15 Jul Lectureship ‘Future of Cities: Best Sustainable Practices Summer Course. Smart City, Definitions & Case-Studies’ at the Future of Cities, University of Oxford (England-UK). 16-24th August 2016

Full information and the programme of the Summer Course here.

Abstract:

Smart Cities: Definition and Case Studies

(16^th August 2016, Christ Church College, University of Oxford)

Dr. Calzada’s interactive lecture aims to provoke a critical and constructive debate on the real potentialities of the Smart City as the so-called buzzword that is currently dominating policy and research agendas in cities and regions worldwide. The lecturer will elaborate on the primary definitions of the term, and will illustrate these through his experiende with some real case studies in Europe, that are funded by the EU-H2020 and the ESRC Urban Transformations programmes. The main ideas stem from the article “Unplugging: Deconstructing the Smart City” in the Journal of Urban Technology. The lecture’s main argument draws upon the necessity to plug stakeholders in by establishing a complex, multi-stakeholder approach to face 21^st century urban challenges from the perspectives of governance, policymaking, and strategy. Topics to be covered include: interdependencies among stakeholders; the need for democratic mechanisms to manage data; the need to scale up urban solutions to metropolitan and city-regional levels; the intent to provide comparative evidence-based data; and the tendency to establish not only quantitative but qualitative rankings and city dashboards that enable adaptation rather than replication.