#ISSS2017 Vienna

"Smart" seems to be the buzzword of these years, following on "sustainable" and "resilient". Everything is smart, or should become smart, including our cities ("smart cities) and our workplaces (e.g., "smart work centers"). But what does a city or a workplace need to be "smart"?

Along with a certain commodization of the word "smart", its meaning has opened to include more than only technological solutions. A network of sensors and some computer intelligence alone won't make a city smart. Instead, e.g., "smart city" is now a catch-all term for a city that is being developed in an integrated way, combining aspects of technical infrastructure with administrative innovation, new approaches to leverage local economic and cultural developments, as well as esthetic and spatial design aspects.

Systems tools and methods can enable such integrated develoments of places on various scales – buildings, campuses and neighborhoods, urban quarters, entire cities and regions. A systems view may help to avoid misled developments and open the minds of decision-makers for future-proof strategies.

Many of our cities are at the crossroad now. Decision makers need to navigate a multitude of good-practice examples and fashions. Do we want to optimize our cities for tourists flying in for a weekend, contributing to the "eventization" of our cities? Are we going to insist on further extending the 20th-century model of public urban mass transportation using buses and tramways, while ignoring that the youth is dreaming of individualized (public) transportation and several companies are working on small flying vehicles? Are we going to leverage on the sharing economy or try to ban it (Uber, AirBnB)? Shall we help people to better interconnect in cities – or continue to put up hurdles to traffic flows and fostering slow modes of transportation such as cycling? And how do we account for moving the aging population – on bicycles? Will we allow for private space or are we going to foster endless "co-"ization – shared common spaces in residential buildings, all together in public mass transportation, all together in co-working spaces?

What do our systems approaches suggest? What is viable? – Are we stuck with the mechanical city of the 20th century (to which belongs, imho any purely technical sensor-computer optimized city), or are we finally going to make the leap to the "systems" city?