Technology And Talent Strategies For Sustainable Smart Cities

Acknowledging the smart cities phenomenon not as a future goal but as an active part of our present, this book critically examines the strategies, business models, practices, tools, and actions needed to ensure that smart cities deliver the solutions they promise.

This volume provides the most current research on smart cities. Specifically, it focuses on the economic development and sustainability of smart cities and examines how to transform older industrial cities into sustainable smart cities. It aims to identify the role of the following elements in the creation and management of smart cities:• Citizen participation and empowerment • Value creation mechanisms • Public administration• Quality of life and sustainability• Democracy• ICT• Private initiatives and entrepreneurship Regardless of their size, all cities are ultimately agglomerations of people and institutions. Agglomeration economies make it possible to attain minimum efficiencies of scale in the organization and delivery of services. However, the economic benefits do not constitute the main advantage of a city. A city’s status rests on three dimensions: (1) political impetus, which is the result of citizens’ participation and the public administration’s agenda; (2) applications derived from technological advances (especially in ICT); and (3) cooperation between public and private initiatives in business development and entrepreneurship. These three dimensions determine which resources are necessary to create smart cities. But a smart city, ideal in the way it channels and resolves technological, social and economic-growth issues, requires many additional elements to function at a high-performance level, such as culture (an environment that empowers and engages citizens) and physical infrastructure designed to foster competition and collaboration, encourage new ideas and actions, and set the stage for new business creation. Featuring contributions with models, tools and cases from around the world, this book will be a valuable resource for researchers, students, academics, professionals and policymakers interested in smart cities.

Co-creation and Smart Cities: Looking Beyond Technology highlights a more robust value-based perspective on public service development and delivery, helping structure co-creation processes that foster responsible innovation and a systemic, value-based approach to sustainable urban development.

Almost a century since the idea of creating more humane — more human-centric — cities was brought to the fore, how far has mankind progressed towards creating a true 'city with a heart'? How far off are we, and what can we do to close the gap?The first generation of smart cities showed the limits of top-down planning, in which cities contracted out design and implementation to IT providers. As residents resented paying high taxes for 'smart' urban features that they did not want or use, it became plain that smart cities were not sustainable, and needed to be re-thought. 'Smart City 2.0' starts the design process with understanding the needs of human residents. Little has yet been written about smart cities' second wind.This book offers leading-edge, international perspectives on Smart City 2.0. It offers an overview of the sustainable smart city concept, presents leading experts' latest thinking on strategies for a new generation of smart cities, and showcases eight implementation case studies from seven countries. All chapters are contributed by prominent, leading thinkers and practitioners from a dozen countries, representing both the developed and the developing worlds.Related Link(s)

We are living at the dawn of what has been termed ‘the fourth paradigm of science,’ a scientific revolution that is marked by both the emergence of big data science and analytics, and by the increasing adoption of the underlying technologies in scientific and scholarly research practices. Everything about science development or knowledge production is fundamentally changing thanks to the ever-increasing deluge of data. This is the primary fuel of the new age, which powerful computational processes or analytics algorithms are using to generate valuable knowledge for enhanced decision-making, and deep insights pertaining to a wide variety of practical uses and applications. This book addresses the complex interplay of the scientific, technological, and social dimensions of the city, and what it entails in terms of the systemic implications for smart sustainable urbanism. In concrete terms, it explores the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary field of smart sustainable urbanism and the unprecedented paradigmatic shifts and practical advances it is undergoing in light of big data science and analytics. This new era of science and technology embodies an unprecedentedly transformative and constitutive power—manifested not only in the form of revolutionizing science and transforming knowledge, but also in advancing social practices, producing new discourses, catalyzing major shifts, and fostering societal transitions. Of particular relevance, it is instigating a massive change in the way both smart cities and sustainable cities are studied and understood, and in how they are planned, designed, operated, managed, and governed in the face of urbanization. This relates to what has been dubbed data-driven smart sustainable urbanism, an emerging approach based on a computational understanding of city systems and processes that reduces urban life to logical and algorithmic rules and procedures, while also harnessing urban big data to provide a more holistic and integrated view or synoptic intelligence of the city. This is increasingly being directed towards improving, advancing, and maintaining the contribution of both sustainable cities and smart cities to the goals of sustainable development. This timely and multifaceted book is aimed at a broad readership. As such, it will appeal to urban scientists, data scientists, urbanists, planners, engineers, designers, policymakers, philosophers of science, and futurists, as well as all readers interested in an overview of the pivotal role of big data science and analytics in advancing every academic discipline and social practice concerned with data–intensive science and its application, particularly in relation to sustainability.

As smart cities are rapidly developing, it is vital that they are built on a combination of support and active participation of self-decisive, independent, and aware citizens by ensuring strong human capital, social capital, and information and communications technology infrastructure. Due to this evolution across the globe, it is critical to examine how others are working to create smarter cities in order to learn and revolutionize the way cities are planned and executed. Planning and Designing Smart Cities in Developing Nations explores smart city implementation in developing countries by highlighting the challenges and opportunities of smart cities and showcasing various developments and accomplishments and presents a framework to implement strategic plans for smart development. Covering topics such as smart technologies and social capital, it is ideal for policymakers, economic and development professionals, city planners and designers, government officials, academicians, professors, and students.

Smart Cities and the UN's SDGs explores how smart cities initiatives intersect with the global goal of making urbanization inclusive, resilient, and sustainable. Topics explored include digital governance, e-democracy, health care access, public-private partnerships, well-being, and more. Examining smart cities concepts, tools, strategies, and obstacles and their applicability to sustainability, the book exposes key structural problems that cities face and how the imperative of sustainability can bypass them. It shows how smart city technological innovation can boost citizens' well-being, serving as a key reference for those seeking to make sense of the issues and challenges of smart cities and SDGs. Includes numerous case studies from around the world Features interdisciplinary insights from academic and practitioner experts Offers an extensive literature review

Smart cities are a fast-growing species, and a fascinating field for new experiments in a number of critical areas, ranging from urban planning, sustainable energy, and transport strategies to social integration and talent attraction, to name a few. As leaders and citizens around the world continue to assess, design, implement and improve on ways to create better cities, they often find themselves confronted with a multitude of decisions and a wide range of partial solutions to specific problems such as traffic congestion, waste management and crime. Unfortunately, they have precious few tools to enable them to define the strategies required and take advantage of the experience of other smart cities around the world. In such a context, metrics can play a significant and constructive role: by quantifying efforts and results, they increase the ability of decision-makers to identify where their priorities should lie as well as the relative merits of various approaches.