The digital revolution has brought about many societal changes such as the creation of “smart cities”. The smart city concept has changed the urban ecosystem by embedding digital technologies in the city fabric to enhance the quality of life of its inhabitants. However, it has also led to some pressing issues and challenges related to data, privacy, ethics inclusion, and fairness. While the initial concept of smart cities was largely technology-and data-driven, focused on the automation of traffic, logistics and processes, this concept is currently being replaced by technology-enabled, human-centred solutions. However, this is not the end of the development, as there is now a big trend towards “design for values”. In this paper, we point out how a value-sensitive design approach could promote a more sustainable pathway of cities that better serves people and nature. Such “valuesensitive design” will have to take ethics, law and culture on board. We discuss how organising the digital world in a participatory way, as well as leveraging the concepts of self-organisation, selfregulation, and self-control, would foster synergy effects and thereby help to leverage a sustainable technological revolution on a global scale. Furthermore, a “democracy by design” approach could also promote resilience. ... Read more

The increase in the deployment of smart meters has enabled collection of fine-grained energy consumption data at consumer premises. Analysis of this real-time energy consumption data bestows new opportunities for better demand–response (DR) programs. This paper offers a new perspective to study energy demand and helps in designing novel mechanisms for decentralized demand-side management. Specifically, a new concept of finding the demand states using energy consumption of consumers over time and feasible transitions therein is introduced. It is shown that the orchestration of temporal transitions between the demand states can meet broad range of smart grid objectives. An online demand regulation model is developed that captures the temporal dynamics of energy demand to identify target consumers for different DR programs. This methodology is empirically evaluated and validated
using data from more than 4000 households, which were part of a real-world smart grid project. This paper is the first one to comprehensively analyze the temporal dynamics of demands. ... Read more