“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

Aktivitäten

  1. Educating responsible consumers for a sustainable world
  2. Building Bridges: The potential of transdisciplinary research to face complex crisis
  3. A Geometric Approach to Decouple Robotino Motions and its Functional Controllability
  4. Teachers beliefs and goals concerning inquiry-based science
  5. Fast or sustainable fashion? - The intersection of values and gender as triggers of consumer motivation
  6. Speaking back to Theory. Africanist Migration Research beyond the Categories
  7. Academy of Management (Externe Organisation)
  8. God is in the details. The filing box answers
  9. Ifo Conference on Survey Data in Economics - Methodology and Applications - 2011
  10. Tagung "Transformation als Dauerphänomen" des SFB 580 - 2006
  11. Workshop Open Educational Ressourcen für das Sprachenlernen
  12. Transparency in Research
  13. Leuphana University Lüneburg and the sustainability challenge: a review and a preview
  14. Mcgraw Hill (Verlag)
  15. Intraorganizational Tensions around Being Good: Structures and Practices of Organizing Purchasing and CSR in Garment Retailers and Brands
  16. Interdisziplinäre Lehre in der Studieneingangsphase
  17. From Pity to Control: Regulated Humanitarianism in News Coverage on Refugees and Asylum
  18. Project-Based Education and Other Activating Strategies in Science Education 2020
  19. Speaking with Pots or the Limits of Information Gettable from Sherds in Priene (Turkey)
  20. Association for Information Systems (AIS) (Externe Organisation)
  21. Adaptation of Coastal Protection to Climate Change: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Viable Strategies

Publikationen

  1. Ist Cola sauer?
  2. HEPS Inventory Tool
  3. Personalized Transaction Kernels for Recommendation Using MCTS
  4. Key criteria for developing ecosystem service indicators to inform decision making
  5. Estimation of physicochemical properties of 52 non-PBDE brominated flame retardants and evaluation of their overall persistence and long-range transport potential
  6. Evidence-Based Management and Organizational Reality
  7. Process Stability and Reproducibility of the Dieless Drawing Process for AZ31 Magnesium Wires
  8. Heinz von Foerster and Early Research in the Field of Pattern Recognition at the Biological Computer Laboratory
  9. Comment on "Recent origin and cultural reversion of a hunter-gatherer group
  10. Wie geben Tutoren Feedback?
  11. Interlanguage pragmatics: From use to acquisition to second language pedagogy
  12. Study Protocol
  13. A Fictional Risk Narrative and Its Potential for Social Resonance: Reception of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior in Reviews and Reading Groups
  14. Variational pragmatics
  15. A Synthesis is Emerging between Biodiversity-Ecosystem Function and Ecological Resilience Research
  16. Learning for sustainable development in regional networks
  17. Operations Management
  18. Gasteditorial
  19. Building a Coalition with Depoliticized Sustainability Discourse
  20. Field-Configuring Events
  21. Social group membership does not modulate automatic imitation in a contrastive multi-agent paradigm
  22. 9th challenge on question answering over linked data (QALD-9)
  23. Utilizing international networks for accelerating research and learning in transformational sustainability science
  24. Contrasting requests in Inner Circle Englishes
  25. The Parameters of Refugeeism and Flight