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Interpreting the Smart City Through Topic Modeling

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Intelligence for Future Cities (CUPUM 2023)

Part of the book series: The Urban Book Series ((UBS))

Abstract

The Canadian Smart Cities Challenge grant program provided a unique opportunity to investigate what communities across Canada mean when they propose becoming a smart city. We investigated the utility of human-centered machine learning to analyze 137 grant proposals submitted to this program, containing approximately 1.5 million words. We explored whether results generated by topic modeling aligned with or differed from standard smart city definitions in the literature and current urban applications of topic modeling. The analysis resulted in three main findings. First, the prevalence of topics describing rural, regional and Indigenous communities challenged conventional definitions of “city” in the smart city. Second, context (e.g., local culture and language) inferred what constitutes smart, although smartness was not focused on technical innovations. Finally, our abductive approach generated new insights missing from conventional smart city research methods, including 40 percent of finalists and all four winning cities being identified as most representative users of topics.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the funding for this research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada SSHRC 895-2012-1023.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Zhibin Zheng & Renée E. Sieber

Authors
  1. Zhibin Zheng
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  2. Renée E. Sieber
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Correspondence to Renée E. Sieber .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Robert Goodspeed

  2. Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Raja Sengupta

  3. Department of Built Environment, Aalto University, Aalto, Finland

    Marketta Kyttä

  4. City Futures Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Christopher Pettit

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Zheng, Z., Sieber, R.E. (2023). Interpreting the Smart City Through Topic Modeling. In: Goodspeed, R., Sengupta, R., Kyttä, M., Pettit, C. (eds) Intelligence for Future Cities. CUPUM 2023. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31746-0_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31746-0_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-31745-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-31746-0

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