Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities: Beyond Sustainability, Towards Co-Habitation

Climate change, rapid urbanisation, pandemics, as well as innovations in technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) are all impacting urban space. One response to such changes has been to make cities ecologically sustainable and ‘smart’. From real-time bus information, autonomous electric vehicles, smart parking, and smart street lighting, such initiatives are often presented as a social and environmental good. Critics, however, increasingly argue that technologically driven, and efficiency-led approaches to sustainability in the smart city are too simplistic and leave little room for participation and citizen agency despite government efforts to integrate innovative technologies in more equitable ways. This has prompted a growing awareness that a human-centred notion of cities, in which urban space is designed for, and inhabited by, humans only, is no longer tenable. Within the age of the Anthropocene, increasing numbers of scholars and practitioners are acknowledging the entanglements between human and non-human others (including plants, animals, insects, as well as soil, water, and sensors and their data) in urban life. In Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities, renowned researchers and practitioners from urban planning, architecture, environmental humanities, geography, design, arts, and computing critically explore smart cities beyond a human-centred approach. They respond to the complex interrelations between human and non-human others in urban space. Through theory, policy, and practice (past and present), as well as thinking speculatively about how smart cities may evolve in the future, the book makes a timely contribution to lively, contemporary scientific and political debates on what it means to design genuinely sustainable smart cities.