SMARTEEE: a framework for developing holistic socio-technical conceptualisations of smart urbanism

Grounded in the notion that the utilisation of ICTs, the ‘internet of things’ and the extraction of data can be leveraged in the enhancement of the city, the process of smart urbanism, and the smart cities which are produced as a result, is an undertaking sweeping the many aspirational cities worldwide. However, despite the apparently laudable goals of such an endeavour, often bound in notions of increased efficiencies, sustainability and inter-urban competitiveness, there is a acute risk that, through this digitally mediated pursuit, already existing inequalities in the urban milieu could be further entrenched; alongside concerns over increased surveillance and creeping privatisation. Such concerns follow in the wake of techno-centric and technocratic implementations of smart urbanism, where faith in these emergent technologies is placed as a panacea for uniquely urban ills, such as but not limited to, congestion, poor air quality and concerns around growth. Yet, cities are not closed systems in need of management and control, but rather are deeply complex environments which span numerous factors, elements and realms of expertise. To act in the city is to work with problems of a ‘wicked’ nature, where simple solutions are doomed to failure. To this end, smart cities are in-and-of-themselves socio-technical endeavours, thus requiring a plethora of insights, expertise and worldviews to be successfully implemented, thereby lending themselves to the development of transdisciplinary research and methods. Therefore, for a city to become truly ‘smart’, a holistic conceptualisation of not only the technical domain, but also the social (and vice-versa) is required. Yet, for many stakeholders within smart city projects, such perspectives and worldviews are alien to their expertise, and whilst there are pre-existing tools and frameworks which could be utilised to structure them - namely Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology and the Business Model Canvas - these are of limited use within smart urbanism. Therefore, this project has turned to the philosophical works of Martin Heidegger - who argued that the essence of technology is that of ‘revealing’ new insights and entities into the world - and Roy Bhaskar - who argued that events often occur beyond our experience of them - to deconstruct the nature of smart urbanism, arguing that its essence lies in the experience of previously in-experienceable events which are revealed in order to attain a set goal or vision. This philosophical argument has been subsequently structured around a mnemonic - SMARTEEE - which has been utilised to create a framework for the elucidation of socio-technical conceptualisations within and of smart urbanism. SMARTEEE stands for eight elements of smart urbanism, identified through extensive literature review, case studies and interviews - namely: situation, make-up, actors, reveal, tools and technique, events, experience and enframement - and to assist in the utilisation of the framework a visual tool has been developed in tandem. The initial manifestations of this undertaking were presented and assessed through interviewing delegates at the 2022 Transdisciplinary Engineering Conference, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through applying the SMARTEEE framework to a socio-technical case study; the shift towards remote working as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Following on from the interview data, a range of adaptations and refinements to the framework and tool were undertaken, alongside which a range of ‘lenses’ were devised in order to assist users in considering other worldviews and approaches when formulating their own conceptualisation of smart urbanism; each of which adopts a position informed by an element within SMARTEEE. The utilisation of these lenses points towards a means of structuring the prerequisite entwinement of methods and expertise inherent in transdisciplinary research. The SMARTEEE framework has proven to serve as not only a means of elucidating and developing holistic, socio-technical conceptualisations of smart urbanism, but has also illustrated a means of structuring them, whilst implicitly binding together the social and technological realms of smart urbanism, which promises to produce better situated, locally integrated, smart city projects going forward.