Seeing Smart Cities Through a Multi-Dimensional Lens: Perspectives, Relationships, and Patterns for Success

This book provides an interdisciplinary lens for exploring, assessing, and coming to new understandings of smart cities and regions, focusing on the six dimensions of sensing, awareness, learning, openness, innovation, and disruption. Using a hybrid case study and correlational approach, people from diverse sectors in a variety of small to medium to large-sized cities in multiple countries (e.g., Canada, United States, Ireland, Greece, Israel, etc.) provide experience-based perspectives on smart cities together with assessments for elements pertaining to each of the six dimensions.

The analysis of findings in this work surfaces a rich and interwoven tapestry of patterns from the qualitative data highlighting for example, the importance of emotion/affect, privacy, trust, and data visualizations in influencing and informing the directions of smart cities and regions going forward. Correlational analysis of quantitative data reveals the presence and strength of emerging relationships among elements assessed, shedding light on factors that may serve as starting points for understanding what is contributing to potentials for improving success in smart cities and regions.

Patricia McKenna is the founder and President of AmbientEase (Emergent Adaptive Solutions Everywhere), a Canadian company providing information services to many sectors. As such, Patricia works within and across diverse domains (interdisciplinary) of scholarship and practice, collaborating in team efforts to set up international, national, regional, and local information services, research projects, startups, and other creative and future-oriented initiatives. McKenna is also the Director of the UrbanitiesLab, an initiative focusing on the exploration of smart cities and learning cities. Author of well over 40 publications including, contributions to special journal issues, a book, and chapter contributions to books pertaining to the smart cities' domain, Patricia is a regular presenter of papers at international conferences as well as a program board member and session organizer. With a focus on smart cities and learning cities, Patricia engages with diverse sectors around use experience and unexpected possibilities for generating and leveraging increased awareness and creativity in 21st century information environments. Patricia holds a BA from the University of New Brunswick, an MLS from McGill University, and a Doctorate in information management (focusing on emerging technologies) from Syracuse University