For smart cities, data-driven innovation promises societal benefits and increased well-being for residents and visitors. At the same time, the deployment of data-driven innovation poses significant ethical challenges. Although cities and other public-sector actors have increasingly adopted ethical principles, employing them in practice remains challenging. In this commentary, we use a virtue-based approach that bridges the gap between abstract principles and the daily work of practitioners who engage in and with data-driven innovation processes. Inspired by Aristotle, we describe practices of data-driven innovation in a smart city applying the concepts of virtue and phronêsis, meaning good judgment of and sensitivity to ethical issues. We use a dialogic case-study approach to study two cases of data-driven innovation in the city of Helsinki. We then describe as an illustration of how our approach can help bridge the gap between concrete practices of data-driven innovation and high-level principles. Overall, we advance a theoretically grounded, virtue-based approach, which is practice oriented and linked to the daily work of data scientists and other practitioners of data-driven innovation. Further, this approach helps understand the need for and importance of individual application of phronêsis, which is particularly important in public-sector organizations that can experience gaps between principle and practice. This importance is further intensified in cases of data-driven innovation in which, by definition, novel and unknown contexts are explored.

This paper highlights the need and opportunities for constructively combining different types of (analogue and data-driven) knowledges in evidence-informed policy decision-making in future smart cities. Problematizing the assumed universality and objectivity of data-driven knowledge, we call attention to notions of “positionality” and “situatedness” in knowledge production relating to the urban present and possible futures. In order to illustrate our arguments, we draw on a case study of strategic urban (spatial) planning in the Cambridge city region in the United Kingdom. Tracing diverse knowledge production processes, including top-down data-driven knowledges derived from urban modeling, and bottom-up analogue community-based knowledges, allows us to identify locationally specific knowledge politics around evidence for policy. The findings highlight how evidence-informed urban policy can benefit from political processes of competition, contestation, negotiation, and complementarity that arise from interactions between diverse “digital” and “analogue” knowledges. We argue that studying such processes can help in assembling a more multifaceted, diverse and inclusive knowledge-base on which to base policy decisions, as well as to raise awareness and improve active participation in the ongoing “smartification” of cities.

This article discusses the technology of city digital twins (CDTs) and its potential applications in the policymaking context. The article analyzes the history of the development of the concept of digital twins and how it is now being adopted on a city-scale. One of the most advanced projects in the field—Virtual Singapore—is discussed in detail to determine the scope of its potential domains of application and highlight challenges associated with it. Concerns related to data privacy, availability, and its applicability for predictive simulations are analyzed, and potential usage of synthetic data is proposed as a way to address these challenges. The authors argue that despite the abundance of urban data, the historical data are not always applicable for predictions about the events for which there does not exist any data, as well as discuss the potential privacy challenges of the usage of micro-level individual mobility data in CDTs. A task-based approach to urban mobility data generation is proposed in the last section of the article. This approach suggests that city authorities can establish services responsible for asking people to conduct certain activities in an urban environment in order to create data for possible policy interventions for which there does not exist useful historical data. This approach can help in addressing the challenges associated with the availability of data without raising privacy concerns, as the data generated through this approach will not represent any real individual in society.

What will be the consequences for policing as cities become increasingly ‘smarter’? The emerging questions about policing and the smart city have thus far focused primarily on the increased surveillance capacity that a highly networked urban setting provides for law enforcement. More cameras and sensors will mean more watching and less freedom from being watched. The perception of ubiquitous government surveillance might quell dissent and inhibit free expression. As a result, concerns about policing and the smart city echo other responses to surveillance technologies. This essay proposes a different analysis: as cities become ‘smarter’, they increasingly embed policing itself into the urban infrastructure. Policing is inherent to the smart city.

The demands for Smart City are growing in the context of the rapid urbanization in the world. In the public safety domain, law enforcement agencies are facing new challenges to protect people and properties in the cities, and they are shifting their focus from the traditional crime investigation towards preventive actions that prevent accidents and incidents before it occurs, and inter-agency collaboration that brings the situation under control swiftly when it occurs. In this paper, we discuss new challenges that cities are facing, and describe NEC's solution based on intelligent multimedia surveillance architecture for Safe Cities to tackle these challenges.