scholarly journals A Unified Smart City Model (USCM) for Smart City Conceptualization and Benchmarking

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonidas Anthopoulos ◽  
Marijn Janssen ◽  
Vishanth Weerakkody

Smart cities have attracted an extensive and emerging interest from both science and industry with an increasing number of international examples emerging from all over the world. However, despite the significant role that smart cities can play to deal with recent urban challenges, the concept has been being criticized for not being able to realize its potential and for being a vendor hype. This paper reviews different conceptualization, benchmarks and evaluations of the smart city concept. Eight different classes of smart city conceptualization models have been discovered, which structure the unified conceptualization model and concern smart city facilities (i.e., energy, water, IoT etc.), services (i.e., health, education etc.), governance, planning and management, architecture, data and people. Benchmarking though is still ambiguous and different perspectives are followed by the researchers that measure -and recently monitor- various factors, which somehow exceed typical technological or urban characteristics. This can be attributed to the broadness of the smart city concept. This paper sheds light to parameters that can be measured and controlled in an attempt to improve smart city potential and leaves space for corresponding future research. More specifically, smart city progress, local capacity, vulnerabilities for resilience and policy impact are only some of the variants that scholars pay attention to measure and control.

2018 ◽  
pp. 523-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonidas Anthopoulos ◽  
Marijn Janssen ◽  
Vishanth Weerakkody

Smart cities have attracted an extensive and emerging interest from both science and industry with an increasing number of international examples emerging from all over the world. However, despite the significant role that smart cities can play to deal with recent urban challenges, the concept has been being criticized for not being able to realize its potential and for being a vendor hype. This paper reviews different conceptualization, benchmarks and evaluations of the smart city concept. Eight different classes of smart city conceptualization models have been discovered, which structure the unified conceptualization model and concern smart city facilities (i.e., energy, water, IoT etc.), services (i.e., health, education etc.), governance, planning and management, architecture, data and people. Benchmarking though is still ambiguous and different perspectives are followed by the researchers that measure -and recently monitor- various factors, which somehow exceed typical technological or urban characteristics. This can be attributed to the broadness of the smart city concept. This paper sheds light to parameters that can be measured and controlled in an attempt to improve smart city potential and leaves space for corresponding future research. More specifically, smart city progress, local capacity, vulnerabilities for resilience and policy impact are only some of the variants that scholars pay attention to measure and control.


2019 ◽  
pp. 247-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonidas Anthopoulos ◽  
Marijn Janssen ◽  
Vishanth Weerakkody

Smart cities have attracted an extensive and emerging interest from both science and industry with an increasing number of international examples emerging from all over the world. However, despite the significant role that smart cities can play to deal with recent urban challenges, the concept has been being criticized for not being able to realize its potential and for being a vendor hype. This paper reviews different conceptualization, benchmarks and evaluations of the smart city concept. Eight different classes of smart city conceptualization models have been discovered, which structure the unified conceptualization model and concern smart city facilities (i.e., energy, water, IoT etc.), services (i.e., health, education etc.), governance, planning and management, architecture, data and people. Benchmarking though is still ambiguous and different perspectives are followed by the researchers that measure -and recently monitor- various factors, which somehow exceed typical technological or urban characteristics. This can be attributed to the broadness of the smart city concept. This paper sheds light to parameters that can be measured and controlled in an attempt to improve smart city potential and leaves space for corresponding future research. More specifically, smart city progress, local capacity, vulnerabilities for resilience and policy impact are only some of the variants that scholars pay attention to measure and control.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahar Raza

This thesis critically analyzes the dominant discourse, actors, and technologies associated with the Sidewalk Toronto smart city project to uncover and resist the potential dangers of the unregulated smart city. Drawing from gray and scholarly literature alongside four semistructured interviews and three action research methods, this research shows that smart cities and technologies are the latest iteration of corporate power, exploitation, and control. Imbued with neoliberal, colonial, and positivistic logics, the smart city risks further eroding democracy, privacy, and equity in favour of promoting privatization, surveillance, and an increased concentration of power and wealth among corporate and state elite. While the publicized promise of the smart city may continuously shift to reflect and co-opt oppositional narratives, its logics remain static, and its beneficiaries remain few. Applying a social justice-oriented lens which connects critical theory, postmodernism, poststructuralism, intersectional feminism, and anticolonial methodologies is crucial in reconceptualizing “smartness” and prioritizing public good.


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):  
MAKSIM D. PUSHKAREV ◽  
◽  
DMITRY A. PROKOFIEV ◽  

Smart city technologies make the functioning of urban infrastructure more efficient, and the lives of citizens more comfortable and safe. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they were very popular, and this could not but affect the energy efficiency of high-tech megacities around the world. This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on smart cities, and also offers a solution to the problem of energy efficiency of smart cities.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
FARZAN SHENAVARMASOULEH ◽  
Farid Ghareh Mohammadi ◽  
M. Hadi Amini ◽  
Hamid R. Arabnia

<div>A smart city can be seen as a framework, comprised of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). An intelligent network of connected devices that collect data with their sensors and transmit them using wireless and cloud technologies in order to communicate with other assets in the ecosystem plays a pivotal role in this framework. Maximizing the quality of life of citizens, making better use of available resources, cutting costs, and improving sustainability are the ultimate goals that a smart city is after. Hence, data collected from these connected devices will continuously get thoroughly analyzed to gain better insights into the services that are being offered across the city; with this goal in mind that they can be used to make the whole system more efficient.</div><div>Robots and physical machines are inseparable parts of a smart city. Embodied AI is the field of study that takes a deeper look into these and explores how they can fit into real-world environments. It focuses on learning through interaction with the surrounding environment, as opposed to Internet AI which tries to learn from static datasets. Embodied AI aims to train an agent that can See (Computer Vision), Talk (NLP), Navigate and Interact with its environment (Reinforcement Learning), and Reason (General Intelligence), all at the same time. Autonomous driving cars and personal companions are some of the examples that benefit from Embodied AI nowadays.</div><div>In this paper, we attempt to do a concise review of this field. We will go through its definitions, its characteristics, and its current achievements along with different algorithms, approaches, and solutions that are being used in different components of it (e.g. Vision, NLP, RL). We will then explore all the available simulators and 3D interactable databases that will make the research in this area feasible. Finally, we will address its challenges and identify its potentials for future research.</div>


2020 ◽  
pp. 13-24
Author(s):  
Anna Pozdniakova ◽  
Iryna Velska

The paper analyzes the key steps taken by different cities worldwide and gathered into a clear step-by-step roadmap that can be useful for emerging smart cities. The Roadmap covers three main stages as we see them during the process of development: preparation, formation and spreading stages. We reveal how this is incorporated in the Ukrainian context. Our analysis of smart city solutions from all over the world (based on the BeeSmartCity database) showed that the tech component on its own is not enough to overcome urban challenges within different domains (environment, economy, government etc.), as we see each of the solutions has a human component involved in a form of knowledge generation and sharing, different forms of co-creation and partnership etc. Thus, ICTs are a required but not a sufficient element of building successful citizen-friendly and resilient cities.


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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 05001
Author(s):  
S Sindhu ◽  
M K Reshmi

Culture is an important aspect of human civilization. Preserving and giving value to the cultural heritage of a region can pave the way for local as well as regional development. This includes tangible, intangible and the natural heritage of cities. It is necessary to develop a cultural infrastructure plan along with other aspects such as transportation, built, green and grey in frastructure. Cultural infrastructure refers to places where culture is experienced, participated in or showcased in. This includes the existing cultural heritage of a place as well as the planning of spaces for cultural stimulation and involvement. With the advent of fourth industrial revolution smart cities are gradually becoming the way of life across the world. The Smart City uses Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Internet of Things (IoT) to effectively manage transportation, water services, waste disposal, energy and other community services. In this scenario it becomes imperative to have strategic infrastructure planning. Indian Government has recently launched the Smart City Mission in India and several smart city projects are underway across the country. It becomes necessar y in this context that Indian cities with their rich tradition and cultural heritage do not lose their unique identity in this process of transformation into smart cities. Even as smart city projects stress the need for heritage preservation there is a lot of ambiguity in how they can be integrated and used to advance urban intelligence. The technologies of the smart city have considerable potential to be used for the management and enhancement its cultural heritage and can help in the creation of a cultural infrastructure plan. This paper will examine the significance of cultural infrastructure in future cities and how it can be integrated into the city planning process of Indian cities through the study of relevant case studies from around the world.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mimoza Bogdanoska Jovanovska ◽  
Daniela Koltovska Nechoska

Abstract Smart City as a concept presupposes using new information and communication technologies in order to improve the quality of life within a particular geographic area. There are six different pillars in the frame of this concept and their one purpose is to achieve better efficiency of city operations. Smart mobility and transport are some of them. The efforts of traditional cities to become smart are not easily and quickly achievable. Numerous traffic solutions have already been implemented in different cities all over the world that make the ‘jump’ from traditional city to smart city. This paper provides an overview of the ‘smart’ transport solutions that have been implemented in the city of Skopje as a traditional city, which is on its way to becoming a smart city. The presented smart solutions are related to traffic management and control area and are aimed at alleviating traffic problems. The focus is on non-motorized solutions, e-vehicles, adaptive traffic control systems and public transport solutions. Several aims have been set in this paper – to promote the achievements of the municipality of Skopje aimed at transforming Skopje into a smart city in a transport area; to present its functionality, and to point out the disadvantages related to law regulations and the interconnection of all stakeholders involved. Finally, the idea is to provide a starting point for future research and to recommend future steps in this direction in the city of Skopje.


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