Smart Cities: Designing Places and Urban Mentalities

About

The aim of this Summer School is to bring together diverse disciplines – including technical, economic, political, environmental and social disciplines – to explore the new set of relationships between society and technology, people and data entailed in the Smart City vision and contribute to a better understanding of processes transforming urban spaces.

Course leader

Oliver Frey, Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Department of Spatial Planning, Interdisciplinary Centre Urban Studies and Member of Centre of Sociology Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Faculty of Informatics, Institute of Design and Assessment of Technology,

Target group

The Smart City: Designing Places and Urban Mentalities - Summer School invites all interested PhD-Students researching Smart Cities from diverse fields as technical, economic, political, environmental and social disciplines. Excellent Master students may apply as well.

Course aim

The aim is a better understanding of how Smart City technologies establish new urban patterns by using digital internet devices and products in housing, communities or cities, and how ICT innovations in urban contexts affect not only mentalities, social interaction but also social structures and particularly the process of designing places.

In the process of designing places for future urban development, the role of technological implementation is important for how social actors communicatively construct places and how spatial identities are developed in communications and social interactions between inhabitants.

For urban planners, technologists or developers, as well as urban sociologists, geographers or cultural studies, it is critically important to gain knowledge about the impacts of Smart City technologies on urban space and how different techno-socio-spatial conditions potentially transform social interaction and collective mentalities. For ICT researchers, such insights can influence their implementation choices as not only being limited to the engineering and design perspectives, but also impacting social life, creating both new opportunities and also possibly new problems.

Fee info