Dialogue on Smart Cities: Can Human-Centred Innovation design Digital Futures?

Smart Cities – as promises they are synonymous to the development of high-performance, efficient, sustainable, and liveable cities. Critics see them more as uniform habitats, whose daily life is defined by sensors, algorithms, and technology companies. Around the world, planners, researchers, politicians, entrepreneurs, companies, and civil society lively debate different ideas on cities and their innumerable facets and odds, but also potential challenges and risks. Although there is no universal definition of a Smart City, the attempts to explain have a pervasion of digital environments and built urban spaces – with all their everyday places and routines – in common. Those discussions are characterised by diverse perceptions of technological developments. The conference “Dialogue on Smart Cities: Can Human-Centred Innovation Design Digital Futures?” tries to reveal these different perspectives and facilitate the dialogue on urban challenges between Indian and German scientists, practitioners and further experts from architecture and sustainable urban development.

Thanks to its interdisciplinary structure and its recent activities in India and Asia, the Indo-German Smart Initiative (IGSI) can draw on a comprehensive network of local and international experts. The mix of innovative work formats, research, planning and practical application gives it a unique character, with which the experts of IGSI are designing cities of the future.