Gusti Ayu Made Suartika
Master Program in Architecture - Planning and Development, Udayana University, Denpasar Campus, 80232, Bali-Indonesia.
Email: ayusuartika@unud.ac.id
Cities are contingent on the historical forces that have shaped their development. Among these are colonization, industrialization, technology, and information. Today the Smart City has emerged as one possible answer to the emergent problems of urbanization in the 21st century. It joins a multitude of concepts and ideas that address daily life in the post-industrial world of informational capitalism – the sustainable city, the creative city, the green city, and the liveable city – and the Smart City that now seems to resonate with urban administrations and urban designers worldwide. The question is what is it?
Cities are merely reflections of the political economy of their own history. They are acts of imagination that combine use values and exchange values, political elites and poverty, fixed and mobile capital, multi-modal transport systems, and a chessboard of land uses that reflect urban politics, investment strategies, densities and class distinctions, histories, and expectations. There is no 'one size fits all', and cities worldwide contain a vast range of differences. On the basis of capitalist urbanization, most cities grow by consuming themselves – by destroying the old to build the new in an effort to reduce crime, pollution, waste disposal, amenity, security and to increase the rate of commodity circulation to generate wealth.
All historical periods have advanced on three fronts; first, the stockpiling of capital; second, the progression of ideologies that inform development and third, technological advancement. The smart city paradigm falls into the latter category. It is firmly committed to informational technology and informational capital to fuel progress. Given this commitment, the problem is that human interests may be subsumed to technological 'efficiency', forgetting that what is human and what is technical, are not hom*ologous. A central problem, therefore, is how to temper the use of technology with democratic politics and the voice of the people.
Today's social system has been described as 'the Network Society' - the product of informational capitalism. This has entailed massive shifts in power, identity and traditional concepts of place as the virtual world of the space of flows reconfigures the material world in a diversity of forms. In the process, many cities thrive, while others sink in a sea of decay. Development is not democratic, and those cities that become hard-wired fastest also have the economic advantage as well, attracting a new 'creative class' of intellectuals, artists, business people, and professionals who then support a plethora of new urban spaces. As a resolution to the above problems, the smart city is therefore not merely a neutral technological fix. It is infused with problems that need to be interrogated if a more humane as opposed to a more efficient environment is to emerge.
As we might expect, the smart city is frequently lauded as a panacea for all ills. To test this idea, the third International Conference on Smart City Innovation (ICSCI)-2020 provided space for all forms of critique and debate in order to test the reality of the smart city in theory and practice, and as a viable strategy for future urbanization. In so doing, this conference was conducted to embrace the following four themes and extended topics:
1. Energy & environment:
(a) Sustainable energy storage system for urban built environment;
(b) Urban energy system, security and sustainability
2. Infrastructure:
(a) Sustainable urban mobility
(b) Sustainable urban water management
(c) Sustainable regional development
3. Information and communication technologies/ICT and mobility:
(a) Extending urban healthcare services to rural areas
(b) Internet of things/IoT
4. Quality of life:
(a) Urban housing infrastructure, policy & technology
(b) Live-able urban environment
(c) Urban healthcare services
In contrast to the previous two ICSCI gatherings, the conduct of the 2020 exposition was organized in conjunction with the 13th AUN/SEED-Net Regional Conference on Energy Engineering (RCEneE). This collaboration was completely executed in online mode using Webex. This rationale was decided in response to the ongoing development of the Covid-19 pandemic that started at the end of year 2019 and has had a devastating global impact. Despite regretfully being unable to proceed on the basis of face-to-face encounter, the conference was successfully delivered. It was engaging and well supported, and the Committee would like to express its sincere appreciation to all of those who made this event possible.
Thank you.
