Smart Spaces – Towards a Smart-Spatial-Nexus in Urbanism: The example of Smart City Quarter Waagner Biro in Graz and Hunziker Areal Zurich

One of the most often declared objectives in Smart City (SC) vision agendas all over Europe is the objective to raise the quality of life for the citizens. Thus, the quality of urbanity and more precisely the quality of urban design and public space seems to be crucial for pursuing and achieving the goal of the Smart City urban visions. The aim of the paper is therefore to investigate the spatial particularities of SC projects in order to find out how architecture and urban design can contribute to the quality of Smart City developments by proposing spatial principles for design. In this context, there is a lack of spatial engagement with the process of urban digitalisation and the need for a connection between spaces and technologies becomes evident. The hypothesis is pursued that Smart City neighbourhoods differ spatially from conventional developments of urban quarters. This article explores a pair of urban quarters – one SC and one conventional – through which Smart City spatial particularities are rendered visible. One Austrian city that is a prominent site for smart urban development, Waagner Biro in Graz is analysed and compared with a similar development Hunziker Areal in Switzerland. The results contribute to the establishment of spatial smartness as an additional dimension of the Smart City concept in order to enable spatial design strategies to contribute to the physical materialisation and implementation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in urban space.