Week 6 Lecture I Flashcards
The purpose of this paper
is to investigate the links between smart cities and urban energy sustainability
Instead, we understand smart cities to be a broad framework of strategies pursued by urban actors, and ask whether and how smart city projects catalyze urban energy sustainability.
while sustainability is not always
a major objective of local implementation of smart city projects, the smartness agenda nevertheless increases the ambition to achieve energy sustainability targets
sustainability measures in smart cities are rarely driven by
advanced technology, even though the smart city agenda is framed around such innovations.
there is significant sustainability potential in
cross-sectoral integration, but there are unresolved challenges of accountability for and measurability of these gains.
The idea of the “smart city” is increasingly central
to debates on urban energy sustainability and a host of cities are now pursuing “smartness” to improve their energy efficiency, transport, and public services
smart city definition
a city that is oriented towards energy sustainability, mobility, new business models and partnerships and the advanced use of big data
By integrating new technology into the management and operation of cities
smart cities are seen to offer innovative solutions to the challenges of sustainability, equity, and economic growth in cities and urban regions
cities can increase rates of economic growth, competitiveness, and innovation while achieving sustainability goals, such as reduced emissions, increased energy efficiency, and improved quality of life
However, it is not clear how the smart city agenda contributes to sustainability
links between “smart city” and “sustainable city” in academic literature are relatively weak
need for a holistic and comprehensive smart city model, but that it is difficult to integrate all the necessary elements into a single model.
Therefore, the relationship between what is smart and what is sustainable is largely dependent upon the local context
we see the “smart city” not as a specific set of interventions, but rather a loosely defined agenda.
The agenda consists of both a technological aspect as well as a managerial side
can potentially include an infinite number of policies, innovations, and targets
Therefore, the appropriate analytical approach is not to attempt to measure its effects – it is more appropriate to understand smartness as a broad framing encompassing a wide range of interventions that are translated and reinterpreted by cities
critique - One is the instrumental camp, which
highlights potentialities for specific technological solutions, but has little to say about the social integration of these solutions in cities.
Such instrumentalist approaches highlight the potential of information communication technology (ICT) solutions and ICT-enabled solutions to increase urban energy efficiency and improve urban infrastructure, which reduces emissions from cities
By integrating new technology into the management and operation of cities, it is widely considered that smart cities can revitalize issues of sustainability, equity, and economic growth in urban landscapes.
Five processes through which ICT solutions may reduce energy use in cities:
through processes of dematerialization (reducing the need for physical products such as DVDs or banks),
demobilization (i.e., facilitating meetings online),
mass customization (reducing resource use through streamlining adaptation, personalization, and demand management),
intelligent operation (reducing the resources needed for various operations)
and soft transformation (changes in the physical infrastructure because of technology and ICT advancements).
The other is the critical camp, - 6
which focuses on the socioeconomic interests and the implications of the smartness agenda itself rather than its practical application in projects.
One criticism is that the agenda is driven by private and corporate economic interests, particularly the large companies that promote smart technologies
universalist and abstract ideas that fail to recognize the local contexts and nontechnological elements of cities
Some of this criticism is quite radical, with scholars arguing that the very approach of driving urban development through technological innovation fails to address the root causes of urban problems
It has even been suggested that smart city developments may exacerbate environmental sustainability challenges in cities, as well socioeconomic ones, by reducing urban problems to technical and apolitical issues and focusing primarily on issues that are solvable through ICT and technological advancements
In particular, they clearly articulate the problem that technological solutions may not be sufficient to meet sustainability targets and indicate that political and governance issues are important for promoting urban sustainability
Competing understandings of the smart city emerged
across the fields of engineering, innovation, and social science.
Much of the research overlaps with related concepts such as intelligent cities, smart growth, information cities, or digitalization, and there is not necessarily a coherent literature on “smart cities” per se.
Second, it is used in relation to urban infrastructures and utilities, such as transport, digital systems, and monitoring.
Third, it refers to urban governance: i.e., cross-sectoral collaboration, integrated decision-making, and citizen participation
we understand smartness to be
the framing of particular urban interventions.
In other words, we propose to assess smart cities not for what they are, but for what they do to urban development strategies in general, and to energy sustainability strategies specifically
A “frame” can be understood as the context or structure within which we make sense of our action
In smart city initiatives, sustainability
becomes interwoven into a set of other goals and agendas, all interfering with and influencing each other, creating possible feedback loops and unpredictable outcomes
smart city agenda should be understood
as a means to achieve urban change, rather than as a goal in itself.
These factors can be both
institutionalized (e.g., preexisting plans, approved budgets, priority areas), and
noninstitutionalized (e.g., the people who assume responsibilities within the project and their personal attributes, such as affiliations and learned smart ideas)
In the fight against climate change
it has been claimed that ‘the built environment is in the front line of the battle to cut carbon emissions as far as possible, and as fast as possible’
The built environment and the professions that create and manage it face many challenges:
growing and ageing populations,
water and energy shortages, air quality,
a globalised and increasingly competitive construction sector,
changing governance and
increasing reliance on ICT infrastructure.
Why are built environments important?
The built environment is of increasing importance because the majority of the world’s population now lives in urban areas.
From 2008 onwards, more than 50% of the world’s population was urban and by 2050 this figure is estimated to rise to 67%
Economic factors drive urbanisation, and most of the world’s activities generating gross domestic product (GDP) are also concentrated in urban areas
cities provide enormous opportunities for tackling
climate adaptation and mitigation due to their resources and relatively agile governance, but due to large populations and concentration of assets, the exposure to climate risk is large
The other important trend for the UK concerns the building stock.
26 million buildings existed in 2008: by 2050 it is estimated that 75–85% of the current building stock will still be in use (Dowson et al., 2012). This shows that the main challenge will be adaptation of existing buildings, rather than redesigning new buildings (although this is also important).
While climate change on a regional scale around a city might cause warming,
city expansion or densification will also cause microclimate change.
Buildings don’t just withstand climate, they create
Urban heat island:
He also correctly identified some of the mechanisms causing it:
materials such as stone and brick absorb the sun’s heat during the day and release it slowly at night,
heat is trapped/re‐radiated between buildings, and
wind that could remove heat is slowed by the city.
heat flows in a building
picture
In any DTS model it is likely that conduction through the building fabric, solar gain and heat loss by radiation, convection of heat away from external surfaces, internal heat sources (e.g. people), air infiltration, ventilation, and heating and cooling systems are represented to determine the temperature and humidity within a building, as well as the energy used to obtain comfortable indoor conditions. Heat and mass transfer (i.e. moisture) processes are the fundamental building blocks of any DTS, but the way in which they are represented in a model varies from detailed analytical representations of heat transfer to simplified models that ‘lump’ building components together and use the theory of electrical resistance and capacitance as an analogy to thermal resistance and thermal store.
If a building façade is made more reflective,
solar radiation is redirected towards ground level or other buildings, leading to heat gains.
Climate warming:
incoming solar radiation is conducted into the ground, evaporates water and drives plant growth. In turn, the warmed ground heats the air above, driving convection, which influences cloud formation. Some materials with high heat capacity, such as stone or concrete, can store heat to re‐radiate as longwave radiation later into the night.
Seven systemic scenarios were devised, showing different city development pathways in terms of
economy, attractiveness, population, technology (including uptake of HVAC), retrofit and occupant energy behaviour. The study found that reduction of energy use for winter heating outweighs any increase due to summer cooling, leading to lower consumption overall in the future, although the shift from multiple energy sources for heating to increasing reliance on electricity for cooling would require substantial adaptation of the electricity transmission system
It can be seen that designing and operating buildings that are
robust and comfortable throughout their lifetimes is a challenge. Doing this and achieving the larger goal of reducing CO2 emissions is even more difficult, requiring consistency of international, national and local governance. Mostly technical challenges around keeping buildings cool have been explored in this chapter, but it has been clear that scientists, policy‐makers and built environment professionals need to work in step with each other.
Urban economies are interconnected at global and regional scale, so elements such as
workforce mobility and
housing market evolution need further study.
Seeing a city’s metabolism holistically
use of water, materials, energy – can lead to enhanced sustainability, for example by integrating blue/green/grey (water/vegetation/built) infrastructure. Modelling tools such as Masson et al. (2014), with DTS at their heart, are assisting
With more data and monitoring of disparate parts of the city system than ever before:
traffic counts and air quality,
building information modelling being increasingly mandated in construction,
mining of social media data for useful information in an emergency.
Recognising the importance of cities at a global level, the IPCC highlighted
the need for joined‐up policy‐making: climate change mitigation and adaptation, urban regeneration and planning, sustainable development and economic development (both of which are heavily dependent on energy costs and policy).
The increasingly global connectivity of the built environment will force professional institutions to have an international perspective: there is an urgent need to include a focus on sustainability and resilience.
