Smart Cities: The Main Drivers for Increasing the Intelligence of Cities

Abstract

Since the concept of smart cities was introduced, there has been a growing number of surveys aiming to identify the dimensions that characterize them. However, there is still no consensus on the main factors that should be considered to make a city more intelligent and sustainable. This report contributes to the topic by identifying the most important smart city drivers from the perspective of professionals from four broad areas of expertise: applied social sciences, engineering, exact and Earth sciences, and human sciences, which provide important insights for the understanding of smart and sustainable cities. In this study, we conducted a wide and detailed literature review, in which 20 potential smart city drivers were identified. The drivers were prioritized from the results of a survey conducted with 807 professionals that work in the concerned field. The results showed that the seven drivers identified as the most important to increase the intelligence of cities are related to the governance of cities.

Smart City Governance in Developing Countries: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Some studies do not discuss the smart city as a concept centred on technological capabilities, but discuss other peripheral concepts such as low-carbon cities [37,47] and eco-cities [50] in the context of smart cities. This chimes with many other studies that discuss the importance of ensuring that sustainability is upheld concurrently with smart city development, in that for a city to be smart, it also needs to be sustainable [3,37,47,50,56,57,72]. For a smart city's visions to be realised, it should include the sustainable elements of an eco-city, and it needs to be designed with the clear objective of elevating public services, improving government efficiency, and minimising negative environmental impacts through the creation of waste and pollution [50].…”

“…The characteristics of all the included 56 studies broadly fall into three categories: (i) studies that focus on in-depth analysis of smart city development process or policy process in a particular jurisdiction [28,, (ii) surveys of citizens and experts regarding their views/opinions/preferences on smart cities adoption [3,[67][68][69][70][71][72][73], and (iii) theorising/conceptualising the developmental trends of smart cities in the context of developing countries [74,75]. While most studies focus on the macropolicy implementation of smart cities, some studies dive into explaining the process of adopting a particular smart systems such as the incorporation of digital platform or ICT into public services [33,55,58,70], adoption of intelligent transport systems [61,[76][77][78], and the adoption of IoT in public services [39,67].…”

“…Appendix A provides more detailed information about the 56 studies including country/initiative studied, method of the study and the aims/objectives of the study. Geographical locations (country/continent) of the included studies by descending order (based on the number of studies identified) India [28,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][67][68][69][70]79] China [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53]71,76,80] Indonesia [54][55][56][57] Brazil [3,58,72] Malaysia [59][60][61] Vietnam [62,73] Mexico [63] Turkey [78] Egypt [81] Romania [64] Nepal [65] ...…”

“…Qualitative city-level case studies [32][33][34]37,38,42,44,45,[47][48][49]50,52,53,[56][57][58]60,62,65,76,80] Qualitative country-level case studies [28,33,35,38,43,44,47,48,52,55,57,58,60-62,65,66,[78]] Qualitative continent-level case studies [74,75] Quantitative surveys [3,[67][68][69][70][71][72][73] 1 Contexts and characteristics of the 56 studies included in the review; please see Appendix A for more details.…”

“…Among the 56 studies synthesised for this review, 14 attempted to conceptualise a smart city in the context of developing countries. It is almost unanimously held that a technology-enabled digital service is one of the key characteristics of a smart city [3,37,39,47,50,51,56,57,63,69,72,74,81,82]. For example, smart city development can only be realised "by the extensive application of ICTs in the urban management system" [57] (p. 62).…”