In this report I propose to examine the concept of the ‘smart city’ from the standpoint of spatial enablement. I analyse emerging research on smart cities, particularly those addressing the potential role of GISciences in the development and implementation of the concept of smart cities. I develop the idea that the intelligence of a city should be measured by its ability to produce favourable conditions to get urban operators (citizens, organizations, private companies, etc.) actively involved into sociospatial innovation dynamics. To obtain such a commitment, I believe that operators should be able to develop and mobilize (digital) spatial skills so that they could efficiently manage their spatiality. In other words, I argue that a smart city is first of all a spatially enabled city.

La convergence des SIG avec les TIC (Internet, téléphonie mobile) et les systèmes de géolocalisation (GPS) se traduit aujourd'hui par l’émergence d’une nouvelle forme de cartographie reposant sur les techniques et les principes du web 2.0. Poussée par les technologies de l’information, la cartographie traditionnellement réservée aux professionnels prend aujourd’hui place au sein de nos pratiques quotidiennes. Au-delà d’un artefact marketing, cette « cartographie 2.0 » qui permet au grand public de lire et d’écrire les cartes pose de nombreuses questions sur la (potentielle) place des amateurs dans des cadres professionnels (mise à jour des bases de données, collecte sur le terrain, production collaborative de référentiels, etc.). Cet article porte sur l’acquisition de connaissance géographique grâce à des populations non-spécialistes. Plus spécifiquement, il explore les potentialités de la cartographie du Web 2.0 pour les sciences citoyennes, terme utilisé pour décrire l'engagement des citoyens dans le processus de collecte de données scientifiques.

This second report is dedicated to the concept of ‘place’ revisited in the context of smart cities. Some recent studies suggest that today’s digital cities rely more on an approach to the urban context based on a network of connected places than on an approach to the city built on areal spaces. Does it mean that there are more places and fewer spaces in spatially enabled cities? Is the intelligence of a city mainly related to its ability to sound out the genesis of urban places? These issues raise questions about the design of spatial models used to build GIS, as well as place-based urban design methods and tools. This second report explores these questions from the standpoint of GISciences.

Research in the area of spatial cognition demonstrated that references to landmarks are essential in the communication and the interpretation of wayfinding instructions for human being. In order to detect landmarks, a model for the assessment of their salience has been previously developed by Raubal and Winter. According to their model, landmark salience is divided into three categories: visual, structural, and semantic. Several solutions have been proposed to automatically detect landmarks on the basis of these categories. Due to a lack of relevant data, semantic salience has been frequently reduced to objects’ historical and cultural significance. Social dimension (i.e., the way an object is practiced and recognized by a person or a group of people) is systematically excluded from the measure of landmark semantic salience even though it represents an important component. Since the advent of mobile Internet and smartphones, the production of geolocated content from social web platforms—also described as geosocial data—became commonplace. Actually, these data allow us to have a better understanding of the local geographic knowledge. Therefore, we argue that geosocial data, especially Social Location Sharing datasets, represent a reliable source of information to precisely measure landmark semantic salience in urban area.