Smart City Field Notes One

This is the first of a number of reports emerging from the author's 50 years of continuous action in the arena of sustainable energy field laboratories. This paper is a fresh guidance product of action-learning in an organically organised living lab which has been dedicated to the phased eradication of the use of fossil fuel as the dominant, and most destructive, source of Earth's energy. During the course of the past five decades, this old-style living lab, made-up of many smaller labs, has been migrating from rural to urban solutions, and it has been at the critical junctures of a number of European Union (EU) lighthouse smart cities. The author asserts that while definitions for smart cities abound, and a plethora of writing exploring the concepts that underpin them has emerged, the definitions tend to fall short as they do not take into account the requirement for keeping the cities operational while the teams of disparate planners, specialists, and citizens dynamically reshape it for purpose. This is akin to building the airship while flying it.