In the last lecture, we discussed how Public Innovation can impact Urban Transformation. In this section, we will focus on repurposing the objective of Urban Infrastructure.

The world’s population is growing rapidly and consequently, complex challenges to city planners and city managers are increasing. Cities’ infrastructures will be tested to their limits, and they must be planned to cope with these problems not at any cost but efficiently and cheaply.

Even though people are the fundamental component of cities, traditionally, the city’s infrastructure has been modeled in a reductionist way, which means that Urban infrastructure has been used to refer almost exclusively to physical infrastructures. Only lately, human considerations such as citizens’ well-being and the emergence of complex human behavior have been addressed seriously in urban infrastructure planning. This implementation repurposes the main objective of urban infrastructure and cities themselves, from physical places for large human settlements into centers of knowledge creation. This change of purpose has profound implications on how cities and their infrastructure are conceived, designed and managed.

In the following video lecture, Prof. Luis Daniel Benavides Navarro introduces the digital and urban infrastructure for sustainable and smart cities and explores several of these implications and their relationship with traditional urban infrastructure components. Concretely, he introduces the concepts of:

• Planning for unsustainability,
• Digital and communication infrastructure,
• Water and waste management,
• Energy,
• Housing,
• Transportation and public spaces,
• And infrastructure for knowledge creation.

Main Takeaways

• Considering knowledge creation as the primary purpose of cities has profound implications on how cities and their infrastructure are conceived and designed.
• City managers must consider not only the efficiency of the city and its infrastructure but also its sustainability, the emergence of complex human behaviors leveraged on technology, and the well-being of their citizens.