Governance and economics of smart cities: opportunities and challenges

Abstract

This editorial introduction to this special issue provides an overview and a conceptual framework of governance and economics of smart cities. We begin with a discussion of the background to smart cities and then it focuses on the key challenges for consideration in smart city economics. Here it is argued that there are four dimensions to smart city economics: the first is regarding the scale of global market for smart cities; the second issue concerns data to be used for smart city projects; the third concerns market competition and structure and the fourth concerns the impact on local economy. Likewise, smart city governance framework has to be considered a layered and multi-level concept focusing on issues of transparency and accountability to the citizens.

CitySpeed: A Crowdsensing-Based Integrated Platform for General-Purpose Monitoring of Vehicular Speeds in Smart Cities

“…Smart-city applications are becoming common, as communication and sensing technologies get cheaper and more available [17,18], creating a propitious atmosphere for new developments in this area. In recent years, many promising studies have been performed [2,19,20], indicating the desired research directions and actions to be considered when creating real applications. For some important examples in this area, the work in [21] presented and discussed different contributions for traffic prediction in smart cities; the work in [22] discussed important security issues for smart-city applications, covering key subjects such as attack resilience and privacy; the challenging issues of health assistance in smart cities were discussed in [23], relating different aspects associated to this environment; and the work in [24] investigated different problems of smart mobility in modern cities.…”

The Role of an Architect in Creating the Image of an Elderly-Friendly Sustainable Smart City

“…In the discussion on such a concept of urban development, the following notions are taken into account: "sustainability, quality of life, urban aspects, and the main topics comprise: society, economy, environment, and governance" [6]. As it was mentioned above, the knowledge about sustainable smart cities was created by the representatives of various scientific disciplines, who often worked in interdisciplinary teams and describe the problem from various perspectives, such as: social [11,12], economic [13], information technology (IT) and telecommunications [14][15][16], environmental [17], health [18][19][20][21], legal [22], transport and mobility [23,24], urban and spatial planning [25,26], etc. It should be emphasized that the recurring feature of the publications is that they do not concentrate on the discussion of one problem, but they show it in a broader context (therefore, the above pairing of the authors with a given aspect only informs that a given topic occurs in a given publication).…”

“…The diagnosed tasks and roles have been presented in a tabular form, taking into account the division into six building blocks of a smart city (the division has been taken from the already cited publication [32] (pp. [12][13][14][15][16]). It should be added that the partial problems presented below have in many cases been already investigated, but only as general problems, without reference to the issues of designing sustainable smart cities friendly to seniors.…”

Identification of Budgetary Sources of Risk in Polish Smart Cities Practical Approach

“…Economic factors are therefore important sources of risk for the creation and growth of smart cities (Jankowska, 2015). It is not possible to describe all those aspects in one article, so the author focused only on very small part concerning the financial aspect of Polish local governments unit (Anand, Navío-Marco, 2018).…”