The new roles of the intelligent cities

UOC-Papers Edition 5 focuses on the subject of the city. The starting point is the inaugural lecture for the 2007-2008 academic year, which, under the title of "Intelligent Cities", is given by Professor Williams J. Mitchell from the MIT. Two years ago, Professor Mitchell was made an Honorary Doctor of our university. In this paper, after showing how decisive the development of mobility systems has been in the evolution of cities and establishing the nature of the technological changes that have occurred in recent years, the author gives us the example of the clean urban car, developed by his laboratory at the MIT. The clean city car aims to tackle intelligent passenger transport by bypassing the debate between public transport and private cars to adopt a solution where resources – especially energy and space – can be managed and distributed more efficiently. This example leads the author to conclude, from a more general perspective, that in the future "the effects on the models of spatial use, building systems and their functionality, and the perspectives for long-term urban sustainability will be far-reaching – often in ways that are as yet unimaginable". UOC lecturer Jordi Borja offers a counterpoint to Mitchell's inaugural lecture, where he emphasises the value of chance as a creator of innovation, highlighting how it is in the density of exchanges afforded by the city that makes it possible for chance to act as a creative agent.

Using such an attractive text as Mitchell's as a basis, we would like to present a dossier on "Cities in the information society", coordinated by UOC lecturers Ramon Ribera-Fumaz, Pep Vivas and Francesc González, to reflect on different aspects of the post-Fordist city, the new demands and its renewed nature. In this sense, the dossier focuses on the idea of mobility as a critical factor for the development of the city of today. Mobility in the traditional sense of goods, people, ideas, etc., taking, however, very much into account the acceleration process that precisely the mobility of these three factors has undergone over the last decade. A process that has represented a leap up the quantitative and also qualitative scale, as can be seen in the articles presented. Vivas and Ribera-Fumaz's examination of the case of Barcelona establishes the new characteristics of this centrality of mobility in papers given on the city, based on analysis of the impact that technology has had on urban space transformation processes. In her article, Sara González explains how the present globalisation process has developed cities as economic agents, how local governments have not only become urban services administrators but also economic promoters, and as such, through the creation of unique events, aim to put their cities in a position where they can compete with others in a hierarchy of attractiveness for visitors and investors. For his part, Francesc González, stressing this aspect, analyses the role of cultural events as catalysts and mobilisers of city tourism in Catalan cities that have become administrators of tourist destinations. Finally, Rojas Arredondo analyses how video-surveillance systems, a security mechanism associated with the most recent developments in technology, become an element to control individuals and their lives of a type and extent unknown until now in the hands of the public administrations. As a whole, the aim is to show the new relevance acquired by urban studies as a result of the revolution in communication technologies and the most recent globalisation based on the recognition of the new role awarded to cities by these changes. Not in vain does it serve as a metaphor that for the first time in history, last year the world's urban population exceeded its rural population.

Our edition is completed as usual with the reviews section and the news selection.

Finally, we are very pleased to see the interest shown in the journal and its contents –UOC Papers now has over 1,500 subscribers and had almost 3,000 downloads in September alone – and, above all, the databases that index it are also increasing in number and prestige, as can be seen in the indexation section. The last inclusion, published in the last newsletter, was Redalyc, the online reference free-access scientific research newspaper library of Latin America and the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal.

Joan Fuster Sobrepere

Director of UOC Papers