A Tale of Research in Smart Cities

The challenge to design the smartest cities has been embraced in most larger UK cities but less is known about how to evaluate and measure the “smartness” of each approach.

Smart city programmes are springing up across UK cities, offering solutions for contemporary challenges facing cities associated with population and urbanisation pressures, and bringing opportunities for smarter: governance, economic development, citizenship, living, environments and mobility. To support future city strategies, we need to understand the benefits of the embedded ubiquitous technologies and smart city developments in our everyday lives, by examining existing and best practice approaches to evaluation, measurement and reporting on the outcomes for cities.

Milton Keynes – A Smart City (Image credit: William Stephens)
The SmartDframe project linked to the MK:Smart project at The Open University analysed city approaches in Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Peterborough to the evaluation of smart city projects and programmes and their impacts on city outcomes.

The SmartDframe research 2015-2017 led by Sally Caird includes a series of smart city case studies informed by city reports and interviews with representative local government authorities that exemplify contemporary practices, offering a timely, insightful contribution to discourse about best practice approaches to evaluation and reporting of smart city projects and programmes developed in complex city systems.

In 2016, this led to a published report by: Caird, S. (2016) with Hudson, L. and Kortuem, G. ‘A Tale of Evaluation and Reporting in UK Smart Cities’. The Open University, UK. http://oro.open.ac.uk/46008/

In 2017, further analysis of the SmartDframe research findings has led to the journal publication by: Caird, S. ‘City approaches to smart city evaluation and reporting: case studies in the United Kingdom’ in Urban Research and Practice on http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/w9XqTmr2seRVWS4MjK7z/full

Cities around the world will find these research publications on smarter UK city evaluation approaches of considerable interest, in providing case studies and analysis that supports drives towards future city development.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *