Urban-architect role in smart-city context literature review and case studies

The Urban-Architect role in smart cities is a topic that has not received much attention from the scientific community. This article studies the work of the traditional responsible for thinking the cities, the Urban Architect. Under a critical proposition, aspects of this problematic are identified, which is in part nourished by the deficient action of these professionals. The study was divided into two parts, the first one materialized through a bibliographical survey, in this section it is presented; 1 — a more detailed description of why this research work; 2 — a contextualisation of the transition of the scenarios is explained; 3 — the problematization and the reflection are raised for some reasons of the “disqualification” of the action of the architect-urbanist in the scene. The second is based on the discussion between the authors and case studies; 4 — aspects are discussed and some characteristics are listed for “(re) framing” within the ideal scenario; 5 — four case studies are described: two smart cities built from scratch and two cities being transformed into smart cities; 6 — the limitations, conclusions and strands for future work are woven.