A city that invests in people and attracts talent to the area, which creates opportunities through emerging smart technologies and enables everyone to participate
Smart city projects and their promises of improved efficiency, sustainability, and quality of life. However, these initiatives tend to prioritize the interests of powerful actors such as technology corporations and urban elites, neglecting the needs of marginalized communities.
Despite the wide adoption of the Smart City concept in our cities, the concept mostly remains obscure to the general public. This is due to the lack of clear definition of Smart City but also the often limited participation to the urban development by the public, including to a specific demographic groups, the children.
Clarinval et al. (2023) introduce a workshop model that can help urban planners and decision maker facilitate a participation design that involves children, an often-overlooked demographic in the provision of Smart City development.
In the implementation of Smart City, people with disabilities may experience inequality of access to information as Smart City includes massive transformation of digitalisation of many information and services. Exclusion from the Smart City may take the form of inaccessibility to affordable & reliable broadband connection, lack of digital literacy, inadequate technical support or even online content that are not designed to be easy to access and engaging for the people with disability.
One of the objectives of Smart City concept is to incorporate the public into the city’s decision making. “People-centric” governance are the core framework that many smart cities incorporate in their masterplan. However, in many cases, Smart City only reflects the opportunistic nature to promote economic activity without even considering the inhabitants needs.
The attractiveness of a smart city is in the eye of beholders, Romao et al. (2018) argues. Through his study on the factors that influenced how residents and tourists rate the attractiveness of their cities. For instance, population growth is influenced by the economic condition and the availability of cultural interaction in the city.
Urban planning in many governments may still mostly use the top-down approach, including in the development of Smart City. However, this approach often neglects what the citizens’ actually want and need. Building a people-centric smart city shows a benefit of services being used more by the citizen, as they perceived them crucial in their well-being in their urban life.
Mora et al. (2019) highlights the strategic principle that drives the development of smart cities in Europe, to look beyond technology. Developing smart cities is about tackling complex socio-technical systems that mitigates or resolve urban challenges.
Both are required to achieve smart city success, according to case study of four European cities, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Helsinki and Vienna. Government plays an important role in creating the grand design and strategies of smart city.
Smart City as a widespread concept for city development around the world, Esposito et al. (2021) calls regional governments to formulate place-based strategies that are aligned with the context of each municipality. One size does not fit all when implementing smart city initiatives in cities with different socio-economic situations.
Through analysing the Smart City initiatives that Songdo, Masdar, Amsterdam, San Francisco and Brisbane implemented through their applied technology, policy and community, there are lesson learned that other cities could apply to achieve success
In the sector of economic growth, Australian Smart Cities are taking the approach of ‘innovation-led’ for employment growth. However, from evidence of cities around the globe, innovation-based cities are associated with less affordable housing.
In the US, building operations use roughly 12% freshwater consumption. Therefore, advancing water resource management in buildings can help mitigate water scarcity in urban areas. Amaral et al. list evidence-based practices that are significant in improving the water resource management of building operations.
By comparing the Smart City plan implemented in two cities in South Korea, Gimpo and Namyangju, Myeong et al. (2021) found the key to successfully building a culture of innovation in the city. Gimpo and Namyangju, both adopt the Smart City Concept in their city development through different approaches.
In 2018, Woetzel and Kuznetsova conducted a study on the adoption of Smart Solutions in cities around the globe. The study analyses what and why a certain smart city innovation is adopted by the citizen and found that the factors vary between cities and technology.
Razaghi and Finger (2018) defined city as a system, which means that a city is composed by interrelated elements that are indivisible elements but a whole. When we see a city as a system, we acknowledge the human agents that are also shaping the behaviour of the urban system as a whole and also how the complex urban system can be massive in terms of components and the geographical coverage.
Smart City vision opens a new way of engagement between the cities government and their citizen with the creation website platforms to communicate policies and information. This initiative is also supported by various legal documents that push the idea of transparent government.
City of Banjarbaru is a medium size city in terms of population size but has quite a large geographical size. This could mean that public service may not always be physically available nor that the citizen living in a more remote area has access to the information on public services that they can get. The city government come up with solution that simplify the process both for the citizens and the government officials.
In the neighbourhood level in Indonesia, there is usually a certain figure that would be the representative of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. The representatives are the cities’ informal helping hand in managing the inhabitants, usually their work is related to administrative civil documenting such as knowing who come in and move out from the neighbourhood,taking notes on birth and death numbers.
Social media can be a powerful tool for city government to communicate with the public. City of Tangerang has built an app that not only provide information for citizens on the city’s program and services, but also built-in citizen reporting platform. With the integrated system reports from any social media platform could then be followed up as soon as possible torelated city agency.
