The smart city movement, during the last decade and a half, advocated the built environment and digital technology convergence with the backing of institutional capital and government support. The commitment of a significant number of local governments across the globe, in terms of official smart city policies and initiatives, along with the constant push of global technology giants, has reinforced the popularity of this movement. This two-volume treatment on smart cities thoroughly explores and sheds light on the prominent elements of the smart city phenomenon and generates a smart city blueprint. The first volume, with its 12 chapters, provides a sound understanding on the key foundations and growth directions of smart city frameworks, technologies, and platforms, with theoretical expansions, practical implications, and real-world case study lessons. The second companion volume offers sophisticated perspectives on the key foundations and directions of smart city policies, communities, and urban futures, with theoretical expansions, practical implications, and real-world case study lessons. These volumes offer an invaluable reference source for urban policymakers, managers, planners, practitioners, and many others, particularly to benefit from it when tackling key urban and societal issues and planning for and delivering smart city solutions. Moreover, the book is also a rich and important repository for scholars and research and undergraduate students.

The era of the smart city has arrived. Only a decade ago, the promise of optimising urban services through the widespread application of information and communication technologies was largely a techno-utopian fantasy. Today, smart urbanisation is occurring via urban projects, policies and visions in hundreds of cities around the globe. Inside Smart Cities provides real-world evidence on how local authorities, small and medium enterprises, corporations, utility providers and civil society groups are creating smart cities at the neighbourhood, city and regional scales. Twenty three empirically detailed case studies from the Global North and South – ranging from Cape Town, Stockholm and Abu Dhabi to Philadelphia, Hong Kong and Santiago – illustrate the multiple and diverse incarnations of smart urbanism. The contributors draw on ideas from urban studies, geography, urban planning, science and technology studies and innovation studies to go beyond the rhetoric of technological innovation and reveal the political, social and physical implications of digitalising the built environment. Collectively, the practices of smart urbanism raise fundamental questions about the sustainability, liveability and resilience of cities in the future. The findings are relevant to academics, students, practitioners and urban stakeholders who are questioning how urban innovation relates to politics and place.

The smart city movement, during the last decade and a half, advocated the built environment and digital technology convergence with the backing of institutional capital and government support. The commitment of a significant number of local governments across the globe, in terms of official smart city policies and initiatives, along with the constant push of global technology giants, has reinforced the popularity of this movement. This two-volume treatment on smart cities thoroughly explores and sheds light on the prominent elements of the smart city phenomenon and generates a smart city blueprint. This first volume, with its 12 chapters, provides a sound understanding on the key foundations and growth directions of smart city frameworks, technologies, and platforms, with theoretical expansions, practical implications, and real-world case study lessons. The second companion volume offers sophisticated perspectives on the key foundations and directions of smart city policies, communities, and urban futures, with theoretical expansions, practical implications, and real-world case study lessons. This book is an invaluable reference source for urban policymakers, managers, planners, practitioners, and many others, particularly to benefit from it when tackling key urban and societal issues and planning for and delivering smart city solutions. Moreover, the book is also a rich and important repository for scholars and research and undergraduate students as it communicates the complex smart city phenomenon in an easy to digest form, by providing both the big picture view and specifics of each component of that view. It also appeals to local government agencies and smart city practitioners.

Many East Asian states have undergone profound economic transformations over the last two decades. Singapore and Hong Kong especially have adapted to shifting economic and technological conditions by transforming themselves into ‘smart developmental states’. In these cities, the proliferation of digital technologies has given rise to new growth sectors and opened up new areas of political contestation within these early proponents of the developmental state model. Providing a theoretical and empirical discussion of the Asian developmental state model, the book assesses the evolution of the developmental state model, considers recent developments in the field and evaluates the development state’s continued relevance as a conceptual framework for understanding the politics of economic development. Focusing on digital and technology-enabled economic activities in Hong Kong and Singapore, the author explores the various policies that allow developmental states to stimulate economic growth, ensure organizational coherence, and engage businesses and other stakeholders. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of political economy and economic development in Asia as well as business professionals and other practitioners.

This book tells the story of visionary urban experiments, shedding light on the theories that preceded their development and on the monsters that followed and might be the end of our cities. The narrative is threefold and delves first into the eco-city, second the smart city and third the autonomous city intended as a place where existing smart technologies are evolving into artificial intelligences that are taking the management of the city out of the hands of humans. The book empirically explores Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong to provide a critical analysis of eco and smart city experiments and their sustainability, and it draws on numerous real-life examples to illustrate the rise of urban artificial intelligences across different geographical spaces and scales. Theoretically, the book traverses philosophy, urban studies and planning theory to explain the passage from eco and smart cities to the autonomous city, and to reflect on the meaning and purpose of cities in a time when human and non-biological intelligences are irreversibly colliding in the built environment. Iconoclastic and prophetic, Frankenstein Urbanism is both an examination of the evolution of urban experimentation through the lens of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and a warning about an urbanism whose product resembles Frankenstein’s monster: a fragmented entity which escapes human control and human understanding. Academics, students and practitioners will find in this book the knowledge that is necessary to comprehend and engage with the many urban experiments that are now alive, ready to leave the laboratory and enter our cities.

This handbook showcases how educators and practitioners around the world adapted their routine media pedagogies to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, which often led to significant social, economic, and cultural hardships. Combining an innovative mix of traditional chapters, autoethnography, case studies, and dialogue within an intercultural framework, the handbook focuses on the future of media education and provides a deeper understanding of the challenges and affordances of media education as we move forward. Topics range from fighting disinformation, how vulnerable communities coped with disadvantages using media, transforming educational TV or YouTube to reach larger audiences, supporting students’ wellbeing through various online strategies, examining early childhood, parents, and media mentoring using digital tools, reflecting on educators’ intersectionality on video platforms, youth-produced media to fight injustice, teaching remotely and providing low-tech solutions to address the digital divide, search for solutions collaboratively using social media, and many more. Offering a unique and broad multicultural perspective on how we can learn from the challenges of addressing varied pedagogical issues that have arisen in the context of the pandemic, this handbook will allow researchers, educators, practitioners, institution leaders, and graduate students to explore how media education evolved during 2020 and 2021, and how these experiences can shape the future direction of media education.

At a time when Asia is rapidly growing in global influence, this much-needed and insightful book bridges two major current policy topics in order to offer a unique study of the latest smart city archetypes emerging throughout Asia. Highlighting the smart city aspirations of Asian countries and their role in Asian governments’ new development strategies, this book draws out timely narratives and insights from a uniquely Asian context and policymaking space.