Discovering smart cities’ potential in Kazakhstan: A cluster analysis

Smart city projects are considered real challenges to the development of cities everywhere. The concept itself has many definitions, but a smart city should be defined less based on implemented IT solutions, and more based on optimization of its basic functions using new technologies. There are societal aspects of smart city implementations, similar to eGovernment early projects, and aspects of the use of digital technology that raise concerns. In most cities, the digital divide is still a problem. Smart city projects are the result of the fourth industrial revolution, but cities still lack a full implementation of solutions derived from previous industrial revolutions. Despite that, cities report a lot of smart city projects. Money still gets spent, as being a smart city is, in many cases, an artificial priority and a fashionable topic. Moreover, non-Internet technologies and their relations to a good smart city solution are also not considered. Digital divide bridging is one requirement for a full implementation of a smart city concept. A review of acceleration and deceleration factors shows the obstacles faced by smart city projects. Rankings of cities based on several smart city criteria are published frequently. Various approaches lead to contradictory rankings. A new set of comprehensive rankings developed by an international organization and based on reputable reports and statistics would be useful. The study is based on several smart city and eGovernment projects in Romania.

PurposeThis study aims to explore the complex, multi-level institutional dynamics of smart city reforms and projects and their potential sustainability pressures on the implementation of a management accounting system in an Egyptian state-owned enterprise (SOE), which has a politically sensitive institutional character.Design/methodology/approachThis study adds to institutional management accounting research using a multi-level perspective of institutional dynamics in the smart city context. Data were collected from an interpretive case study of an Egyptian SOE that was under socio-political sustainability pressures to implement a smart electricity network project in New Minya city.FindingsSmart city projects have formed social and political sustainability pressures, which introduced the enterprise resource planning (ERP) network as a new management accounting system. A new (complex and multi-level) management accounting system was invented to reinvent the sustainable city as an “accounting city” (which appeared rhetorically as a “smart city”). “Smart” being the visibility and measurability of the sustainability performance of the collective body, which calls the city and its connectivity to different institutional levels brought out in a city network project for the ERP-enabled electricity distribution.Research limitations/implicationsThis study examines a single case study from a single smart city and identifies the accounting community’s need for multiple and comparative case studies to further analyse the potential impact of smart city reforms and projects on the sustainable implementation of management accounting systems.Practical implicationsCity policymakers and managers may benefit from the practical findings of this interpretive field-based case study in planning, implementing and monitoring smart city projects and objectives.Social implicationsIndividual and collective well-being may be enhanced through new management accounting forms of multi-level local governance and increased political, field and organisational sustainability.Originality/valueThis study provides important insights into the sustainability dynamics of management accounting in achieving smart city reforms. The achievement of sustainability management accounting systems has connected to multiple ERP roles at different institutional levels, which resulted in accommodating the socio-political objectives of smart city projects.

Purpose Smart cities are an attempt to recognize the pioneering projects designed to make the cities livable, sustainable, functional and viable. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate funding released by the government city wise and sources available for finance for the development of the smart cities. The impact of fund released by the government for the development of smart cities (Chandigarh, Karnal, Faridabad, Pune, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Kanpur, Delhi, Lucknow and Agra) in India has been studied in detail. Urbanization is a continuous process, which is taking place throughout the globe, especially in developing countries like India. Design/methodology/approach The research is descriptive in nature. The sources of funding for smart cities in India have been taken into consideration, and χ2 test of independence has been employed to study the impact of fund released by the government for smart city development in India by using IBM SPSS. Findings The total investment, area-based projects, pan-city initiatives and O&M costs for smart cities ranged between Rs 133,368 and Rs 203,979 lakh crores, Rs 105,621 and Rs 163,138 lakh crores, Rs 26,141 and Rs 38,840 lakh crores, and Rs 1,604 and Rs 1,999 lakh crores, respectively, in the year 2016 (for 60 smart cities) to 2017 (for 99 smart cities), which shows an increasing trend. The investment in retrofitting projects, redevelopment projects, greenfield projects and area-based projects ranged between Rs 94,419 and Rs 131,003 lakh crores, Rs 8,247 and Rs 23,119 lakh crores, Rs 2,955 and Rs 8,986 lakh crores, and Rs 105,621 and Rs 163,138 lakh crores, respectively, in the year 2016 (60 smart cities) to 2017 (99 smart cities), which shows the division of projects funding for smart city development in India. The funding released for smart city development such as other sources, loans from the financial institution, private investment, convergence, state government share funding and Central Government Funding ranged between Rs 14,828 and Rs 15,930 lakh crores, Rs 7,775 and Rs 9,795 lakh crores, Rs 30,858 and Rs 43,622 lakh crores, Rs 25,726 and Rs 43,088 lakh crores, Rs 27,260 and Rs 45,695 lakh crores, and Rs 29,207 and Rs 47,858 lakh crores, respectively, in the year 2016 (60 smart cities) to 2017 (99 smart cities), which reflects the different sources of funding for the development of smart cities in India. The χ2 test of independence has been applied, which shows that there is no impact of fund released by the government on cities for smart city development in India as the p-values of Chandigarh (0.213), Karnal (0.199), Faridabad (0.213), Pune (0.199), Chennai (0.213), Ahmadabad (0.199), Kanpur (0.199), Delhi (0.199), Kolkata, Lucknow (0.213) and Agra (0.199) are greater than 0.05. Research limitations/implications For the Smart Cities Mission to be financially sustainable, the right policy and institutional framework should be implemented for modernization and aggregation of government landholding. Consolidation of all the landholdings under the smart city project should be properly implemented, and the role of private sectors should be encouraged for public‒private partnership projects to make Smart City Mission more successful. Practical implications The benefits of smart cities development will help provide affordable, cleaner and greener housing infrastructure for all, especially the inclusive group of developers belonging to the lower middle-income strata of India, and the benefits will be replicated when adopted on a smaller scale in the rural part of the country. Originality/value The research paper is original and χ2 test has been used to study the impact of fund released by the government for smart city development in India.

This study aims to study Kazakhstan’s regions and identify places with the best potential for developing smart cities based on cluster analysis. To analyze the differentiation by the level of development, 17 regions of Kazakhstan are grouped according to 2020 data from the statistical bulletin of the National Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The formation of groups of regions with different values of indicators was carried out based on agglomerative clustering using the single linkage, complete linkage, and Ward’s clustering methods. In agglomerative clustering, the algorithm groups regions based on observations into clusters, and indicators determine each area’s innovative development level. The instrument to build clustering is the “RStudio” software package. As a result, regions with their essential characteristics were identified, and an assessment of their prospects was obtained with the most significant potential for developing and managing “smart cities” – Atyrau region, Almaty city, and Astana city. The remaining clusters include regions where favorable conditions for the development of innovations have not yet been formed, which require more resources and efforts to build “smart cities.” Therefore, they should not be the first to implement this concept. They need a more balanced, integrated approach, ideally supported by experience in implementing the idea in more promising regions. In a sense, clustering also allowed for identifying potential (or even existing) innovation clusters in regions of Kazakhstan. The study results can be used in developing government programs to form smart cities and further study the potential of smart cities.

The large deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) is actually enabling Smart City projects and initiatives all over the world. Objects used in daily life are being equipped with electronic devices and protocol suites in order to make them interconnected and connected to the Internet. According to a recent Gartner study, 50 billion connected objects have been deployed in smart cities by 2020. These connected objects will make our cities smart. However, they will also open up risks and privacy issues. As various smart city initiatives and projects have been launched in recent years, we have witnessed not only the expected benefits but the risks introduced. The current and future trends of smart city with respect to IoT have been described. It also discussed the interaction between smart cities and IoT. The drivers behind the evolution & development of IoT and smart cities have been explained. Finally, the IoT weaknesses and how they can be addressed when used for smart cities has been discussed

A smart city is an urban policy innovation that can improve the community's quality of life by promoting environmental, social, and economic sustainability issues. The involvement and participation of civil society in developing smart cities is a major issue in implementing inclusive smart cities. However, gender issues are often forgotten in developing sustainable smart cities. This article examines two issues. First, the importance of gender issues integration in the development of sustainable smart cities in Indonesia. Second, the importance of gender mainstreaming policy in the development of smart cities in Indonesia. This is a desk study or literature study. Data were obtained from research results published in national and international journals. Data was obtained through accredited journal search engines, namely google scholar, SagePub and Researchgate. The research results show that development of smart city in Indonesia is not yet gender responsive, causing gender inequality gender and excluding women from development. To respond to this, thus there is a need for gender mainstreaming policies in developing smart cities through an overview of the challenges of gender mainstreaming in developing smart cities. Thus, this research recommends a gender mainstreaming strategy as a policy in developing smart cities in Indonesia. Gender mainstreaming policy in smart city development need to be to create a smart city life that is just, inclusive and involves women in development.

The study aims to avoid the phenomenon that thousand cities seem the same in the construction of smart cities and the efforts of all walks of life are jointed to implement the construction of smart cities and the creation of city brands. First, the basic theory of smart city construction is introduced. Second, the restricting and promoting factors influencing smart city construction and development are analyzes, and the evaluation system of smart city development is established. Then, the model for smart city construction and development based on the neural network is implemented. Finally, some domestic cities are selected as the dataset to build a training model, and the city brand optimization strategy is proposed. On this basis, an evaluation system for smart city development based on the intelligent neural network and Grey relational analysis Back Propagation Neural Network (GRA-BPNN) is obtained. The entropy weight method (EWM), grey relational analysis (GRA) method and the evaluation method based on Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solutionv (TOPSIS) are regarded as the members of the control group, and the results of different methods for evaluating the development of smart cities are compared. The results show that the modeling of smart city construction based on neural networks can help to implement an evaluation model for smart city construction and development, and it can help evaluate smart city construction and development accurately. And then the corresponding strategies are proposed to speed up the construction of smart cities with its local characteristics, and then city brands are built. Compared with other evaluation algorithms, the performance of the algorithm proposed is better and more stable and the evaluation results are more reasonable than those of the others, which can prove that the evaluation algorithm is feasible and scientific. This study provides a new idea for the application of deep learning to smart city construction and city brand building.

Smart cities rely on innovative technologies, guidelines, and mechanisms to advance city dwellers’ quality of life (QoL). Notwithstanding the global attention the smart city concept has received within the last decade, studies establishing pragmatic approaches for implementing smart sustainable city strategies in the Gulf region are rare. This study modelled a practical framework for implementing smart sustainable city strategies and megaprojects in one of the Gulf cities. A qualitative research methodology was used to assess smart city strategies from four cities to identify the optimum implementation strategies. This study design framework adopted a case study methodology, the identification of knowledge gaps, data collection and analysis, and interpretations of key findings. Best practices, paramount/relevant stakeholders, main issues/relevant considerations, 15 key performance indicators (KPI), and outputs/deliverables involved in diverse smart sustainable city strategies and project lifecycle phases were identified. The lifecycle phases adopted in the study were (i) conceptualization, (ii) planning/design, and (iii) installation/closure. A pragmatic understanding of how to effectively appraise, monitor, and implement smart sustainable city strategies and megaprojects is provided for policy/decision-makers and built environment experts in Saudi Arabia and globally. The proposed implementation strategic framework can perform the function of an appraisal tool for assessing each phase of the smart city project’s life cycle progress, informing preventions of delays or implementation challenges. This study’s contribution to research knowledge is the development of a model that reveals and illustrates the connections between different phases of smart sustainable city strategies and projects.

Smart cities are an emerging technology that is receiving new ethical attention due to recent advancements in artificial intelligence. This paper provides an overview of smart city ethics while simultaneously performing novel theorization about the definition of smart cities and the complicated relationship between (smart) cities, ethics, and politics. We respond to these ethical issues by providing an innovative representation of the agent-deed-consequence (ADC) model in symbolic terms through deontic logic. The ADC model operationalizes human moral intuitions underpinning virtue ethics, deontology, and utilitarianism. With the ADC model made symbolically representable, human moral intuitions can be built into the algorithms that govern autonomous vehicles, social robots in healthcare settings, and smart city projects. Once the paper has introduced the ADC model and its symbolic representation through deontic logic, it demonstrates the ADC model’s promise for algorithmic ethical decision-making in four dimensions of smart city ethics, using examples relating to public safety and waste management. We particularly emphasize ADC-enhanced ethical decision-making in (economic and social) sustainability by advancing an understanding of smart cities and human-AI teams (HAIT) as group agents. The ADC model has significant merit in algorithmic ethical decision-making, especially through its elucidation in deontic logic. Algorithmic ethical decision-making, if structured by the ADC model, successfully addresses a significant portion of the perennial questions in smart city ethics, and smart cities built with the ADC model may in fact be a significant step toward resolving important social dilemmas of our time.

A smart city is a city that uses information and communication technologies (ICT), smart sensors, actuators and video cameras to better support and optimize the delivery of urban services and to address challenges within city communities. A smart city collects and analyzes data from smart IoT sensors (IoT devices/nodes) and video cameras. The data collected by the sensor nodes can be used to develop applications and systems that benefit the city and the community. Smart city industry is projected to be a $400 billion market by 2021, with 600 cities around the globe expected to generate 60% of the world's GDP by 2025, according to McKinsey research. Many cities have adopted at least one smart city project. However, the majority of cities around the globe are not yet smart cities. The key hurdle is securing the huge fund needed to start a smart city project, and ensuring that there are sufficient resources to sustain the project over time. Because implementing new smart city infrastructure is a large and complex financial undertaking that poses a financial hurdle, specifically, for most of the under-developed countries, a viable and cost-effective strategy is needed to tackle this problem and conquer the digital divide. Building upon and leveraging existing infrastructure is the key to address this problem. This minimizes the cost of technology upgrades and allows for an easier integration process. In addition, leveraging existing infrastructure can give cities a better and quicker return on investment. The main objective of this work is to devise an innovative research and development initiative, which builds upon and leverages ongoing global deployment of smart city and outdoor lighting infrastructures trend, to explore the potential and assess the feasibility of gradually transitioning existing Egypt’s cities infrastructure into truly IoT-enabled smart cities. Specifically, we propose and develop an innovative cost-effective, future-proof, scalable and modular end-to-end device-to-cloud connected outdoor Lighting network infrastructure solution that is based on P2P 4G LTE cellular technology to provide the direct connectivity between lighting poles (IoT devices) and the cloud. The proposed intelligent Lighting solution includes three key building blocks:1) light pole-mounted smart control nodes; 2) cloud-based smart city software solution (NetServ) to remotely monitor, manage, and control the entire lighting infrastructure; and 3) P2P 4G LTE cellular network. In the proposed architecture, smart streetlights serve as the framework for a high- bandwidth, low-latency wireless sensor network, capable of transporting large amounts of data in real-time, while concurrently supporting deployment of a wide range of smart city services.

The notion of ‘smart cities’ has gained the attention of policymakers, urban developers and government authorities around the world and is emerging as a major response to urbanization, economic regeneration and other environmental challenges faced by cities globally. Smart cities depend not only on a city's endowment of hard infrastructure (physical capital), but also and increasingly so, on the availability and quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure (human and social capital). This emerging role of cities as information hubs and knowledge repositories is particularly decisive for urban competitiveness. Arguably, many smart city projects die after the pilot stage and the lessons learned from previous projects never scale up to inform subsequent implementations. This is a major impediment in the future development of smart cities, particularly around facilitating successful technological and procedural replication. In line with recent calls for a cautious rethink of the very rationale and relevance of the smart cities debate pointing to new avenues of research into interdisciplinary aspects, this paper reviews the extant smart city literature in an attempt to identify current theoretical streams and provide further insight into the role of Knowledge Management in smart city development. It also explores how cities can realise the full benefits of tacit knowledge, learning and collaboration. A review of forty-eight peer-reviewed articles is conducted. The findings suggest the lack of Knowledge Management models for smart city replication and reveal how socio-technical approaches can help to support collaboration and knowledge sharing. Policy recommendations for local and national governments on how cities can benefit from a shift towards collaborative knowledge-making are also provided.

In this developing paradigm, heterogeneous network infrastructure is combined with ubiquitous devices for sensing, smart control systems and big data analytics to create “smart cities.” Enhancing the overall quality of life is one of their main goals and they do so through smart services they offer in a broad range of areas such as transportation, healthcare, entertainment (including virtual reality), the environment (including pollution) and energy. To be able to offer those services, the job of big data and their analysis is complicated, since it allows for the extraction of useful insights from the enormous amounts of data that the smart cities produce. The current state-of-the-art research efforts aimed at big data analytics in a smart city setting are investigated and presented in this chapter. In particular, a comprehensive literature review on the big data analytic frameworks for smart cities is provided. Following that, a short talk on IoT and big data is briefed. Owing to different data that the smart cities collect, which frequently have contradictory processing needs, appropriate investigative methods based on the data type are also recommended, depending on the data type. The many smart city applications were investigated and a perspective on the difficulties associated with smart city development was developed. In this chapter, the methods addressing the smart city issues and development are examined, and the possibility for the employment of integrated IoT and big data analytics is presented. Finally, as a case study, a briefing on a call service application for the fire department in a smart city is provided to round up the presentation.

The use of ICT to optimize urban processes, activities, efficiency and effectiveness of services turns cities into smart. Smart cities make it necessary to plan, monitor and analyze the city, except for the routine functions of the city. The study examined what smart city research projects are in five representative smart cities (London, New York, Singapore, Barcelona, and Istanbul) and whether there are similarities or differences in background assumptions. The literature used has a global reach; cities around the world have been chosen for comparison. By evaluating the existing literature, it has been evaluated that smart cities are the most successful and the weakest issues. Despite the centrality of New York and London’s smart city policies; they are fairly superior in economic competition. Public participation in smart city projects is already weak in Singapore and Istanbul. Barcelona has a more participatory policy than other cities, but it needs to develop a smart governance perspective. The study concludes with how the smart city ideology achieves its goals. The study adds value to smart city research by a critical look at the subject. Combining the results of practical smart city initiatives, it concludes the practicality and usefulness of smart city development.

Big data and artificial intelligence based early risk warning system of fire hazard for smart cities

In the last decade, a number of smart city initiatives have flourished around the world. While the literature is ripe with descriptions of those projects and pioneering cities, there is far less systematic research on why some cities are more advanced than others. As single locating entities, cities are posited to have strong geographic rootedness. Hence, spatial and socio-economic context, considered as the main stimulant of organizational innovation, can be particularly important for cities. We investigate 22 Swiss cities with smart city projects and use fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to determine the configuration of conditions that make some cities more advanced than others in their smart city development. Results indicate that a configuration of high share of service sector, presence of research institutions and high urban density is sufficient for the outcome, whereas population size, new residential development and participation to international networks appear as less important. By providing insights into the spatial and socio-economic underpinnings of smart city development, the study contributes to the understanding of the geographies of smart cities.