The future of smart cities has arrived, courtesy of citizens and their phones. To prove it, Daniel T. O’Brien explains the transformative insights gleaned from years researching Boston’s 311 reporting system, a sophisticated city management tool that has revolutionized how ordinary Bostonians use and maintain public spaces. Through its phone service, mobile app, website, and Twitter account, 311 catalogues complaints about potholes, broken street lights, graffiti, litter, vandalism, and other issues that are no one citizen’s responsibility but affect everyone’s quality of life. The Urban Commons offers a pioneering model of what modern digital data and technology can do for cities like Boston that seek both prosperous growth and sustainability. Analyzing a rich trove of data, O’Brien discovers why certain neighborhoods embrace the idea of custodianship and willingly invest their time to monitor the city’s common environments and infrastructure. On the government’s side of the equation, he identifies best practices for implementing civic technologies that engage citizens, for deploying public services in collaborative ways, and for utilizing the data generated by these efforts. Boston’s 311 system has narrowed the gap between residents and their communities, and between constituents and local leaders. The result, O’Brien shows, has been the creation of more effective policy and practices that reinvigorate the way citizens and city governments approach their mutual interests. By unpacking when, why, and how the 311 system has worked for Boston, The Urban Commons reveals the power and potential of this innovative system, and the lessons learned that other cities can adapt.

Urban space is a commons: simultaneously a sphere of human cooperation and negotiation and its product. Understanding urban space as a commons means that the much sought-after productivity of the city precedes rather than results from strategies of the state and capital. This approach challenges assumptions of urbanization as capital-driven, an idea which resonates with a range of recent urban social movements, from the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement to the “Right to the City” alliance. However commons exist in a tense relationship with state and market, both of which continually seek to exploit and control them. Initiatives to create “commons” are welcomed and even facilitated by governments in order to (re-)valorize urban space and lessen the impacts of economic restructuring, while, at the same time, the creative and reproductive potential of the urban commons is undermined by continuing attempts to commodify them. This volume examines these topics theoretically and empirically through a wide spectrum of international case studies providing perspectives from a variety of cities as diverse as Berlin, Hyderabad and Seoul. A wider discussion of commons in current scientific and activist literature from housing, public space, to urban infrastructure, is explored through the lens of the urban condition.

"Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons" showcases over a hundred sharing-related case studies and model policies from more than 80 cities in 35 countries. It both witnesses a growing global movement and serves as a practical reference guide for community-based solutions to urgent challenges faced by cities everywhere. This book is a call to action meant to inspire readers with ideas, raise awareness of the impressive range of local efforts, and strengthen the sharing movement worldwide. "Sharing Cities" shows that not only is another world possible, but that much of it is already here.

This book rethinks the city by examining its various forms of collectivity – their atmospheres, modes of exclusion and self-organization, as well as how they are governed – on the basis of a critical discussion of the notion of urban commons. The idea of the commons has received surprisingly little attention in urban theory, although the city may well be conceived as a shared resource. Urban Commons: Rethinking the City offers an attempt to reconsider what a city might be by studying how the notion of the commons opens up new understandings of urban collectivities, addressing a range of questions about urban diversity, urban governance, urban belonging, urban sexuality, urban subcultures, and urban poverty; but also by discussing in more methodological terms how one might study the urban commons. In these respects, the rethinking of the city undertaken in this book has a critical dimension, as the notion of the commons delivers new insights about how collective urban life is formed and governed.

The book presents a novel examination of urban commons which provides a robust base for education initiatives and future public policy guidance on the protection and use of urban commons as invaluable urban green spaces that offer a diverse cultural and ecological resource for future communities. The book's central argument is that only through a deep understanding of the past and a rigorous engagement with present users, can we devise new futures or imaginaries of culture, well-being and diversity for the urban commons. It argues that understanding the genesis of, and interactions between, the different pressures on urban green space has important policy implications for the delivery of nature conservation, recreational access and other land use priorities. The stakeholders in today’s urban commons, whether land users, policy makers or the public, are the inheritors of a complex cultural legacy and must negotiate diverse and sometimes conflicting objectives in their pursuit of a potentially unifying goal: a secure future for our urban commons. The book offers a unique and strongly interdisciplinary study of urban commons, one that brings together original historical investigation, contemporary legal scholarship, extensive oral history research with user groups, and research examining the imagined futures for the urban common in modern society. It explores the complex social and political history of the urban common, as well as its legal and cultural status today, using four diverse case studies from within England as exemplars of the distinctively urban common. These are Town Moor in Newcastle, Mousehold Heath in Norwich, Clifton and Durdham Downs in Bristol and Valley Gardens in Brighton. The book concludes by looking forward and considering new tools and methods of negotiation, inclusivity and creativity to inform the future of these case studies, and of urban commons more widely. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the commons, green spaces, urban planning, environmental and urban geography, environmental studies and natural resource management.

This book tells the story of Metropoliz, a vacant salami factory located in the Eastern periphery of Rome (Italy) that was squatted in 2009 by homeless households with the cooperation of the Housing Rights Movement Blocchi Precari Metropolitani, and progressively reconverted into the house and museum spaces that form the Città Meticcia (the mestizo city). Through a vivid activist-ethnographic account, Margherita Grazioli suggests that Metropoliz exemplifies a practice of grassroots urban regeneration that speaks to the conflicted reconfiguration of real estate urban regimes in a post-crisis, post-neoliberal scenario. Using the contentious reappropriation of housing as a point of departure for claiming manifold rights, Metropoliz represents an alternative model of urbanity and habitation that will inspire contemporary urban social movements concerned with the demand of the ‘right to the city’, as well as those concerned with the ontology of the urban commons.

This book explores the changing approaches to urban common good in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. The question of common good is fundamental to urban living; however, understanding of the term varies depending on local contexts and conditions, particularly complex in countries with experience of communism. In cities east of the former Iron Curtain, the once ideologically imposed principle of common good became gradually devalued throughout the 20th century due to the lack of citizen agency, only to reappear as a response to the ills of neoliberal capitalism around the 2010s. The book reveals how the idea of urban common good has been reconstructed and practiced in European cities after socialism. It documents the paradigm shift from city as a communal infrastructure to city as a commodity, which lately has been challenged by the approach to city as a commons. These transformations have been traced and analysed within several urban themes: housing, public transport, green infrastructure, public space, urban regeneration, and spatial justice. A special focus is on the changes in the public discourse in Poland and the perspectives of key urban stakeholders in three case-study cities of Gdańsk, Kraków, and Łódź. The findings point to the need for drawing from best practices of the socialist legacy, with its celebration of the common. At the same time, they call for learning from the mistakes of the recent past, in which the opportunity for citizen empowerment has been unseized. The book is intended for researchers, academics, and postgraduates, as well as practitioners and anyone interested in rediscovering the inherent potential of urban commonality. It will appeal to those working in human geography, spatial planning, and other areas of urban studies.

This book provides a critical theoretical framework for understanding the implementation and development of smart cities as innovation drivers, with long-term effects on productivity, livability, and the sustainability of specific initiatives. This framework is based on an empirical analysis of 21 case studies, which include pioneer projects from various regions. It investigates how successful smart city initiatives foster technological innovation by combining regulatory governance and private agency. The typologies of smart city-making approaches are thoroughly examined. This book presents the holistic approach of smart cities, which start from current issue and challenges, advanced technological development, disaster mitigation, ecological perspective, social issue, and urban governance. The book is organized into five major parts, which reflect interconnection between theories and practice. Part one explains the introduction which reflects the diversity and challenges of the urban commons and its regeneration. Part two covers the current and future situation of urban growth, anglomeration agglomeration, and urban infrastructure. This section includes rethinking urban sprawl: moving towards sustainable cities, drivers of urban growth and infrastructure, urban land use dynamics and urban sprawl and urban infrastructure sustainability and resilience. Part three describes climate crisis, urban health, and waste management. This section includes climate change and health impacts in urban areas, green spaces: an invaluable resource for delivering sustainable urban health, health and wellbeing and quality of life in the changing urban environment, urban climate and pollution—case study, sustainable urban waste management and urban sustainability and global warming and urban heat Island. Part four covers the ecological perspectives, advanced technology, and social impact for i.e., smart building, ecosystem services, society and future smart cities (SSC). This section includes urban ecosystem services, environmental planning, and city management, artificial intelligence and urban hazards and societal impact, and using geospatial application and urban/smart city energy conservation—case study. Part five covers urban governance, smart solutions, and sustainable cities. It includes good governance, especially e-governance and citizen participation, urban governance, space and policy planning to achieve sustainability, smart city planning and management and Internet of things (IoT), advances in smart roads for future smart cities, sustainable city planning, innovation, and management, future strategy for sustainable smart cities and lessons from the pandemic: the future of smart cities.

This book explores the application of service design to urban commons. It originates from a project developed by the research group of POLIMI DESIS Lab of Politecnico di Milano, aimed at imagining the future of the Reggio Emilia Ducal Palace and its park - the Reggia di Rivalta. The peculiarity of the project lays in the idea that the design of a (public) space should be informed by the design of its services, because the development of specific activities actually builds a fundamental part of the identity of a place, conceiving both the tangible and intangible dimensions as part of a single creative process. The combination of a participatory process and the integration of spatial and service design led to infrastructuring a multi-stakeholder participatory action research of envisioning the future of a public good. This effort has been thus framed into a working methodology, specific tools and progressive outputs, which are defined as Service Master Planning (the process), and Service Master Plan (the product), allowing service design professionals to expand their knowledge and develop skills for a new field of application connected to urban planning.