Humane and Sustainable Smart Cities: A Personal Roadmap to Transform Your City After the Pandemic

By Eduardo M. Costa

Humane and Sustainable Smart Cities explores how to develop emergent smart cities that are rooted in humane, innovative and sustainable values (CHIS). The book considers the move from technocratic and idealized smart metropole to humane cities as a product of fundamental demographic changes, the development of a usage-based rather than an ownership economy, the novel implications of digitalization, decentralization and decarbonization, and Internet-enabled changes in public opinion towards democratization and participation. The book's authors explore seven dimensions and characteristics of humane, sustainable and innovative cities in the developing world: the economy, people, the place, energy and the environment, mobility, social inclusion and governance.

Additional sections the operationalization of the CHIS concept into formal planning, policy implementation, and impact assessment considerations. Final discussions center on building a roadmap for planners seeking to design development policies conducive to human values and long-term social viability.

• Provides an axiological framework for the development of humane, innovative and sustainable cities
• Examines how that framework can be operationalized into formal planning, policy implementation and impact assessment
• Explores humane, innovative and sustainable cities in terms of seven dimensions, including the economy, people, the place, energy and the environment, mobility, social inclusion and governance
• Explores proven paths for promoting effective community engagement in developing humane cities
• Provides a practical roadmap to design development policies conducive to human values and long-term social viability

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academic Press
• Release date: Nov 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9780128191873

Eduardo M. Costa

Eduardo Moreira da Costa is an international consultant and speaker on innovation in practice. His research interest focused on the need for transformation in our cities towards more Humane, Innovative and Sustainable places (CHIS) to live. Professor Costa received his PhD from Southampton University in the UK and is a Professor of Knowledge Management at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil, where he heads the LabCHIS laboratory (labchis.com). He also sits on the Board of Directors of three companies (SENIOR, HOPLON and SABIA). His consulting assignments include The World Bank, The World Economic Forum, The InterAmerican Development Bank amongst others.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The concept of more Humane and Sustainable Smart Cities

Abstract

Smart cities are quite well known. The humane and sustainable characteristics of a smart city are not well known. This chapter introduces the concept of more Humane and Sustainable Smart Cities, detailing the evolution of the studies about our more modern cities and the meanings associated with the terms: sustainable, resilient, creative, knowledge-based, digital, and smart cities in the past 30 years. The difference between humane and human is also explained. It then emphasizes the need for an anthropocentric view of the development of a city rather than a technocentric view. It stresses the point that a city exists for the well-being of its citizens and visitors, and technology is a tool toward that goal and not an end in itself. The chapter also describes the book’s content.

Keywords

Smart cities; humane and human cities; technocentric view; anthropocentric view; city development; sustainable city; urban planning

To the extent that we hyperseparate ourselves from nature and reduce it conceptually in order to justify domination, we not only lose the ability to empathise and to see the nonhuman sphere in ethical terms, but also get a false sense of our own character and location that includes an illusory sense of autonomy. The failure to see the nonhuman domain in the richer terms appropriate to ethics licences supposedly ‘purely instrumental’ relationships that distort our perceptions and enframings, impoverish our relations and make us insensitive to dependencies and interconnections.

Val Plumwood.

Content

You have probably heard the term smart city. It refers to a place which has plenty of cameras, sensors, monitoring devices, lots of software, and one or two control centers. Most of the examples show how to improve the traffic conditions of the private car, how to control or ameliorate traffic congestion, how to find a place to park, how to pay electronically for the parking, how to find the best fuel prices or the best routes, etc. It is all about cars, not people. The assumption is that our lives will be better if our cars lived in a smarter environment.

May I beg to disagree.

There is, in our view, a fundamental mistake in the overall concept of the city today; it is designed for the car, not for the citizens. How did we develop this misconception? It all started in the 18th and 19th centuries with the industrial revolution and the invention of the automobile (see Chapter 2: Historical Overview: Cities From Medieval to Modern Times—What Went Wrong). Factories were at first built within the town’s boundaries. But with the realization that they polluted the air and the rivers, and later on with the possibility of local transport by car, urban planners concentrated their efforts into building towns with segregation of the daily functions of living, working, and playing in different boroughs of the town. In the 20th century all major towns had one or more industrial districts, next to big roads where people could move around on a daily basis. Transport between the different boroughs was done by public transport initially, but eventually by private cars. It all went well when the number of cars was small (well, for the people who owned cars, of course) but it led to huge investments by local and provincial governments everywhere to construct the necessary infrastructure for the cars and trucks transporting goods: large avenues and roads, viaducts, even suspended roads. This transport infrastructure became a measure of the level of development of a town or a region.

Eventually, it did not work.

The level of air pollution in the cities became unbearable. A new movement started to take shape and emerged with force: the eco or green movement. The beginning of the movement is arguably set on December 24, 1968, with the photograph of our planet sent from his lunar orbit to earth by the American astronaut William Anders: it was sort of a rude awakening to the fact of how small and insignificant we were in the galaxy. Nature photographer Galen Rowell described it as the most influential environmental photograph ever taken. The environmentalists and their ideas gained momentum over the following years, and, at the Rio-92 UN Conference on Environment and Development (also The Earth Summit), the 195 UN national states agreed on a set of principles, of which principle #1