The Urban Studies Group is happy to announce that they will be welcoming Nathan Flore (PhD candidate) from the Institute for Public Decision Making, a division of Cité, an interdisciplinary Research Unit dedicated to issues of governance, justice and society at the University of Liège. Flore will be conducting field work in Luxembourg this spring for this PhD project entitled, "Smart Cities and the Regulation of Urban Mobilities (SCRUM)"
A short summary:
The aim of this doctoral research is to investigate the regulation of urban mobilities induced by smart mobility projects. Thousands of cities around the world have adopted "smart city" plans since the beginning of the 2000s. These plans include public strategies targeting efficiency goals and based on the utilisation of digital technologies. A large part of smart city projects consist indeed in the reduction of resource consumption in the city, be it water, power or time. In this context, the infrastructure is represented as the locus of the optimisation of urban life, hence the appearance of concepts such as smart grid, smart environment and smart mobility, for instance. So-called smart mobility projects focus on the citizen use of roads and means of transport when the latter across the city. They mobilise whole sociotechnical systems that include sensors, data, algorithms and digital interfaces to analyse in real time the state of transportation networks. Public authorities are then in a position to intervene directly, either by adapting flexible transport infrastructure or steering citizens through digital media. The SCRUM research project investigate this type of digitally mediated regulation of urban mobility with a case study research design. The smart mobility policies of three cities, namely Namur, Luxembourg and Lyon are explored through multisite ethnography based on the combined use of document analysis, semi-structured interviews and observations.
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