Although the question, What is a Smart City? still lingers in the academic discourse, scholars are more frequently fixing their gazes not on the future and what smart cities might become, but are focusing closer to the present to examine the effects of smart cities and how to measure those effects. The first article in this issue has a unique take on what makes for a smart city in the US context, while the subsequent articles examine the role of the individual in smart cities, the economic impact of making a city smart, and the benefits and drawbacks of a smart city during a health crisis such as the global pandemic of COVID-19. The final article breaks the pattern and is not about smart cities.
In their piece, “What Makes a City ‘Smart’ and Who Decides? From Vision to Reality in the USDOT Smart City Challenge,” Jae Teuk Chin and Andrew Guthrie study how a grant program of the USDOT has shaped the smart city concept in the United States to a much greater extent than has scholarly work. They explain that their article:
… reviews the literature on the smart city concept and its implications for city and transportation planning; introduces the smart city vision elements (VEs) specified by USDOT at the heart of the grant; employs the grant’s finalists’ vision statements as a basis for systematically theorizing the smart city concept, and the discourses deployed to construct it from the perspectives of finalist cities and USDOT; and constructs a similarity index describing other finalists’ full applications in terms of their differences from the eventual winner, Columbus, Ohio. (7)
The article by Sandra Breux, Jérémy Diaz, and Hugo Loiseau, “The Smart City—Does the Individual Matter?” moves away from definitions of smart cities and focuses on a discussion of how individuals interact with smart cities. They explain that early on individuals in smart cities were defined by their relation to technology, having an active role, a passive role, or being victims. Even when “citizen-centric” smart cities are created, the authors argue, “only city dwellers with specific skills and know-how may be classified as ‘active individuals,’ with the remaining ‘ordinary’ citizens seen as extras.” This conception of the city, they say, can also reinforce existing social inequalities. The point they argue in their article is that if individuals are to find a participatory place in the smart city, a political vision must come before the technology that can be used to implement that vision.
Andrea Caragliu and his co-authors, Chiara F. Del Bo and Peter Nijkamp, engaged in the attempts to define smart cities in an article in this journal in 2011. In their current effort, “’Smart Cities in Europe’ Revisited: A Meta-Analysis of Smart City Economic Impacts,” they set out to “explore the empirical literature of the impact of smart cities to verify whether the latter provides evidence in favor of a positive impact of the smart cities orientation, and along which dimension (economic, environmental, or other)this impact manifests.” They offer an extensive and detailed meta-analysis with a culling of more than 600 papers, which resulted in a cache of 24 usable and scientifically validated papers that yielded a total of 174 estimated impacts. Their analysis showed that the strongest impact of smart cities is on economic outcomes. The authors conclude by calling for more research on the impacts of smart cities and note that the work that is being done shows impacts (not all positive) in areas such as the environment, health care, inequality, and well-being.
The article by Huaxiong Jiang, Haozhi Pan, Yanliu Lin, and Stan Geertman, “Hacking Corporate Smart Cities Under COVID-19: Towards a Smart Governance Approach,” is a commentary on how the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated the need for the smart city to be reconceptualized in the face of public health threats such as a global pandemic. They argue that governance structures should be reimagined and transformed and they should move away from the often technocratic and corporate-led way of coping with societal stressors. In the short term, they want to see more investments in connectivity infrastructure and service-oriented technologies as potential solutions to the pandemic. In the medium-term, they want to see a redefining of government leadership and the facilitating of cross-sectoral and multi-actor collaborations at different jurisdictional levels to facilitate the delivery of high-quality public service and develop better policies. Finally, they say that long-term smart city transformation requires cities to recreate their “smart” vision of a city and build open governance capacities for resilience, in particular for future pandemic threats.
In the issue’s final article, Aldiyar Belossarov, Atilla Aba, and Domokos Esztergár-Kiss take as their subject the Mobility as a Service (MaaS) concept and use the Hierarchy Process Method to evaluate the effectiveness of existing MaaS applications. In their article, “Using the Analytical Hierarchy Process Method to Evaluate Mobility as a Service (MaaS) Applications,” the authors develop a framework and methodology for evaluating these applications. They first identify and categorize the aspects of the apps to be measured. The aspects, which include routing, booking, payment, ticketing and supplementary services are scored and weighted in their methodology. They measure currently used apps and their method allows them to rank which services are strongest and weakest among the seventeen MaaS services they study. Their research found that the services, payment, routing, and ticketing were considered the most important aspects. The goal of their research is to demonstrate which aspects are most helpful to users and where improvements to applications can best be made.