Is the Smart City a Cyber Horse?

Mike Batty, Sarah Wise and Academic Visitor at CASA Efrat Blumenfeld-Lieberthal delivered papers to the international conference Smart Cities: Potentials, Prospects and Discontents at the City Center Institute, Tel Aviv University (TAU) between 12-14 September 2017. The conference raised questions and some controversy about the nature of the smart city of the future. Will it be something other than smart? Sarah talked about her work on freight modelling at the most local of scales inside the city whilst Mike talked on the evolution of smart cities and the embedding of computers into the fabric of the built environment. Efrat introduced new ways of mapping the discourse on smart cities.

Amongst many other interesting presentations, our researchers were particularly fascinated by papers delivered by Charlie Catlett of the Urban Center for Computation and Data (University of Chicago/Argonne Labs) on his Array of Things which involves wiring downtown Chicago; Hermann Haken and Juval Portugali (TAU) on the Smartification of Cities: an Information Adaptation Perspective; Itzhak Benenson (TAU) on smart adaptive public transport, and Egbert Stolk (TU Delft) on the smartification of urban design.

The image is Cyber Horse, outside the Auditorium at the Tel Aviv University Cyber Auditorium built for the university’s Cyber Week in 2016. It is built of infected computer and phone components. Like the Trojan horse, it is what is inside it that is important.