensions and elements characterizing a smart city. The different metrics of urban smartness are reviewed to show the need for a shared definition of what constitutes a smart city, what are its features, and how it performs in comparison to traditional cities. Furthermore, performance measures and initiatives in a few smart cities are identified.

Smart Cities: Definitions, Dimensions, Performance, and Initiatives

Making a city "smart" is emerging as a strategy to mitigate the problems generated by the urban population growth and rapid urbanization. Yet little academic research has sparingly discussed the phenomenon. To close the gap in the literature about smart cities and in response to the increasing use of the concept, this paper proposes a framework to understand the concept of smart cities. Based on the exploration of a wide and extensive array of literature from various disciplinary areas we identify eight critical factors of smart city initiatives: management and organization, technology, governance, policy context, people and communities, economy, built infrastructure, and natural environment. These factors form the basis of an integrative framework that can be used to examine how local governments are envisioning smart city initiatives. The framework suggests directions and agendas for smart city research and outlines practical implications for government professionals.

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Understanding Smart Cities: An Integrative Framework

This conceptual paper discusses how we can consider a particular city as a smart one, drawing on recent practices to make cities smart. A set of the common multidimensional components underlying the smart city concept and the core factors for a successful smart city initiative is identified by exploring current working definitions of smart city and a diversity of various conceptual relatives similar to smart city. The paper offers strategic principles aligning to the three main dimensions (technology, people, and institutions) of smart city: integration of infrastructures and technology-mediated services, social learning for strengthening human infrastructure, and governance for institutional improvement and citizen engagement.

https://inta-aivn.org/images/cc/Urbanism/background%20documents/dgo_2011_smartcity.pdf

Conceptualizing smart city with dimensions of technology, people, and institutions

This paper describes the information technology (IT) foundation and principles for Smarter Cities™. Smarter Cities are urban areas that exploit operational data, such as that arising from traffic congestion, power consumption statistics, and public safety events, to optimize the operation of city services. The foundational concepts are instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. Instrumented refers to sources of near-real-time real-world data from both physical and virtual sensors. Interconnected means the integration of those data into an enterprise computing platform and the communication of such information among the various city services. Intelligent refers to the inclusion of complex analytics, modeling, optimization, and visualization in the operational business processes to make better operational decisions. This approach enables the adaptation of city services to the behavior of the inhabitants, which permits the optimal use of the available physical infrastructure and resources, for example, in sensing and controlling consumption of energy and water, managing waste processing and transportation systems, and applying optimization to achieve new efficiencies among these resources. Additional roles exist in intelligent interaction between the city and its inhabitants and further contribute to operational efficiency while maintaining or enhancing quality of life.

Foundations for smarter cities

Mobile agents are programs, typically written in a script language, which may be dispatched from a client computer and transported to a remote server computer for execution Several authors have suggested that mobile agents offer an important new method of performing transactions and information retrieval in networks Other writers have pointed out, however, that mobile agents introduce severe concerns for security We consider the advantages offered by mobile agents and assess them against alternate methods of achieving the same function We conclude that, while the individual advantages of agents do not represent an overwhelming motivation for their adoption, the creation of a pervasive agent framework facilitates a very large number of network services and applications

/pdf/mobile-agents-are-they-a-good-idea-4ev3mskzkw.pdf

Mobile Agents: Are They a Good Idea?

The transformation to smarter cities will require innovation in planning, management, and operations. Several ongoing projects around the world illustrate the opportunities and challenges of this transformation. Cities must get smarter to address an array of emerging urbanization challenges, and as the projects highlighted in this article show, several distinct paths are available. The number of cities worldwide pursuing smarter transformation is growing rapidly. However, these efforts face many political, socioeconomic, and technical hurdles. Changing the status quo is always difficult for city administrators, and smarter city initiatives often require extensive coordination, sponsorship, and support across multiple functional silos. The need to visibly demonstrate a continuous return on investment also presents a challenge. The technical obstacles will center on achieving system interoperability, ensuring security and privacy, accommodating a proliferation of sensors and devices, and adopting a new closed-loop human-computer interaction paradigm.

Smarter Cities and Their Innovation Challenges

Describes a framework for itinerant agents that can be used to implement secure, remote applications in large, public networks such as the Internet or the IBM Global Network. Itinerant agents are programs, dispatched from a source computer, that roam among a set of networked servers until they accomplish their task. This is an extension to the client/server model in which the client sends a portion of itself to the server for execution. An additional feature of itinerant agents is their ability to migrate from server to server, perhaps seeking one that can help with the user's task or perhaps collecting information from all of them. A major focus of the article is the agent meeting point, an abstraction that supports the interaction of agents with each other and server based resources The article begins with an overview of the operation of an itinerant agent framework and a review of previous work. The authors consider likely applications of itinerant agents and discuss one specific example in detail. They give an architectural description of the structure of itinerant agents, the languages employed to create them, and the execution environments required at the servers; and also a detailed description of how an itinerant agent is processed at a server. Security issues are then discussed and finally they consider the technical advantages of the itinerant agent framework and the services it enables. >

Itinerant agents for mobile computing

We entered the 21st century with a strong, global trend to increasing concentration of the population in relatively few, large cities. Large, dense cities can be highly productive, innovative, and per capita very green and hence desirable for our future. However the rapid influx of new citizens presents overwhelming challenges to their governments. Along with the positive benefits that accumulate from dense, diverse cities come in equal measure the negative aspects such as informal development, traffic congestion, waste management, and access to resources and crime. The demand for services is immediate, but the tax revenues to fund them come later. At the same time, globalization has connected cities on opposite sides of the planet in forms of competition previously unknown – for capital, for resources, and for the Creative Class. These challenges lead to experiments with new approaches to the planning, design, finance, construction, governance, and operation of urban infrastructure and services that are broadly called Smart Cities. Some of these approaches are related to emerging roles of information technology. 
A new professional community – the Urban Systems Collaborative – has formed to foster mutual learning among members of the architecture, planning, engineering, transportation, utilities, information technology, operations research, social sciences, geography and environmental science, public finance and policy, and communications profession. One of its hypotheses is a new theory of cities that makes use of new, rich sources of information about what is going on in the city. Among other things, it seeks to understand the impact that information technology can have on the urban fabric and norms of behaviour.
Systems Science, in particular work on systems of systems and scaling laws, has provided new observations of urban systems at a macro-level. The Smart City provides new instrumentation that enables observation of urban systems at a micro-level.
This paper describes steps towards a model that can unify the perspectives of the professions in the Urban Systems Collaborative. It begins with examples of Smart Cities and why this movement is so active. It describes how information technology plays roles in shaping new norms of behaviour intended to facilitate the continuing growth of dense populations. It then explains a key hypothesis of the Urban Systems Collaborative that the increasing accessibility of information will enable us to develop Urban Systems models that are capable of helping citizens, entrepreneurs, civic organizations, and governments to see more deeply into how their cities work, how people use the city, how they feel about it, where the city faces problems, and what kinds of remediation can be applied.

Colin Harrison

Papers

Foundations for smarter cities

Mobile Agents: Are They a Good Idea?

Smarter Cities and Their Innovation Challenges

Itinerant agents for mobile computing

A Theory of Smart Cities