Smart City Transformation Strategies

Smart Principles For Smart City Development

Generic principle of cities development can be analyzed or modelled after two major principles:

• 1.

  A holistic principle where all sectors of city life are addressed in a central effort and development plans are consider the city as the overall objective. Of course, this goes down from top and hence the central plan is structured into smaller projects. Naturally all these smaller projects are integrated, complementing each other, aiming at the long run that all the city becomes “smart”. The essence of such strategy is to eventually transform a traditional city to a smart one. The specificity of such approach is it expects the city sectors have similar level of quality and stature. The sum of these qualities would identify generally the level of the city vis-à-vis life, development, etc. of sectors like infrastructure, health, education, environment, and public spaces.

• 2.

  A piecewise principle where transformation to smart cities become subject to the status of the city sectors. In other words, each sector is considered separately. For example, while planning development of the education sector, the strategy focuses on education and minimizes coupling it to other sectors. This is in a way like instead of addressing smart transformation of a city, the concern becomes transformation of a sector. This is of course not always possible scientifically, but for pragmatic and technical as well as financial, reasons it would be best to “truncate” the transformation into smaller efforts, by addressing smarter sectors. Financing smart cities is perhaps the most crucial part of any transformation, but it is not about the transformation itself rather it is about the empowerment of implementing the adopted transformation plans (Pratap, 2017).

Adopting the piecewise strategy is best suited to cities of developing nations, where different sectors of the city have wide gaps in the level of achievement and performance (de Sola Pool, 2003).

Cities that aspire to become smart come in different shapes and sizes with different resources and infrastructure but the fundamental principles which the cities need to focus upon remains similar.

Research could attempt to look at comprehensive and end-to-end smart strategy, however, varying degrees of adherence to these principles will not change the fact that ‘smartness’ can be achieved.

Research could come up with several answers or potential ones, but it is clearly established that all significant and principal ones are information driven.

The development needs to incorporate a modern digital infrastructure for the city. Such infrastructure should be able to maintain and provide open access to secure public data. This will allow citizens to access and use the information they need and whenever they need it.

In any smart city, the citizen is at the center of performance and operation. This implies that service delivery is improved to ensure that the needs of citizens are brought to the fore. This refers to various principles such as connectivity, data exchange, back-office operations, service delivery systems and the functioning of city governance and management information sharing.

Another type of infrastructure is what can be called the smart physical infrastructure such as real-time sensors, fast networks, etc. (including “smart” systems or IoT: Internet of Things), to allow service providers to use the full range of data both to manage the delivery of services daily and to inform strategists in city government to support decision making. There should be always a professional policy of dedicating special attention to be open to lessons learned from other similar development initiatives.

Smart cities are developed to provide an efficient, safer, and happier life for their citizens.