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Energy-Conscious Design Practice in Asia: Smart City Chengdu and the Taiwan Strait Smart Region

The 'Sustainable Energy Landscapes' book is a peer reviewed publication published in the USA. It contains an article by Raoul Bunschoten describing the emergence of large scale landscapes related to energy and climate change issues. This can mean the threat of rising sea levels, or the role that in-between landscapes such as the Taiwan Strait or the Mediterranean Sea can play in negotiations, or the creation of new cooperative organisations, such as the proposed Taiwan Strait Smart Region Task Force, or the Desertec organization planning to harvest solar energy from the Sahara for use in Northern Europe. The article describes the thinking process behind the methodology called 'Urban Gallery' which Bunschoten's research is developing. The Urban Gallery is a planning support tool that helps navigate through non-data based information levels, tools, stakeholders and action frameworks. It is based on a deeper history of cybernetics and is in fact an instrument for cybernetic urbanism.

The article describes the relationship between a curatorial and choreographic approach, the links to co-evolution and choreography in and of urban dynamics. This tool and the research related to it are significant since they touch on the most difficult aspect of the current smart city discourse: what is 'smart' and how does it emerge in city planning and development? The research focuses on emerging smartness through systems fusing, or infrastructures being integrated in new ways. This is an ongoing process linking the continuously emerging smartness in ongoing projects where new technologies merge with human intelligence and communal ‘smart’ behaviour closer to the actual smartness of a human brain.