Understanding and Enabling “Communities” Within Smart Cities: A Literature Review

Abstract

Community-level interventions through technological updates and connectedness are quite popular within smart city visions. These interventions, under the collective label of smart and connected communities (SCC), promise to increase technology access, services, and the sense of entrepreneurship and organization at the community level. This paper addresses the lack of academic research investigating SCC with regard to its merits and linkages to the debate on smart cities. It reviews the academic literature on conceptions, constituents, and enablers of SCC. It highlights SCC as a concept with more issues and complexity than conventional smart city projects, particularly with regard to soft or human-related factors. While SCC is associated with diverse objectives, there are some basic elements of SCC projects such as a common direction, digitalization, optimization, better services, and participation. This paper also presents a range of critical factors and enablers based on previous studies. These factors include the features of communities and services as well as collaborative and institutional mechanisms. This paper shows the importance of the planning and design tasks in initiating SCC interventions. When designing successful and context-specific SCC projects, it is important to address the contextual environment of SCC through an informed SCC project design. This is particularly relevant for (ill-defined) communities with unconducive institutional context or no cooperation legacies. The success of SCC often depends on engagement and change management within communities as well as the development of context-specific, and often iterative, project designs.

Smart cities and communities in the GCC region: from top-down city development to more local approaches

“…While this paper shows the current limitations of the wide dissemination of SCC projects in the Gulf, such limitations are not uncommon. SCC experiences worldwide show a large degree of complexity thus emphasizing the need for experimentation with local designs through iterative urban planning processes (Al-Saidi and Zaidan, 2023). This is in line with urban planning literature that recommends testing and evaluating urban designs (Gleye, 2014).…”

“…Besides, it is important to adequately study the specific context inherent in the environment of SCC projects. For example, Japanese SCC projects have been facilitated by a strong involvement of municipalities, while European projects are embedded within city-wide projects that are often oriented towards EU sustainability policies (Al-Saidi and Zaidan, 2023). In contrast, the Gulf's context in terms of centralized planning, reliance on the governmental sector and the existence of demographically heterogenous communities has hindered the dissemination of local SCC projects, particularly at the residential sectors.…”

“…Smart city developments have also been applied to smaller scales such as campuses or compounds in which more interactions between people and hard infrastructure can be expected (Dameri et al, 2016). In this context, the idea of smart and connected communities (SCC) has emerged as a label for urban interventions towards achieving more connectedness and better services in urban communities (Al-Saidi and Zaidan, 2023). The SCC concept emphasizes the development of synergies through the use of technology, infrastructure, and local community participation (Damiani et al, 2017;Shaw and Sui, 2018;Sui and Shaw, 2018).…”

“…The SCC concept emphasizes the development of synergies through the use of technology, infrastructure, and local community participation (Damiani et al, 2017;Shaw and Sui, 2018;Sui and Shaw, 2018). However, SCC projects have shown a degree of variation with most cases on the challenges of implementing the SCC concept stemming from high-income countries in the Global North (Al-Saidi and Zaidan, 2023). So far, there is a lack of knowledge on the feasibility of SCC interventions in other political-economic contexts such as that of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region.…”