Table Of ContentS.M.A.R.T. Environments
Nimish Biloria Editor
Data-driven
Multivalence
in the Built
Environment
S.M.A.R.T. Environments
Series Editor
Nimish Biloria, Sydney, Australia
Chief Editor
Nimish Biloria, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), NSW 2007, Australia
Editorial Board
Jane Burry, Swinburne University of Technology, Victoria, Australia
Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Tim Gammons, Arup, London, UK
Michael U. Hensel, AHO-Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway
Rob Roggema, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, The Netherlands
The book series will cover a broad spectrum of data-driven multivalence in the built
environment. The individual volumes will set the stage for understanding multiple
ways in which the exponential escalation of digital ubiquity in the contemporary
environment is being absorbed, modulated, processed and actively used for
enhancing the performance of our built environment.S.M.A.R.T., is used as an
acronym for Systems & Materials in Architectural & Urban Research and
Technology, with a specific focus on investigating the intricate relationship between
information systems and associative material formations at variable scales within
the built environment. This is deeply rooted in exploring multi-domain research and
design strategies involving nonlinear processes for developing data-driven generative
meta-design systems. This book series is relevant to the shaping our Built
Environment and will explore novel design and research paradigms.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15908
Nimish Biloria
Editor
Data-driven Multivalence
in the Built Environment
Editor
Nimish Biloria
University of Technology Sydney
Sydney, NSW, Australia
ISSN 2523-8469 ISSN 2523-8477 (electronic)
S.M.A.R.T. Environments
ISBN 978-3-030-12179-2 ISBN 978-3-030-12180-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12180-8
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
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Foreword
The city has always been a locus for ideas, engagements and ideals. For most of us,
a city is where we encounter other people in our jobs and social lives, but city gov-
ernments and administrators tend to focus on the material city, its structure and
supporting systems. These material systems include an expanding array of digital
technologies. These technologies are often focused on making the material city run
more smoothly – traffic, water, power, waste management and so on. Such enhance-
ments are usually about the ‘business’ of the city and a perception of the city as
primarily a place of business in its broadest sense – the city as a marketplace. This
is an ancient idea being modified for our present digital age. But it is only one
important dimension of the city; another sees the city as place for living, not simply
surviving but one of flourishing.
A central focus in many critiques of the smart city is the desperate need for a
focus on people and not just on the technology. This has become a key part of the
contemporary smart cities discussion – how to humanise the smart city and what
additional opportunities humanising the smart city might offer? And this raises the
idea as to how digitisation might make the city more liveable. Can we effectively go
against historical flows and make the city a more people-centric environment using
technologies often designed to facilitate the material city and its economic focus? In
The Netherlands, for example, some of these ideas are already in play including the
option for older people to ‘hack’ the lights on pedestrian crossings. In this context,
technologies can facilitate this process of humanising the city.
One of the central and essential foci of this volume is the place of people in the
smart city and the smart city as a place for people of all descriptions. This is impor-
tant because the twenty-first-century city is a global phenomenon characterised by
various forms of migration and associated demographic changes. People come into
the city in search of opportunities, as they have always done, while others attempt
to leave the city for all manner of reasons ranging from the cost of housing in the
globalised city through to a desire to escape the actual and perceived stresses of
contemporary urban environments.
Perhaps one of the least smart elements of many contemporary cities is that they
are often more disruptive than adaptive for their inhabitants, especially those most
v
vi Foreword
vulnerable to rapid changes in urban form and function. In the context of high-
income countries, this means looking at the city, smart or not, from the perspective
of an ageing population, from those with disability, the very young, the homeless
and all those groups whose needs don’t fit easily with the high-technology rhetoric
of the smart city. The city is dependent on the contributions of people, but in many
cases, it does not return that favour in its design or operations. In this sense, we
often forget that the city is more than the physical infrastructure and its technology;
it is a fundamentally social space – one with an almost unlimited potential and
capacity for places of representation and participation. Throughout this volume, this
idea is presented to the reader across a variety of national and social contexts.
The issue of ‘mobilities’ is also addressed because new technologies can be a
change in and of themselves (e.g. electric vehicles), but their adoption drives flow-
on effects and produces new adaptations (e.g. ride sharing, car sharing and the ‘gig’
economy) that were previously unanticipated. In addition, conventional wisdoms
associated with public and private transport are destabilised, forcing a fresh per-
spective on the potential of new technologies, digital and analogue, and their impli-
cations for established systems and ideas as change unfolds. The speed of new
digital technologies and applications, in particular, means that the growth of knowl-
edge in this space is increasingly dynamic.
The smart cities discourse has been given an added momentum by the rapid
developments in digital technologies and methods including the incredible hype and
potential opportunities associated with ‘big data’. The literature in this space is
developing rapidly with contributions from the low- to high-income countries
increasingly the norm.
What Nimish Biloria and the contributing authors bring to this digital urban envi-
ronment is a broad-ranging understanding of the history of the smart city, actual and
idealised, as well as its intersectional nature with the human domain. The city is
clearly not simply a mechanism for business but a dynamic, lived environment. An
increasingly important aspect of this lived dynamism is the changing nature of the
city’s population and the implications of demographic change. If digital technolo-
gies and thinking can help humanise the smart city, now is the time as population
ageing becomes a global phenomenon. This volume addresses this and a number of
related concerns with the idealised, smart techno-city and expands our understand-
ing of the knowledge we need to create a humane, liveable smart city fit for all its
inhabitants.
Senior Research Fellow, Faculty of Health Hamish Robertson
University of Technology Sydney,
Sydney, Australia
Introduction
Data-Driven Multivalence in the Built Environment is the first issue of the 5-year
Springer Book Series on S.M.A.R.T. Environments. This issue sets the stage for
understanding multiple ways in which the exponential escalation of digital ubiquity
in the contemporary environment is being absorbed, modulated, processed and
actively used for enhancing the performance of our built environment. S.M.A.R.T.,
in this context, is thus used as an acronym for Systems & Materials in Architectural
& Urban Research and Technology, with a specific focus on interrogating the intri-
cate relationship between information systems and associative material formations
at variable scales within the built environment. This interrogation is deeply rooted
in exploring multidomain research and design strategies involving nonlinear pro-
cesses for developing data-driven generative meta-design systems.
Such meta-systems are in turn used to conceive multi-performative architectures,
which can respond, reconfigure and adapt to observed contextual data variations in
real time. The multi-performative nature of such research-driven social, spatial and
technical initiatives is deemed critical in deciphering new realities within which we
situate ourselves. Mining and generating informed architectural and urban forma-
tions within such a context thus challenge conventional top-down decision-making-
driven approaches towards shaping the built environment and instead conceive
data-driven design hybrids. Such hybrids evolve from the creative fusion of social
and cultural data, ubiquitous computing, computational design systems and place-
making policies.
This context implies changes to the manner in which the physical, the human and
the digital counterparts formulating the contemporary built environment are inextri-
cably interlinked into complex relational networks. Implications on how different
facets of the built environment such as energy, health, mobility, governance, urban
design and architecture operate and innovate with this mediated layer of real-time
data are thus crucial and are thus captured and exposed via this opening volume’s
focus on the multivalence of data in the built environment. What is also vital to
understand is the relationship between the micro-, mezzo- and macroscales of oper-
ation, which collectively build up the so-called ‘smart’ nature of the built environ-
ment. The opening issue of S.M.A.R.T. Environments sets the base for understanding
vii
viii Introduction
the city as a complex ecosystem wherein the operative term ‘smart’ is seen as a
customised creative response to urban problems residing at the confluence of peo-
ple, technology, context and economics properties of the city.
The following multifarious domains constituting the built environment are cov-
ered under the opening issue: health, mobility, energy, infrastructure and the built
environment. The book is accordingly organised in seven parts: Perspectives on the
City, Smart Urban Infrastructure, Urban Health and Wellbeing, Urban Living Labs,
Disruptive Technologies, Socio-spatial Ecosystems and Conclusions. The book
begins with a collection of three chapters under the operative title Perspectives on
the City, which creates an overarching narrative around three vital considerations
while developing a smart city: firstly, considering economic equity as an important
dimension of performance to promote an inclusive environment of wellbeing and
democratic growth; secondly, developing guidelines on designing the ‘Convenient
City’ by making use of available technology while harnessing a critical wholistic
viewpoint on the current propaganda of smart cities rather than understanding them
as technocratic interventions; and thirdly, by acquiring a human-centric perspective,
which outlines emerging humanism of urban technologies as a quintessential tool
for developing smart and equitable urban environments.
After setting a socio-economic context around the state of the city, the next part
focuses on smart urban infrastructure wherein both physical and digital infrastruc-
ture are explored for their potential. Smart urban mobility solutions and customer-
centric infrastructure planning, big data command and control centres for smart
cities and city information models in conjunction with advanced design, analysis
and management systems and smart governance frameworks involved in the devel-
opment of smart infrastructure projects are explored under this book section. The
subsequent part focuses on urban health and wellbeing by covering multiple scales
of urban health and wellbeing applications, from the object scale, involving custom-
ised 3D printing, to socio-technical measures for promoting agile ageing and the use
of contemporary ICT-enabled enhancements, both in terms of advanced meta-
systems and integrated IoT-based solutions within the built environment. Living
labs within urban settings in European as well as Indonesian contexts as evidence-
based design-thinking enablers are further discussed via two chapters. These cover
two scales: firstly, the design and development of interaction labs, which go beyond
conventional scientifically controlled experimental spaces but rather acquire the
character of design research labs which predominantly deal with exploring, hacking
and tinkering with electronics via messy engineering processes, and secondly,
utilising the city as a lab for conducting socio-technical experiments as well as for
mapping the biorhythms of the city within dense urban environments in the form of
urban living labs.
The Disruptive Technologies part of the book focuses on developing
biotechnology-b ased techniques for developing sustainable energy solutions and
creative ways of incorporating image processing-driven visioning and mapping
technologies. Both look at intelligent means of collecting, processing and applying
urban resources via both software- and hardware-based adaptations to service the
urban environment. Evidence driven explorations around the application of algae
Introduction ix
building technology and the technology transfer-based applications of image pro-
cessing to map pedestrian and vehicular flows, to develop a new and more abstract
understanding of the material nature of the city, are two such promising technolo-
gies discussed in the book.
The Disruptive Technologies part is complemented by the Socio-spatial
Ecosystems part of the book. Here, the focus moves towards understanding such
innovative technologies as entrepreneurial ecosystems and their relationship and
impact on smart cities. Apart from this, the part also looks at spatial innovation
within today’s cultural context and focuses on practical applications within the
housing sector by exploring multimodal accommodations in the age of the millen-
nial as well as speculates upon finding suitable ways of measuring urban wellbeing
within the contemporary city via interfacing quantitative, qualitative measuring
techniques together with citizen science-based participatory methodologies. The
book finally concludes with a section on inferences and speculates upon the future
of a data-rich wholistic smart environment.
Faculty of Design Architecture and Building Nimish Biloria
University of Technology Sydney,
Sydney, Australia
