For smart city initiatives to work well they need to be conceptualized and contextualized within a broader and richer understanding of what a city is and how it works in practice.
Q) Who does this conceptualization and decision making? What is the skill-set required to anticipate and articulate the context in order to conceptualize? Who defines as a right candidate to qualify these requirements in order to make such decisions or contribute to the process of decision-making? Is it a function of governance, city administration, architects, technology makers, citizens, users? And what would be a concrete process to visualize this broader understanding of the city? Is there a need for guidelines to develop this understanding that can be passed on the potential candidates? If yes, is there a need for consistency in these guidelines?
In general, smart city technologies, and associated rhetoric and science (urban science and urban informatics), are founded on big analytics. In short, this means algorithms are used to process vast quantities of real-time data in order to dynamically manage a system and to make future predictions.
Q) This is true for the top down and bottom up visions of smart city development. In that case, how do we ensure and facilitate participation? What would be the learning curve for users to be able to participate fully and what are the skill sets required? Is the bottom up approach just a leveling down of top-down approach? Is it an inclusive method for decision making? What happens to the excluded groups? And what would be the motivation for participation if it has a learning curve? Is it more like a competition than participation to make it loud to be heard?
The impression one gains from encountering smart city initiatives is that the starting point is the technology and then to partially approach the question from the perspective of what core issue (e.g., sustainability) its technical intervention (reducing traffic) might address. In other words, the means is post-justified by ends, rather than the ends shaping the means.
Q) Do technical interventions sometimes not function as building blocks to the process of problem-solving? Would it be a right to say, that the problem arises when, rather than using technical solutions as a resource to solve identified problems, problems are crafted to fit in the developed technology?