Search

In smart city practice, urban policymakers show to focus foremost on the technologies sec. This often leads to quite uniform, technocratic and corporate-led ways of handling urban issues. In contrast, more attention should be paid to the question of appropriateness of smart city technologies. This entails that quite uniform urban issues in different contexts ask for distinctive approaches and as a consequence, for specific smart city technologies. In other words, the context plays a decisive role in the choice for the urban issues themselves and in the ways to ‘solve’ or govern these, and in the choice for specific smart city technologies. This study examines the role of context in the handling of urban issues with the help of smart city technologies in three smart city projects: Hangzhou City Brain (China), Singapore Smart Nation, and Amsterdam Smart City (the Netherlands). The results reveal that the specific contextual factors influence urban city developments and the application therein of smart city technologies. This includes: a technology-driven management approach to fixing Hangzhou's traffic congestion; a mixed technocratic and platform-oriented approach to effecting transformation in Singapore's government services, businesses and urban living; and a platform-oriented, open-minded mechanism to improve Amsterdam's livability and economic prosperity. This paper concludes that rather than treating the technology itself as smart, the real smartness in smart cities is to develop and implement appropriate technologies according to its local context to solve targeted urban issues.

Rapid suburbanization in China is dramatically reshaping the daily life of urban residents. In China, long-distance commuting, traffic congestion, spatial mismatch and the low quality of life resulting from residential suburbanization are causing widespread concern. This paper compares the changes in time allocation from a time-use perspective, based on two activity-travel survey datasets collected in suburban Beijing in respectively 2007 and 2017. Travelling time to work has increased substantially between 2007 and 2017 and particularly impacted non-working activities. Working and commuting showed to have the greatest impact on time allocated to non-work activities, both in home and out of home, both maintenance and discretionary activities. Furthermore, residents’ allocation of time to non-work activities shows to be influenced too by their socioeconomic attributes, such as gender, marital status and household configuration (e.g. extended family). We found that the space–time constraints imposed by household responsibilities leads to greater gender differences in time allocation. This paper provides insight into how urban residents reallocate their time as a result of increasing suburbanization.

Studies have found that spatial mismatch is a universal phenomenon, although both their substantive and methodological focus can differ substantially. In China, there is a growing body of literature on spatial mismatch, but few studies have measured the degree of spatial mismatch between local and migrant workers in different occupations. To fill this gap, this research investigates the spatial mismatch for different socioeconomic groups in Xiamen according to their “hukou” status and occupation. As one of the country’s first four special economic zones, Xiamen achieved housing marketization earlier than most other Chinese cities, attracting a large amount of capital and migrants, and shaping different spatial patterns of local workers and migrant workers. The findings show that blue-collar, pink-collar, and white-collar workers, who are further categorized as either locals or migrants, experience varying degrees of job accessibility and spatial mismatch. In addition, even though migrant workers experience less spatial mismatch, they still have disadvantages in terms of commuting time due to their travel mode. The results presented in this paper are helpful for understanding the spatial mismatch for various social groups and facilitating sustainable mobility and social equity.