In 2014, Puca launched an exploratory seminar on smart cities
. The aim was to hold five sessions to initiate a discussion involving researchers, stakeholders, experts, and laypeople in order to move beyond enchanted narratives and negative preconceptions about smart cities and make them a possible object of governance or, at the very least, a shared object of research.
After an introductory session with Antoine Picon, the first person in France to develop a theoretical framework on the subject, the seminar explored the links between smart cities and sustainable development
, what they meant for the "city of networks
,"
the democratic challenges
of data in the urban sphere, and finally its "outside"
and the opportunities it offered to think about and organize it differently.
There was no assessment at the end of this first cycle, but there was a conviction that the smart city was a substantial concept
, protean certainly, but more complex than evanescent, and that it could not be limited to the extension of the digital domain to the city, the pursuit of e-administration by other means, or the ultimate stage of neoliberalism in urban services.
Borrowing, of course, from these and other registers, but not reducible to any one of them, the "smart city
" manifests itself in a way that is not fully captured by the predictive and prophetic discourse that accompanies it. That is why it was decided to continue the exercise.
But while the first cycle was led by the Puca, under the direction of François Ménard and Jean Danielou, this second cycle is part of a more cooperative and partnership-based approach. LATTS (Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Société)
, a partnership between the CNRS, Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, and the University of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, has offered to continue the project and suggest new areas for debate. How, beyond pilot projects and demonstrations, are the new opportunities offered by communication technologies, big data, and Web 2.0 transforming urban management and life
? How do these developments "enter" politics
, how do they influence policy, between under-politicization (by its actors?) and over-politicization (by researchers?)? This will be the theme of the first session.
The other sessions will address other questions: How
are knowledge production, urban sciences
, and the use of models influenced by the new possibilities of mass statistics
, by whom, and with what consequences? How is the economic landscape of urban services being redrawn (flexible uses, disintermediation, between platform economies and dynamic pricing, etc.)? Through what means
(open data, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, digital forums, etc.) can these new technologies enable the population to influence urban management?
Without claiming to provide definitive answers from an expert perspective, the seminar aims instead to be a moment of shared inquiry into these emerging practices.
Session 1: "Smart city" policies, Friday, January 27, 2017
Session 2: Models and big data, Thursday, May 4, 2017
Session 3: Generalized transparency, filtering, or distortion: what big and open data reveal about the city
Contact
Gilles Jeannot, professor at École des Ponts Paristech, researcher at LATTS, gilles.jeannot@enpc.fr