The convergence of technology and the city is commonly referred to as the ‘smart city’. It is seen as a possible remedy for the challenges that urbanisation creates in the age of global climate ...change, and as an enabler of a sustainable and liveable urban future. A review of the abundant but fragmented literature on smart city theories and practices, nevertheless, reveals that there is a limited effort to capture a comprehensive understanding on how the complex and multidimensional nature of the drivers of smart cities are linked to desired outcomes. The paper aims to develop a clearer understanding on this new city model by identifying and linking the key drivers to desired outcomes, and then intertwining them in a multidimensional framework. The methodological approach of this research includes a systematic review of the literature on smart cities, focusing on those aimed at conceptual development and provide empirical evidence base. The review identifies that the literature reveals three types of drivers of smart cities—community, technology, policy—which are linked to five desired outcomes—productivity, sustainability, accessibility, wellbeing, liveability, governance. These drivers and outcomes altogether assemble a smart city framework, where each of them represents a distinctive dimension of the smart cities notion. This paper helps in expanding our understanding beyond a monocentric technology focus of the current common smart city practice.
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•Determines the current state of conceptual understanding of smart cities•Highlights the key smart city drivers and desired outcomes•Generates insights into expanding our understanding on smart cities•Develops a comprehensive multidimensional smart city framework•Intertwines smart city drivers with desired outcomes in a multidimensional framework
In this article, we survey a growing body of literature within geography and other intersecting fields that trains attention on what inclusive smart cities are, or what they could be. In doing so, we ...build on debates around smart citizens, smart public participation, and grassroots and bottom‐up smart cities that are concerned with making smart cities more inclusive. The growing critical scholarship on such discourses, however, alerts us to the knowledge politics that are involved in, and the urban inequalities that are deeply rooted within, the urban. Technological interventions contribute to these politics and inequalities in various ways. Accordingly, we discuss limitations of the current discourses around inclusive smart cities and suggest a need for a nuanced definition of ‘inclusiveness’. We also discuss the necessity to further engage with critical data studies in order to ‘know’ what we are critiquing.
•The encounter of smart cities research & information management bears great potential.•This study delves into end users’ views on and perceptions of smart city applications.•It develops and ...validates a 20-item scale for measuring five distinct dimensions of users’ perceptions.•It suggests how to turn the subjective information into managerial and policy-making recommendations.
Smart-cities research has established itself as one of the most dynamic fields in research today, accommodating scholars from diverse disciplines, including engineering and computer science as well as social sciences. Even if only tacitly, the resultant debate increasingly oscillates around how the effective use of information and communication technology (ICT) might render cities and urban space better places. This article responds to this imperative by suggesting how to capture users’ views and perceptions of smart city services and applications and in this way enrich the decision- and policy-making processes. It is argued that by developing appropriate scales these otherwise subjective views and perceptions may be objectivized and hence made of great use to managers and policymakers. Accordingly, in this research, a process of scale development is conducted in four phases of both inductive and deductive methods. Following initial rounds of focus groups and assessment by experts, an international survey was conducted with 295 participants from Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Arab Peninsula, and other regions. The data were analyzed using IBM SPSS 24 and AMOS 20 tools. The study proposes a 20-item scale in five distinct dimensions: Technology anxiety; Work–life interface; Engagement orientation; Support orientation; and Quality of life. The significant theoretical and managerial implications are discussed to demonstrate how to manage information for the benefit of all stakeholders involved in the making of a smart city.
Despite its growing ubiquitous presence, the smart city continues to struggle for definitional clarity and practical import. In response, this study interrogates the smart city as global discourse ...network by examining a collection of key texts associated with cities worldwide. Using a list of 5,553 cities, a systematic webometric exercise was conducted to measure hit counts produced by searching for "smart city." Consequently, 27 cities with the highest validated hit counts were selected. Next, 346 online texts were collected from among the top 20 hits across each of the selected cities, and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively using AntConc software. The findings confirm, first, the presence of a strong globalizing narrative which emphasizes world cities as "best practice" models. Second, they reveal the smart city's association-beyond the quest for incremental, technical improvements of current urban systems and processes-with a pronounced transformative governance agenda. The article identifies five critical junctures at the heart of the evolving smart city discourse regime; these shed light on the ongoing boundary work in which the smart city is engaged and which contain significant unresolved tensions. The paper concludes with a discussion of resulting implications for research, policy, and practice.
The role of smart cities in order to improve older people's quality of life, sustainability and opportunities, accessibility, mobility, and connectivity is increasing and acknowledged in public ...policy and private sector strategies in countries all over the world. Smart cities are one of the technological-driven initiatives that may help create an age-friendly city. Few research studies have analysed emerging countries in terms of their national strategies on smart or age-friendly cities. In this study, Romania which is predicted to become one of the most ageing countries in the European Union is used as a case study. Through document analysis, current initiatives at the local, regional, and national level addressing the issue of smart and age-friendly cities in Romania are investigated. In addition, a case study is presented to indicate possible ways of the smart cities initiatives to target and involve older adults. The role of different stakeholders is analysed in terms of whether initiatives are fragmentary or sustainable over time, and the importance of some key factors, such as private-public partnerships and transnational bodies. The results are discussed revealing the particularities of the smart cities initiatives in Romania in the time frame 2012-2020, which to date, have limited connection to the age-friendly cities agenda. Based on the findings, a set of recommendations are formulated to move the agenda forward.
Revisões sistemáticas de literatura indicam lacunas que necessitam ser analisadas em pesquisas futuras para contribuição ao campo de Smart Cities. Este artigo objetiva averiguar a amplitude e ...qualidade das RSL que estão sendo realizadas ao tema de Smart Cities. Portanto, uma Revisão Sistemática de Literatura foi conduzida, analisando 22 artigos, conforme etapas propostas por Brereton et al. (2007). Os resultados apontam que algumas etapas não foram atendidas pelos pesquisadores. As lições aprendidas foram: revisar a pergunta da pesquisa durante o protocolo pode aumentar a compreensão do problema que conduz à necessidade do estudo; validar o protocolo permitirá encontrar erros nos procedimentos de coleta de dados e legitimar os critérios de seleção dos artigos; realizar a validação do relatório final, permitirá detectar e corrigir erros e as estratégias que foram usadas no campo para garantir a autenticidade do estudo. Estas lições permitirão aos pesquisadores maior rigor na execução de futuras RSL. Este artigo contribui com o campo de Cidades Inteligentes ao demonstrar a importância que etapas relevantes de uma RSL podem trazer maior legitimidade, rigor e qualidade nos estudos realizados.
As city areas have been experiencing dynamic growth, the efficient development of cities is becoming a priority for technologically advanced countries and for states further down on the list from the ...global leaders. Smart cities are friendly for both people and the environment, in which life is better, safer, and healthier, the results of a creative approach to developing and implementing various innovations. Boasting sustainable and modern infrastructure and management, ecological city centres are perceived as key foundations of the future. Still, developing cities towards being “smart” is a serious challenge, not just for self-government and government administrators, but also for entities offering technical and technological solutions used for the purpose of implementing the improvements. The research objective was an attempt to indicate the expected changes in the shaping of the idea of smart cities in Poland. The authors’ own research was conducted from 2 August to 31 August. The method of focus group interviews with experts, specialists in the field of smart city, was used. Twenty-three practitioners participated in the study. The geographic area of the analysis covered the territory of the Republic of Poland. The time perspective of the study concerned the end of the current decade. The research process consisted of three stages: (1) preparation, the analysis of the literature on the subject (in which the variables selected for the study were identified); (2) the implementation of focus interviews; and (3) the analysis of the research results. In the last stage of the study, the statistical analysis and qualitative approach to responses were also used (by creating clusters). A network of relations, spanning a total of 3034 connections, was developed from the responses of experts on the fundamental development directions, beneficial factors, and adverse factors. On the basis of the research results, a SWOT analysis was prepared, containing the key beneficial factors, adverse factors, benefits, and disadvantages of smart city development. It was shown, on the basis of the conducted research, that the key development directions for smart cities in Poland by 2030 are: smart and sustainable buildings and infrastructure, smart mobility, and smart energy. The developed results of the analyses constitute an added value and can be used particularly in planning investments in intelligent solutions (identification of barriers and key development factors).
Subjecting this claim to critical scrutiny, in this book, Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin examine the cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts in which urban computational logics have ...emerged. They consider the rationalities and techniques that constitute emerging computational forms of urbanization, including work on digital urbanism, smart cities, and, more recently, platform urbanism. They explore the modest potentials and serious contradictions of reconfiguring urban life, city services, and urban-networked infrastructure through computational operating systems-an urban OS. Luque-Ayala and Marvin argue that in order to understand how digital technologies transform and shape the city, it is necessary to analyse the underlying computational logics themselves. Drawing on fieldwork that stretches across eleven cities in American, European, and Asian contexts, they investigate how digital products, services, and ecosystems are reshaping the ways in which the city is imagined, known, and governed. They discuss the reconstitution of the contemporary city through digital technologies, practices, and techniques, including data-driven governance, predictive analytics, digital mapping, urban sensing, digitally enabled control rooms, civic hacking, and open data narratives. Focusing on the relationship between the emerging operating systems of the city and their traditional infrastructures, they shed light on the political implications of using computer technologies to understand and generate new urban spaces and flows.
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