scholarly journals Could a Smart City Ameliorate Urban Traffic Congestion? A Quasi-Natural Experiment Based on a Smart City Pilot Program in China

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 2291
Author(s):  
Yuhui Guo ◽  
Zhiwei Tang ◽  
Jie Guo

More countries and regions are joining the bandwagon of smart city construction, which is an important strategy and innovative urban governance concept to solve the problem of rapid urbanization. This paper examines whether smart city innovation is able to ameliorate the traffic congestion faced by a large number of cities. Using panel data for 187 prefecture-level cities in China from 2008 to 2017, this paper tests the effect of implementation of a smart city on urban traffic congestion with the difference-in-difference method. The results show that, firstly, the construction of smart cities have significantly reduced the degree of urban traffic congestion and improved the quality and capacity of public transport. Secondly, information technology and urban innovation are the main mechanisms for smart city implementation to improve urban traffic problems. Thirdly, the improvement effect of smart city implementation on traffic management shows an increasing marginal effect over time. By overcoming the estimation bias in previous studies, this study accurately analyzes the positive role and dynamic effect of smart city construction on traffic improvement. It augments the literature of program evaluation and assessment of smart city implementation. By examining how to improve traffic congestion, it offers some insights that could inspire governments to build smarter cities with better traffic.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Shelton ◽  
Thomas Lodato

In response to the mounting criticism of emerging ‘smart cities’ strategies around the world, a number of individuals and institutions have attempted to pivot from discussions of smart cities towards a focus on ‘smart citizens’. While the smart citizen is most often seen as a kind of foil for those more stereotypically top-down, neoliberal, and repressive visions of the smart city that have been widely critiqued within the literature, this paper argues for an attention to the ‘actually existing smart citizen’, which plays a much messier and more ambivalent role in practice. This paper proposes the dual figures of ‘the general citizen’ and ‘the absent citizen’ as a heuristic for thinking about how the lines of inclusion and exclusion are drawn for citizens, both discursively and materially, in the actual making of the smart city. These figures are meant to highlight how the universal and unspecified figure of ‘the citizen’ is discursively deployed to justify smart city policies, while at the same time, actual citizens remain largely excluded from such decision and policy-making processes. Using a case study of Atlanta, Georgia and its ongoing smart cities initiatives, we argue that while the participation of citizens is crucial to any truly democratic mode of urban governance, the emerging discourse around the promise of smart citizenship fails to capture the realities of how citizens are actually discussed and enrolled in the making of these policies.


Author(s):  
Hung Viet NGO ◽  
◽  
Quan LE ◽  

The world’s population is forecasted of having 68% to be urban residents by 2050 while urbanization in the world continues to grow. Along with that phenomenon, there is a global trend towards the creation of smart cities in many countries. Looking at the overview of studies and reports on smart cities, it can be seen that the concept of “smart city” is not clearly defined. Information and communication technology have often been being recognized by the vast majority of agencies, authorities and people when thinking about smart city but the meaning of smart city goes beyond that. Smart city concept should come with the emphasizing on the role of social resources and smart urban governance in the management of urban issues. Therefore, the "smart city" label should refer to the capacity of smart people and smart officials who create smart urban governance solutions for urban problems. The autonomy in smart cities allows its members (whether individuals or the community in general) of the city to participate in governance and management of the city and become active users and that is the picture of e-democracy. E-democracy makes it easier for stakeholders to become more involved in government work and fosters effective governance by using the IT platform of smart city. This approach will be discussed more in this paper.


Author(s):  
Onur Dogan ◽  
Omer Faruk Gurcan

In recent years, enormous amounts of digital data have been generated. In parallel, data collection, storage, and analysis technologies have developed. Recently, there has been an increasing trend of people moving towards urban areas. By 2030 more than 60% of the world's population will live in an urban environment. Urban areas are big data resource because they include millions of citizens, technological devices, and vehicles which generate data continuously. Besides, rapid urbanization brings many challenges, such as environmental pollution, traffic congestion, health problems, energy management, etc. Some policies for countries are required to cope with urbanization problems. One of these policies is to build smart cities. Smart cities integrate information and communication technology and various physical devices connected to the network (the internet of things or IoT) to both improve the quality of government services and citizen welfare. This chapter presents a literature review of big data, smart cities, IoT, green-IoT concepts, using technology and methods, and applications worldwide.


Author(s):  
Vrushali Gajanan Kadam ◽  
Sharvari Chandrashekhar Tamane ◽  
Vijender Kumar Solanki

The world is growing and energy conservation is a very important challenge for the engineering domain. The emergence of smart cities is one possible solution for the same, as it claims that energy and resources are saved in the smart city infrastructure. This chapter is divided into five sections. Section 1 gives the past, present, and future of the living style. It gives the representation from rural, urban, to smart city. Section 2 gives the explanations of four pillars of big data, and through grid, a big data analysis is presented in the chapter. Section 3 started with the case study on smart grid. It comprises traffic congestion and their prospective solution through big data analytics. Section 4 starts from the mobile crowd sensing. It discusses a good elaboration on crowd sensing whereas Section 5 discusses the smart city approach. Important issues like lighting, parking, and traffic were taken into consideration.


Author(s):  
Özcan Sezer ◽  
Mehmet Avcı

Cities are futures' crucial elements, playing an important role in economics, social and environmental. As closer to individuals, cities face some challenges in terms of problems caused through the rapid urbanization process. Hence, governments and public agencies at all levels should use smart techniques including technology for sustainable development, better quality of life for citizens, and finally, an efficient use of scarce public resources. In this sense, Turkey plans to apply a smart city concept in Turkish cities as worldwide and published 2020-2023 National Smart Cities Strategy and Action Plan document with four strategic goals, nine targets, and 40 actions. This chapter aims to reveal the institutional, fiscal, and social challenges on smart governance, which is the most important dimension of smart city, for Turkey. In this respect, there are some challenges on smart governance in Turkey in terms of legislation, institutional, transparency and accountability, participation, e-democracy, and citizens.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (24) ◽  
pp. 7209
Author(s):  
Janetta Culita ◽  
Simona Iuliana Caramihai ◽  
Ioan Dumitrache ◽  
Mihnea Alexandru Moisescu ◽  
Ioan Stefan Sacala

Smart cities are complex, socio-technological systems built as a strongly connected System of Systems, whose functioning is driven by human–machine interactions and whose ultimate goals are the well-being of their inhabitants. Consequently, controlling a smart city is an objective that may be achieved by using a specific framework that integrates algorithmic control, intelligent control, cognitive control and especially human reasoning and communication. Among the many functions of a smart city, intelligent transportation is one of the most important, with specific restrictions and a high level of dynamics. This paper focuses on the application of a neuro-inspired control framework for urban traffic as a component of a complex system. It is a proof of concept for a systemic integrative approach to the global problem of smart city management and integrates a previously designed urban traffic control architecture (for the city of Bucharest) with the actual purpose of ensuring its proactivity by means of traffic flow prediction. Analyses of requirements and methods for prediction are performed in order to determine the best way for fulfilling the perception function of the architecture with respect to the traffic control problem definition. A parametric method and an AI-based method are discussed in order to predict the traffic flow, both in the short and long term, based on real data. A brief comparative analysis of the prediction performances is also presented.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Xiaofei Yang ◽  
Lini Ma

Urban color is becoming more and more important in the construction of smart cities. This research mainly discusses the influencing factors of AHP-based 3D regional color smart city construction. From the perspective of city managers, the factors selected in the article that affect the choice of urban color planning are economic development, urban culture, designer’s ideas, customs, and natural environment. We use GIS to comprehensively collect basic geographic information data of the city. We use CityEngine and GIS data to quickly create virtual cities. When constructing the AHP model, once the weight value of each factor in the color-influencing factors of the entire smart city is obtained, the total ranking of the levels needs to be checked once. After that, the study uses the MATLAB program platform to realize the parametric design of the main color of the city, including the control of the changes in the spatial structure of the main color of the city, followed by the control of the transition and coordination mode between the key elements of the city color. Explorer provides comprehensive and rich 3D digital city roaming browsing, query positioning, analysis, and other functions; supports the loading of multiple data sets from the Internet and local; and can dynamically load massive 3D city simulation models above and below ground. Finally, the design of the urban architectural color or improvement plan is further carried out, and the urban color main color design plan is finally implemented in the implementation of the urban architectural color, which effectively realizes the quantitative control of the urban color. When evaluating smart city color resources, the color weight value of public facilities is 0.147, which accounts for 14.7% of the total weight value. This research helps to enhance the regional and local cultural characteristics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuria Febrer ◽  
Frans Folkvord ◽  
Francisco Lupiañez-Villanueva

With the ongoing rapid urbanization of city regions and the growing need for (cost-)effective healthcare provision, governments need to address urban challenges with smart city interventions. In this context, impact assessment plays a key role in the decision-making process of assessing cost-effectiveness of Internet of Things–based health service applications in cities, as it identifies the interventions that can obtain the best results for citizens' health and well-being. We present a new methodology to evaluate smart city projects and interventions through the MAFEIP tool, a recent online tool for cost-effectiveness analysis that has been used extensively to test information and communications technology solutions for healthy aging. Resting on the principles of Markov models, the purpose of the MAFEIP tool is to estimate the outcomes of a large variety of social and technological innovations, by providing an early assessment of the likelihood of achieving anticipated impacts through interventions of choice. Thus, the analytical model suggested in this article provides smart city projects with an evidence-based assessment to improve their efficiency and effectivity, by comparing the costs and the efforts invested, with the corresponding results.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 9543-9547

Internet of things plays an important role to make smart in all the areas like smart city, smart home etc [1]. It is used in more efficient water supply, an innovative solution for traffic congestion, to make reliable public transportation, improved the public safety, energy efficient building, Vehicle smart security system etc [4]. While the average cost for basic items is going up, there is a developing concentration to include innovation to bring down those costs for smart city development. In the following chapter will discussed the few innovation for the smart city development.


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