A global smart city with coordinated leadership and collaboration across government, industry and business, which leads the way and connects with its citizens
This post provides an overview of smart city solutions in Australia, highlighting the benefits, challenges, and practical steps for implementation. It aims to inform and inspire action towards building smarter and more sustainable urban environments.
The UN Habitat conducted a survey to map these challenges by surveying 300 respondents knowledgeable on smart city governance in more than 250 municipalities in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America to examine what global smart cities face as challenges in creating and implementing smart city strategies.
Public sector organisations around the world often face challenges in implementing smart city initiatives and governing the process of digital transformation due to its novelty and complexity.
van Winden et al. (2016) found that Smart City initiatives often forget to include the impact measurement of the project. It is often missed neither in the planning steps nor the end of the project.
A new town development in Germany developed a game that promotes future mobility solutions to their future citizens. The game called MiniLautern created a city mobility simulation where the general public can participate in informing a more sustainable mobility solution.
In the construction of a new town development, city managers often find challenges in envisioning the Smart City needs of future citizens. A team of researchers study a German smart city district as it is being built and come up with concrete steps and procedures for developing digital solutions for the new smart town.
Mu et al. (2022) classifies four organisational conditions that influence the depth of technology enactment in government-led smart city projects. The four organisational conditions are Financial Capacity (FC), Information Sharing (IS), Human Resources Pressure (HR) and Leadership (LD).
Mu et al. (2022) classifies four organisational conditions that influence the depth of technology enactment in government-led smart city projects. The four organisational conditions are Financial Capacity (FC), Information Sharing (IS), Human Resources Pressure (HR) and Leadership (LD).
There are four organizational conditions of governments that may influence the depth of technology enactment in smart city projects. The success of a smart city project usually depends not on how advance the technology that is being adopted but by the social, cultural and environmental attributes, such as political stalemates or interest conflicts in organisations.
Depending on the city’s organisation capacities and conditions, a Smart City Project may display different level of technological “smartness”. Mu et al. (2021) specified three level of “smartness” of intelligent technology that cities adopted to support the government function.
Smart Cities thrive where innovation is fully supported in the governance. Urban Living Labs (ULL) is one medium that can provide the supporting environment for innovation. Urban Living Labs uses co-creation or a process of value creation by sharing information, promotes iterative, nonlinear innovation processes.
Addressing complex urban challenges require innovative problem solving, including through co-creation of urban solution with Urban Living Labs (ULL). ULL function as meeting arenas to support communities’ diversity, significance and connectedness, where participants can experiment with practical ideas and solutions towards a more cohesive, inclusive and sustainable every-day life.
In the development of Smart Cities, increasing the Transformative Capacity is critical to close the gap between planning and implementation of the Smart City goals. Transformative Capacity is the city government’s capacity to conceive, prepare, initiate, and perform cutting-edge urban changes.
The City of Stockholm put significant weight in the improvement of their transformative capacity. This is ensured by the implementing measures that support the sustainability of their smart city agenda. For Stockholm, it is not only crucial to have a long-term vision but also that the goal is shared and democratically legitimised by a wide range of stakeholders.
Despite the strong top-down approach of smart city planning, Chinese Smart City successfully nurture the innovative and collaborative environment in their governance system by encouraging local municipality to adapt national strategic plan based on the local context.
Smart City thrive in a system that support collaboration and innovation. Yet, many smart cities still operate in a top-down governance structure that may limit the progress of development. One of the problem arise from the conventional governance structure is the gap between planning and implementation of smart city advancement.
A side effect that may impose in creating more accessible and affordable digital platform for smart cities is the threat of privacy and safety of individual data. Thus, city government should put in place practices that strengthen the safety of people, their data and identity.
Data collection through various sensors and monitors, and analysing them with the help of Artificial Intelligence can be a powerful system that Smart Cities use to understand the municipal needs in real time. However, without transparency and accountability of how the government use the data and process of the decision making, can be a hazard to democracy.
Connecting the vulnerable social groups to the digital infrastructure and service can provide significant impact to the communities. Such as the case in Latin America, where grass-root network owned by locals jointly collaborate to provide affordable internet access to low-income groups that lacks the digital literacy and have no access to the information and technology.
A successful initiative that improves digital literacy and bridge the digital gap is the Urban Governance Lab. This is medium that digital upskilling of the most marginalised, especially women, and young people who have a large demographic footprint within many countries and cities of the developing world.
To fully reap the benefits of Smart City development with the upgrade of technology and service provision, city government must address the issue of “digital divide” that may persist in the municipality. However, to bridge the digital gap of infrastructure and services, it cannot be handled by only one department or a single IT-agency.
To establish the sustainability of the equal digital governance initiative, mechanisms that city applies in the beginning must be coupled with recurring process of monitoring and evaluation to measure the progress. City shall appoint diverse external advisory team with key local actors.
Regardless of the pervasive adoption of Smart City concept. There is no one size fit all solution that can be implemented in every city. Some policy initiatives may fail to achieve the goals that have been set.
Policy Entrepreneurs is one of the most critical actors that sets a certain policy objective in Smart Cities. In 2010 for example, the initiative of Automated Vehicles (AVs) as part of the Smart Mobility agenda was successfully set by the Policy Entrepreneurs from private companies, academics, and other various sector of stakeholders.
Policy Entrepreneurs are groups or individuals that can map the dynamics of the governance structure related to smart cities that become the communicator and facilitator between stakeholders that ensure that successful implementation of a certain policy agenda, including in the smart city development.
In setting a new policy in smart city innovation, the role of Policy Entrepreneurs are critical from agenda-setting through the implementation of the policy. In the case study of Automated Vehicle (AV) in the Netherland, Gironés et al. (2020) described the process of how AV was first proposed in 2010 until being implemented starting 2018.
Previous article has explained Li et al. (2022) findings on the six factors that supports the policy transfer between smart cities. Further, this study recommends three action points that local governments can take to accelerate the process of policy transfer for the development of local smart cities.
One important strength in embracing the Smart City concept is benefitting the open knowledge and collaborative principles in the effort of improving the quality of life of the city. Partnerships and collaboration among smart cities allow the local government to learn from each other case studies and implement the best practice in their own cities.
Spicer et al. (2021) found that the main narrative in Smart City development focus on larger urban areas as the framework targets to solve problems such as congestions, pollution, and population growth. Smaller cities or rural communities are often overlooked in the discussion, despite them also could greatly benefit from the adoption of Smart City.
City development requires iterative process of planning, implementing and evaluating various policies and strategies. This encourages smart cities around the globe to adopt Digital Twin technology, an exact copy of a city created as a virtual model.
