_my PhD research is about how Melbourne-based city designing professionals (architects, urban planners, urban designers, and engineers) understand, operationalise and use the concepts of future of cities and smart cities in their practices_ 

_title: Making future cities ‘smarter’ by supporting city designing practitioners_

_abstract: Cities are the manifestation of humanity and its evolution, with the majority of the population living in cities since 2018. Urban areas are major negative contributors to global challenges, such as climate change and overpopulation. The need for more sustainable urban design is widely acknowledged; however, how to affect change and contribute positively to future cities is not yet clear. One of the proposed transformative solutions for the future is the smart city concept. While cities are designed, the responsible people – architects, urban planners, urban designers and engineers – are usually left out of contributing to the required transformation because they have limited influence on the smart city concepts’ creation and implementation, and no easy way to operationalise concepts aligned with smart city thinking.
This PhD research aims to understand the smart city concept, its connection to the future of cities and how to operationalise these concepts in design practice. To do this, the smart city concept was investigated in the literature, with different definitions and critiques. Additionally, a digital review of the ‘smart city’ term, as used by Australian university research groups, and 43 interviews with Melbourne-based design practitioners were conducted to examine the practical application of smart cities and future of cities concepts. Preliminary findings were challenged in focus groups with the same participants. Based on their feedback, a conceptual framework was created to bridge the gap between theory and practice, helping practitioners operationalise the smart city and future of cities concepts in their professions. This investigation also reveals gaps in academic research.
Based on the findings, it is questionable whether cities should have one specific global future; therefore, the smart city as a universal concept is questioned. Additionally, the future of cities, or at least the path towards it, should be based on a location’s values and characteristics. How we refer to and classify it should embrace the ever-changing nature of human evolution. Instead of designing smart cities as a definitive aim, we need to focus on future urban design encouraging continual sustainable development without a clear end point, using smarter approaches. Designers have roles and responsibilities, alongside academia, government, citizens and industry as urban agents, in establishing the future of cities based on their disciplinary expertise and spatial problem-solving skills. However, they are not the only responsible party: each urban agent has duties in the urban setting, creating a collective responsibility with individual roles that needs practical and applicable access to the latest information and knowledge about sustainable design practices.

_available: Swinburne University of Technology Research Bank