Governing the smart city

The development and success of cities have always been inextricably linked to innovation. Thanks to technologies, urban systems and infrastructures can be constantly adapted to the emerging needs and the challenge of today is to ensure that technologies are truly capable of providing an effective response to the problems of citizens and businesses. Current schemes therefore need to adapt to new conditions: it is necessary to rethink the city, its logics, its traditional structures. Smart cities are an effective response to these emerging needs, made crucial by global, rapid and unavoidable dynamics.

However, the smart city, based on the assumptions of the digital economy, implies the constant connection between technological tools and people in a digital network. This connection in turn determines the collection and use of data in considerable quantities (big data) through the information available on the Internet about the people who usually surf online. If on the one hand the creation of big data can be useful to satisfy the needs of citizens, on the other it can have a negative side: the big data collected can be used abusively without having the right or even violating the privacy of individuals and going against the European guidelines on privacy as GDPR. The explosion of the Internet of things and 24-hour connection has made this issue more central than ever. All is done online is de facto tracked. Information on user’s data (preferences, behavior, etc.) could be collected in personal and collective profiles, trajectories, trend, etc.. All this data and information that consumer users produce with the use of IT represent the basis of what Zuboff (2019) defines as “Surveillance Capitalism” and represent a valuable good as they are processed and sold at auction by “data brokers” can generate both economic and political revenues. This phenomenon, paraphrasing the best term known in urban planning of “land grabbing” (exploitation of the land according to business logic), can be defined as digital grabbing.

By focusing on these premises, the SCIDAM workshop welcomes contributions aimed at proposing novel methods and visions, theoretical approaches and case studies connecting technology with the sustainable city debate.

Focus of contributions may include (but is not limited):

 

• Smart cities and IoT, IoE
• Data gathering and management: Open Data, Big Data
• City dashboards and decision support systems
• Data Analytics for decision support
• User data management, profiling
• Space and energy use;
• Data-informed design and planning;
• Online and informal economies;
• Urban morphogenesis;
• Theoretical and methodological development;
• Urban policy making.

Given the focus of the Conference on Computational Science issues, the SCIDAM workshop welcomes contributions on urban studies, engineering, spatial planning, and computational aspects, proposals and applications from a wide variety of scholars on the issues proposed. Engineers, Urban and Regional Planners, Architects, Geographers and Environmental Engineers, among others are welcome to contribute.

Each paper will be independently reviewed by 3 programme committee members. Their individual scores will be evaluated by a small sub-committee and result in one of the following final decisions: accepted, or accepted on the condition that suggestions for improvement will be incorporated, or rejected. Notification of this decision will take place on April 2021.
Individuals and groups should submit complete papers (10 to 16 pages).
Accepted contributions will be published in the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) volumes

Important dates