Mapping the realities of smart urbanism: a method to promote transdisciplinary smart city approaches

Smart urbanism is shaping the world’s cities. Through the use of digital sensors attached to urban infrastructure, smart cities use data to make quantitatively informed decisions regarding city management and policy. Yet, whilst elements of the smart city exist in the empirically observable realm, the proposed benefits of smart urbanism emerge from an empirically unobservable reality. Therefore, the forces driving the smart city are essentially invisible to those who live within it. This paper adopts a perspective informed by the work of Martin Heidegger and critical realism, which respectively posit that the essence of technology is to reveal new entities and this simultaneously occurs across multiple domains of reality - arguing that the essence of smart urbanism is the experience of previously imperceptible events, which are revealed to achieve a set goal or vision. This paper proposes a systemic map centred upon a mnemonic, SMAARTEE, which stands for eight elements of smart urbanism - situation, manifestation, actors, application, reveal, technology, events and experiences - to be used to aid holistic smart city thought, in order to shape transdisciplinary practice.