Vienna Summer School 2016 – “Smart cities: Designing places and urban mentalities”

The concept of Smart City is promising: The European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities highlights the opportunities to link and upgrade infrastructures, technologies and services in key urban sectors (transport, buildings, energy, ICT) in a smart way [that] will improve quality of life, economic competitiveness and sustainability of cities. Such conceptions present Smart City-solutions as mainly technology driven utopian visions of societal transformation while blurring the multitude of social decisions made in technology development which fundamentally shape the kinds of social transformations possible in urban life.

The Summer School brings together scholars from diverse disciplines including technical, economic,political, environmental and social disciplines to explore new sets of relationships between (a) society and technology and (b) people and data entailed in the Smart City vision and to contribute to a better understanding of processes transforming urban spaces. The questions we will explore  during the Summer School include:

• Which new urban patterns are established by using Smart City technologies as digital internet
devices and products in housing, communities or cities?

• How do ICT innovations in urban contexts affect mentalities, social interaction and social
structures?

• What are the technological and social related driving forces that shape the process of designing
urban places?

Organisers: Oliver Frey, Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Department of Spatial Planning,
Interdisciplinary Centre Urban Studies and Section Sociology Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Faculty of

Informatics, Institute of Design and Assessment of Technology, Human Computer Interaction Group
(HCI)

language: English

duration: 8 days

credits: 6 ects

website: http://summerschool2016-smartcity.tuwien.ac.at/