Some thoughts on Ralf-Martin Soe, Luiza Schuch de Azambuja, Kalle Toiskallio, Marko Nieminen & Michael Batty (2021): Institutionalising smart city research and innovation: from fuzzy definitionsto real-life experiments, urban research & practice, 2021

Abstract

The article ‘Institutionalising Smart City Research and Innovation’ consists of three parts, which are only very loosely connected to each other: 1) a complaint about the inconsistent use of the term ‘smart city’, 2) a survey of established global research centres dealing with smart cities, and 3) a presentation of the research and practice activities of the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities, a Tallinn-based recently founded EUfunded organisation for research and innovation to which most of the authors belong. The author’s basic idea is to bundle the scattered smart city discussions by looking at the work of ‘actual smart city research actors’, claiming that ‘understanding these actors can help to reason the smart city as a concept’. Since I find my fundamental discomfort with this approach astutely articulated in Kitchin’s commentary, I would like to touch on two points in particular.