Are smart innovation ecosystems really seeking to meet citizens’ needs? Insights from the stakeholders’ vision on smart city strategy implementation

The concept of a smart city is becoming the leading paradigm worldwide. Consequently, a creative mix of emerging technologies and open innovation is gradually becoming the defining element of smart city evolution, changing the ways in which city administrators are organizing their services and development globally. Thus, the smart city concept is becoming extremely relevant on the agendas of policy-makers as a development strategy for enhancing the quality of life of the citizen and improving the sustainability goals of their cities. Despite of the relevance of the topic, still few studies investigate how open innovation shapes the way cities become smarter or focus on the experiences of professionals to understand the concept of a smart city and its implementation. This paper fills this gap and analyzes the processes for building effective smart cities by integrating the different perspectives of smart innovations and using the core components of smart cities according to a conceptual framework developed in previous research. In so doing, it provides useful insights for smart city stakeholders in adopting social and technological innovation to improve the global competitiveness of their cities. The empirical dataset allows examining how “smart cities” are being implemented in Manchester (UK), and in Boston, Massachusetts, and San Diego City (United States of America (USA)), including archival data and in-depth interviews with core smart city stakeholders who are involved in smart city projects and programs across the cases. Results from empirical data suggest that the conceptualization of smart cities across the cases is similar with a strong emphasis on social and technological innovation aimed at addressing municipal challenges in the core sub-systems of the cities, which include mobility, environmental sustainability, entrepreneurial development, quality of life, and social cohesion. The results also reveal benefits and challenges relating to smart innovation ecosystems across the cases and the future directions of their diffusion

Challenges and strategies for gender mainstreaming policy in smart city development in Indonesia

A smart city is an urban policy innovation that can improve the community's quality of life by promoting environmental, social, and economic sustainability issues. The involvement and participation of civil society in developing smart cities is a major issue in implementing inclusive smart cities. However, gender issues are often forgotten in developing sustainable smart cities. This article examines two issues. First, the importance of gender issues integration in the development of sustainable smart cities in Indonesia. Second, the importance of gender mainstreaming policy in the development of smart cities in Indonesia. This is a desk study or literature study. Data were obtained from research results published in national and international journals. Data was obtained through accredited journal search engines, namely google scholar, SagePub and Researchgate. The research results show that development of smart city in Indonesia is not yet gender responsive, causing gender inequality gender and excluding women from development.  To respond to this, thus there is a need for gender mainstreaming policies in developing smart cities through an overview of the challenges of gender mainstreaming in developing smart cities. Thus, this research recommends a gender mainstreaming strategy as a policy in developing smart cities in Indonesia. Gender mainstreaming policy in smart city development need to be to create a smart city life that is just, inclusive and involves women in development

TOWARD SUSTAINABLE SMART CITIES: CONCEPTS & CHALLENGES

The world’s urban population is growing enormously, increasing of energy usage, air toxicity, and traffic congestion in urban areas which need a furthermost effective way for solutions. Smart city as a solution is expected to solve the functionality of urban systems. It needs to improve ICT infrastructure as an authoritative, adaptable, accessible, secure, and flexible one, and improve the quality of daily lifetime, refine citizen’s healthiness as well to achieve economic growth and develop the physical infrastructure services to promote sustainable development. This research is a narrative review, kind of methodological approach presented as open research and structured as follows: First section presents the smart city concept by reviewing the definitions, characteristics, and its dimensions. Based on the creation of smart cities, the research aims to identify and investigate the main challenges that smart cities development will face in the coming years by analysing, estimating, and evaluating the available data. It also includes a various assortment of challenges classified under; infrastructure challenges, theoretical, urban design, interdisciplinary, hackers challenges, urban land use, disability of the elderly challenges, the Big Data, technology trap, cultural and democracy challenges, budgetary and cost constraints, and regulations challenges. Besides, it is important to be conscious of security and privacy risks when implementing new systems. One example specifically discussed, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia smart city practices, provides a general overview of the Saudi Vision 2030. It is enlightened by a brief about “the most recent smart city project in Saudi Arabia”, NEOM and illustrates the smart city practices of Makkah, in the light of the six dimensions of the smart city, also studied the city of Amsterdam as it considered one of the first smart cities at the global level. Finally, the research ends with the conclusions and recommendations

Big Data in Smart-Cities: Current Research and Challenges

Smart-cities are an emerging paradigm containing heterogeneous network infrastructure, ubiquitous sensing devices, big-data processing and intelligent control systems. Their primary aim is to improve the quality of life of the citizens by providing intelligent services in a wide variety of aspects like transportation, healthcare, entertainment, environment, and energy. In order to provide such services, the role of big-data and its analysis is extremely important as it enables to obtain valuable insights into the large data generated by the smart-cities.  In this article, we investigate the state-of-art research efforts directed towards big-data analytics in a smart-city context. Specifically, first we present a big-data centric taxonomy for the smart-cities to bring forth a generic overview of the importance of big-data paradigm in a smart-city environment. This is followed by the presentation of a top-level snapshot of the commonly used big-data analytical platforms. Due to the heterogeneity of data being collected by the smart-cities, often with conflicting processing requirements, suitable analytical techniques depending upon the data type are also suggested. In addition to this, a generic four-tier big-data framework comprising of the sensing hub, storage hub, processing hub and application hub is also proposed that can be applied in any smart-city context. This is complemented by providing the common big-data applications in a smart-city and presentation of ten selected case studies of smart-cities across the globe. Finally, the open challenges are highlighted in order to give future research directions

Introducing Data Mesh Paradigm for Smart City Platforms Design

The concept of a smart city imposes a unique set of requirements for the underlying ICT technologies for a successful implementation of services and applications for citizens. At the core of these requirements lies the complex data platform architecture which must be carefully designed. The selection of a particular data platform architecture incurs significant technical debt to be serviced in the future, as well as the integration challenges involving hundreds of stakeholders. Since services developed within the smart city ecosystem have significant impact on human well-being and quality of life, the process of designing data platform must be robust. Data mesh paradigm is a new approach for building complex information systems. It is particularly suited as the blueprint for designing data platforms for smart cities. In this paper we present the overview of the data mesh concept. Building upon 25 years of experience of developing applications and providing data infrastructure for the city of Poznan, we identify key challenges when using the data mesh approach to build data platform tailored to a smart city. We provide guidelines for successful introduction of the data mesh at sociological, technological, and infrastructure level. We also point to the usability of the data mesh paradigm in the context of digital twins, a promising vision of future services for smart cities

The Status of Adoption of Social Media Analytics: Three Cases in South African and German Government Departments

Lack of access to technologies and quality data are key challenges for reducing the digital divide and developing digital citizens to support Smart City initiatives. This paper reviews efforts towards Smart Cities and access to smart technology and Open Data in developed economies globally and in South Africa. Reviews of literature and websites were conducted and the Qualitative Content Analysis method was used to analyse the data. The contributions are the commonalities and differences between Smart City initiatives in developed economies and in South Africa. The findings revealed that in developed countries the focus was mainly on e-services, citizen engagement, Intelligent Transport Systems and energy systems. They provided city-wide connectivity and addressed integration and interoperability challenges. The technologies included large IoT sensors and WiFi in-motion networks incorporating internationally accepted standards. Initiatives in South Africa were less mature, mostly in the initial stages and are not addressing other more urgent needs of the country such as water, food, shelter and education. Collaboration with best practice Smart Cities is needed to provide support to current and future initiatives in South Africa and for the development of African digital citizens

Access to Technology and Data in Smart Cities for South African Digital Citizens

Lack of access to technologies and quality data are key challenges for reducing the digital divide and developing digital citizens to support Smart City initiatives. This paper reviews efforts towards Smart Cities and access to smart technology and Open Data in developed economies globally and in South Africa. Reviews of literature and websites were conducted and the Qualitative Content Analysis method was used to analyse the data. The contributions are the commonalities and differences between Smart City initiatives in developed economies and in South Africa. The findings revealed that in developed countries the focus was mainly on e-services, citizen engagement, Intelligent Transport Systems and energy systems. They provided city-wide connectivity and addressed integration and interoperability challenges. The technologies included large IoT sensors and WiFi in-motion networks incorporating internationally accepted standards. Initiatives in South Africa were less mature, mostly in the initial stages and are not addressing other more urgent needs of the country such as water, food, shelter and education. Collaboration with best practice Smart Cities is needed to provide support to current and future initiatives in South Africa and for the development of African digital citizens

Scientific and Practical Understandings of Smart Cities

Cities are key agents in the transformation of energy systems, since the majority of the world population lives in cities and most energy is consumed in urban areas. In recent times, the concept of smart cities has raised the attention of both scientists and practitioners in different fields. Smart cities are envisioned to link different fields of action such as mobility; energy production, distribution, and consumption; buildings; governance and stakeholder processes; and urban planning. Information and communication technologies are seen as key to these interconnections. The overall goal of a smart city is to save energy and simultaneously to increase the quality of life for inhabitants. Although a broad variety of descriptions of smart cities have been developed, the concept itself appears to be rather fuzzy and hard to grasp. A clear-cut, common definition of smart cities is still lacking. The goal of this paper is to better understand what a smart city constitutes and what it means from the perspective of science, as well as from a practical point of view. In a thorough literature analysis, we identify different i) definitions, ii) approaches, iii) fields of actions and iv) technologies associated with smart cities. Our analysis is based on interdisciplinary scientific literature, as well as on practical documents (e.g. websites of pilot projects). In a subsequent step, we compare the different understandings of smart cities. In so doing, we focus on similarities and differences between scientific and practical approaches. In a final step, we identify opportunities and challenges arising from the identified similarities and differences. Recognising these challenges and potentials is of particular interest for so-called transdisciplinary research in urban development, where scientists and practitioners work closely together. Differences between science and practice might on the one hand inform research on smart cities concerning practical implications and experiences. On the other hand, they can also inform practitioners about scientific innovation in urban development (e.g. cloud computing assessing sensor data in real time)

PREFACE

Abstract. Simply defined, a Smart City is a city overlaid by a digital layer, which is used for the governance of the city. A Smart City uses intelligent technology to enhance our quality of life in urban environments, bringing together people and data from disparate sources such as sensors, demographics, topographic and 3D mapping, Building Information Models and many more. Increasingly, Smart Cities use this data in a variety of ways, to address key challenges related to transportation, communications, air quality, noise, well-being of the citizens, decision making relating to education and health and urban planning, as well as in relation to initiatives such as startups and fostering economic growth and employment within the city. As more data becomes available, the challenges of storing, managing and integrating such data are also multiplied.The first Urban Data Management Symposium (UDMS) was held in 1971 in Bonn, Germany, made the choice of hosting the 6th international conference on Smart Data and Smart Cities (SDSC) in Stuttgart a very natural one. SDSC was established in 2016 as the successor of the UDMS, and this year we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the series of symposia and conferences. The SDSC 2021 will be part of the scientific week on intelligent cities at HFT Stuttgart. Together four events were held during the week of 14th – 17th September 2021, and alongside SDSC participants were invited to attend the "Energy, water and food for the cities of the future" conference, the "LIS-City – liveable, intelligent, and sustainable City" workshop, and the mobility day Stuttgart. Participant interaction – and the ability to attend sessions across the four events – was particularly encouraged. SDSC 2021 itself was organised by the Urban Data Management Society (UDMS www.udms.net), ISPRS and HFT Stuttgart (the University of Applied Science Stuttgart), and Professor Volker Coors Chaired the SDSC committee.As in previous years, three key conference themes were proposed to represent the Smart Cities: Smart Data (sensor network databases, on-the-fly data mining, geographic and urban knowledge modeling and engineering, green computing, urban data analytics and big data, big databases and data management), Smart People (volunteered information, systems for public participation) and Smart Cities (systems of territorial intelligence, systems for city intelligence management, 3D modeling of cities, internet of things, social networks, monitoring systems, mobility and transportation, smart-city-wide telecommunications infrastructure, urban knowledge engineering, urban dashboard design and implementation, new style of urban decision-making systems, geovisualization devoted to urban problems, disaster management systems).This volume consists of 14 papers, which were selected from 41 submissions on the basis of double blind review, with each paper being reviewed by a minimum of three reviewers. These papers present novel research concerning the use of spatial information and communication technologies in Smart Cities, addressing different aspects of Smart Data and Smart Citizens. The selected papers tackle different aspects of Smart Cities: 3D; Citizen Engagement; transport, sustainable mobility; dashboards and web GIS; citizen engagement and participation; sensors; urban decision making.The editors are grateful to the members of the Scientific Committee for their time and valuable comments, which contributed to the high quality of the papers. Reviews were contributed by: Alias Abdul-Rahman, Giorgio Agugiaro, Ken Arroyo Ohori, John Barton, Martina Baucic, Filip Biljecki, Lars Bodum, Pawel Boguslawski, Azedine Boulmakoul, Matteo Caglioni, Caesar Cardenas, Eliseo Clementini, Volker Coors, Youness Dehbi, Abdoulaye Abou Diakité, Adil El Bouziri, Claire Ellul, Tarun Ghawana, Gesquiere Gilles, Didier Grimaldi, Ori Gudes, Stephen Hirtle, Martin Kada, Lamia Karim, Robert Laurini, Christina Mickrenska-Cherneva, Christopher Petit, Alenka Poplin, Ivana Racetin, Dimos Pantazis, Preston Rodrigues, Camilo Leon Sanchez, Genoveva Vargas Solar, Nils Walravens, Parag Wate, Besri Zineb, Sisi Zlatanova. We are also grateful to the work of the local organising committee at HFT Stuttgart, without whom this conference would not have been possible