Hybrid Smartness: Seeking a Balance Between Top-Down and Bottom-Up Smart City Approaches
This chapter is part of the . Intelligence for Future Cities book published as a part of the International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM 2023). The book is Edited by Robert Goodspeed, Raja Sengupta, Marketta Kyttä, Christopher Pettit.
In this article, we explore how the idea of smart cities has been the subject of a range of views in recent years.
We do a review of the terms and concepts around the “smart city” that reveals three distinct ways of making urban development “smart”: a techno-centric approach (top-down), a social-centric approach (bottom-up), and a socio-technical approach (in-between).
While each direction is significant in its own way, we argue that it is crucial to support an alternative, integrated idea of the smart city through “hybrid smartness.” In this new approach to smart cities, both top-down and bottom-up smart ideas are balanced, and recognized. It is the interweaving of both ideas that ensures an urban development model that promotes equity and sustainability. This hybrid thinking approach can thus inform the wider planning discourse that is usually trapped between top-down and bottom-up extremes.
Link: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-31746-0_2
Hendawy, M., da Silva, I.F.K. (2023). Hybrid Smartness: Seeking a Balance Between Top-Down and Bottom-Up Smart City Approaches. In: Goodspeed, R., Sengupta, R., Kyttä, M., Pettit, C. (eds) Intelligence for Future Cities. CUPUM 2023. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31746-0_2