“Smart is not smart enough!” Anticipating critical raw material use in smart city concepts: the example of smart grids

Publikation: Beiträge in ZeitschriftenKommentare / Debatten / BerichteForschung

Authors

Globally emerging smart city concepts aim to make resource production and allocation in urban areas more efficient, and thus more sustainable through new sociotechnical innovations such as smart grids, smart meters, or solar panels. While recent critiques of smart cities have focused on data security, surveillance, or the influence of corporations on urban development, especially with regard to intelligent communication technologies (ICT), issues related to the material basis of smart city technologies and the interlinked resource problems have largely been ignored in the scholarly literature and in urban planning. Such problems pertain to the provision and recovery of critical raw materials (CRM) from anthropogenic sources like scrap metal repositories, which have been intensely studied during the last few years. To address this gap in the urban planning literature, we link urban planning literatures on smart cities with literatures on CRM mining and recovery from scrap metals. We find that underestimating problems related to resource provision and recovery might lead to management and governance challenges in emerging smart cities, which also entail ethical issues. To illustrate these problems, we refer to the smart city energy domain and explore the smart city-CRM-energy nexus from the perspectives of the respective literatures. We show that CRMs are an important foundation for smart city energy applications such as energy production, energy distribution, and energy allocation. Given current trends in smart city emergence, smart city concepts may potentially foster primary extraction of CRMs, which is linked to considerable environmental and health issues. While the problems associated with primary mining have been well-explored in the literature, we also seek to shed light on the potential substitution and recovery of CRMs from anthropogenic raw material deposits as represented by installed digital smart city infrastructures. Our central finding is that the current smart city literature and contemporary urban planning do not address these issues. This leads to the paradox that smart city concepts are supporting the CRM dependencies that they should actually be seeking to overcome. Discussion on this emerging issue between academics and practitioners has nevertheless not taken place. We address these issues and make recommendations.
OriginalspracheEnglisch
Aufsatznummer4422
ZeitschriftSustainability
Jahrgang11
Ausgabenummer16
Anzahl der Seiten11
ISSN2071-1050
DOIs
PublikationsstatusErschienen - 16.08.2019
Extern publiziertJa

Bibliographische Notiz

Funding Information:
Funding: This research was funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research, 033R148.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 by the authors.

Dokumente

DOI

Zuletzt angesehen

Publikationen

  1. The Effectiveness of the Effectuation Approach on Opportunity Identificaton and Pursuit
  2. An in vivo study on the metabolism and osteogenic activity of bioabsorbable Mg-1Sr alloy
  3. Tool wear mechanisms and effects on refill friction stir spot welding of AA2198-T8 sheets
  4. Learning to collaborate from diverse interactions in project-based sustainability courses
  5. Technical and economic assessment of food waste valorization through a biorefinery chain
  6. Rural electrification efforts based on off-grid photovoltaic systems in the Andean Region
  7. Idiosyncratic volatility, option-based measures of informed trading, and investor attention
  8. Transferring sustainability solutions across contexts through city-university partnerships
  9. Experimental and numerical investigation of residual stresses in laser shock peened AA2198
  10. Contributions to the sustainable development goals in life cycle sustainability assessment
  11. Addressing social representations in socio-technical transitions with the case of shale gas
  12. Strengthening Sensory Sustainability Science - Theoretical and Methodological Considerations
  13. Hybrid life cycle assessment of an onshore wind farm including direct and indirect services
  14. High quality extrudates from aluminum chips by new billet compaction and deformation routes
  15. Understanding the role of gender identity in charitable giving—recruiting bone marrow donors
  16. Lehre und Forschung im Projekt „Naturwissenschaftlichen Unterricht inklusiv gestalten“ (Nawi-In)
  17. Recurring patterns and blueprints of industrial symbioses as structural units for an it tool
  18. A comprehensive method for determination of fatty acids in the initial oral biofilm (pellicle)