Toward Effective and Sustainable Smart City Model

Building a smart city that follows sustainability goals enhances the quality of life and preserves environmental, human, and social capital. Yet, existing smart sustainable city projects have concentrated on the technological dimensions of smart cities such as using big data or smart devices to follow sustainability goals. Currently, there is no comprehensive category of smart sustainable city indicators in the literature. This paper aims to discover these indicators by considering the common features of sustainability and smart city concepts. Two rounds of the content analysis technique were employed to investigate semantic, lexical, and conceptual relationships between smart city and sustainability indicators. This paper employed the Sustainable Development Indicators suggested by OECD and the Smart City Index Master by Cohen as the two main groups of indicators. The findings offer a novel set of indicators that enables policymakers and researchers to consider the smartness and sustainability of their projects simultaneously. This includes socio-cultural, economic, environmental, and governance categories with 28 associated indicators. The outcome of this paper offers a unique combined category of smart sustainable city indicators by considering the key elements of sustainability and smart city concepts. Academics and policymakers can also employ this set of indicators as a guideline to build a smart sustainable community.

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.

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.

A rising number of people agree that the actions conducted in India as part of the Smart Cities project should be utilized to create models for environmentally sustainable smart cities. The circumstances in developing nations differ from those in industrialized nations, which have historically worked toward sustainable cities and are currently working toward smart sustainable cities. The Smart cities standards as they stand now seem to place more of an emphasis on governance challenges, social and economic development and the use of contemporary information and communication technology (ICT). Background: Sustainable indicators are the measures that are used to gauge the effectiveness of environmental strategies. These activities are connected to certain goals and outlined in a sustainability plan. Reducing waste during production, for instance or the carbon footprint. Their execution serves as a gauge for whether things are moving in the proper way. Methods: This study emphasizes on 20 top smart cities of India using GIS Mapping techniques and geospatial data science. Results: These indicators are often used to assess if the city of India is accomplishing its goals. If there is a deviation, remedial action may be taken. Sustainability indicators, then, assess both the performance of the city’s growth and its plan execution. Conclusions: But it's crucial to choose the appropriate parameters and make sure they're directly related to the suggested goals. If not, they will basically stop working.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the implementation of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) in cities. The concept of smart city in the context of sustainable development will be presented. Smart city is an innovative concept that integrates digital infrastructure in carefully planned cities to ensure accessibility, environmental friendliness and efficient use of resources. The link between smart city and sustainable city is reflected in the concept of smart sustainable cities. It describes a city whose development is supported by modern technologies and co-created by its residents. In this article, we seek answers to the question of how non-financial reporting can be useful in the development of a smart, sustainable city. In today’s world, the concept of smart, sustainable cities is becoming a key goal for cities striving for sustainable development. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues play an extremely important role in this concept, which provides the basis for efforts to create smart and sustainable cities. We will also address how ESG methodology can support city managers in various areas, such as managing urban transportation, organizing waste disposal, or introducing electronic citizen services. In addition, we will discuss the role of smart cities in improving the quality of life of their residents, where ESG, by optimizing environmental, social and economic management solutions, can significantly contribute to the further development of cities. We will present some examples of Polish cities and their approaches to ESG risk management.

According to United Nations estimates, about 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050. (https://www.un.org) Smart sustainable cities technologies and approaches, including those based on information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and Internet of things (IoT), are already helping people to overcome multiple challenges of urban development and to progress towards achieving global objectives for cities, particularly Sustainable Development Goal 11 ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ (The first United Smart Cities SMART CITY LAB opened in Vienna, supporting co-creation of solutions for smart sustainable cities worldwide 2018, [1]). The Smart Cities Mission (SCM), launched in 2015, by the Government of India, aims at building up sustainable and inclusive cities that provide core infrastructure, a clean and sustainable environment and a decent quality of life to its citizens. The strategic components of the Mission are city improvement (retrofitting), city renewal (redevelopment) and city extension (greenfield development) with smart solutions applied in service delivery and governance (SDG India Index & Dashboard 2019–2020, [2]). There are several urbanization models that incorporate digital technologies to address some of the urbanization and sustainability challenges: Digital cities feature the integration of digital technology into the city’s core infrastructure systems; intelligent cities rely on the digital city infrastructure to build intelligent buildings, transportation systems, schools, enterprises, public spaces, public services, etc., and to integrate them into intelligent urban systems; and smart cities—deploy intelligent urban systems at the service of socio-economic development and improving urban quality of life (Estevez et al, Smart sustainable cities, reconnaissance study 2016, [3]) So, here, we are trying to deal with systems of systems in physical ecosystems powered by various ICT and digital technologies. Meanwhile, the existing technological approaches tend to latch onto the most hyped technology of the year and produce many silo-ed solutions for smart cities which, although elevates technology innovation, fails to engage its citizens. Therefore, a design intervention is needed to help bridge this and make technologies work for humans, the citizens and the primary stakeholder. This interpretation paper is an inquisition into the role of design and designers, to bring the right kind of approach when it comes to sustainable smart city design. The paper first lays down the high-level role and responsibilities of designers and its various other key stakeholders in crafting a smart city. Then, it talks about the right kind of methodologies that designers bring at all levels of sustainable smart city design—from working with official bodies in co-creation and collaboration mode to the end-users—the citizens—to understand their wants, needs and desires. The paper then details out a case study of a smart campus where the aforementioned methods are applied in order to come up with the most effective designs for the smart city that meet the official bodies’ KPI requirements and at the same time, delivers best-in-class experiences to citizens.

This paper describes the motivation, framework, concepts, method, implementation, and results of the HCII2023 Design Café, a dedicated participatory highly interactive design workshop held in Copenhagen in July 2023. Motivated by the ubiquitous challenges our world is facing, this initiative had the goal to explore six main issues from an interdisciplinary perspective with a focus on the UN SDG 11: “Sustainable Cities and Communities” and the HCI Grand Challenge 2 “Human-Environment Interactions.” The six issues were formulated as questions and presented to the participants working in small groups. (1) How to create inclusive and ethical smart cities? (2) How to establish trust between people and smart environments? (3) How to address privacy concerns in smart environments that adopt the “disappearing computer” paradigm? (4) How to promote explainability and transparency of policies and measures to citizens of smart cities or in smart environments in general? (5) How to design incentives and rewards for engagement and sustainable behavior in smart cities at a personal as well as collective/corporate level? (6) How to measure success and impact in sustainable smart city projects? The method and approach of the Design Café is a tailored composition of a guided, structured format combined with and inspired by processes of informal communication and exchange of knowledge and ideas. Aligned moderation, a minimum set of rules, a set of relevant topics and an interdisciplinary group of motivated participants working in rotating formations provides the structure for achieving results. The results show that the six issues are not independent of each other, but require a holistic view, considering the various dependencies as well as synergies when exploring solutions. Nevertheless, the importance of first establishing higher-level goals based on ethical and inclusive approaches fostering human dignity and human rights were key. Acceptance of overall goals, processes, rules, and regulations was considered as the fundamental pre-requisite for sustainable change towards a declared goal. Acceptance needs trust and privacy as well as explainability and transparency of policies and measures. The role of incentives and rewards for engagement and sustainable behavior was twofold. Offering incentives must include planning on how to measure their impact. Effective measurement of success and impact depends heavily on how the institutions address privacy. Explainability and transparency should become one of the ethical guidelines that steer and control concepts, decision making, and implementations of all activities. The scale of these societal challenges still needs to be recognized by those responsible. It is essential to educate decision makers in the psychological needs and effects of sense making, comprehensibility, and finally acceptance and well-being moving towards a humanity-centered design.

This paper focuses on the challenges and opportunities of achieving sustainability in smart cities. It depends on maintaining the balance between energy efficiency and connectivity through energy-efficient protocols. The study surveys systems with energy-efficient protocols, emphasizing their strengths and limitations in maintaining sustainability in smart cities. The need for energy-efficient protocols in smart city settings is that these protocols dynamically adjust operations to optimize energy consumption within sensor nodes in communication networks while considering parameters: like heterogeneity, traffic patterns, and environmental factors. Evaluation against key performance metrics such as energy consumption, data delivery ratio, network lifetime, and throughput identify promising technologies to achieve an optimal balance between connectivity and energy efficiency in smart cities. It concludes by proposing future research directions and considerations to make the development of sustainable networking solutions rapidly tailored to the evolving landscape of smart cities. This paper aims to present a comprehensive overview of the pivotal role played by energy-efficient protocols in fostering sustainable networking architectures.

The evolution of smart cities represents a pivotal transformation in urban development, driven by the integration of cutting-edge technologies. Among these, blockchain and edge intelligence have emerged as pivotal forces shaping the future of smart cities. This paper presents a comprehensive review and outlook on the potential synergy between blockchain and edge intelligence, highlighting their transformative impact on sustainable smart city development. In our analysis, we delve into the key components and technologies associated with smart cities, emphasizing their goals of sustainability, efficiency, and improved quality of life. We introduce the concepts of blockchain and edge intelligence, elucidating their applications across various industries and urban domains. Moreover, we identify gaps in the existing literature and underscore the critical need for further research in the synergy of these technologies in smart cities. Our exploration extends to the significance of the study, emphasizing the timeliness of this research amidst growing interest in sustainable smart cities. We discuss the potential benefits and implications of this technological convergence for urban planning, technology adoption, and sustainability. This paper envisions smart cities that prioritize sustainability, circular economies, and data privacy, while fostering innovation and collaboration among public and private stakeholders. As we look to the future, we anticipate that this convergence will pave the way for more resilient, sustainable, and inclusive smart cities, and we outline potential areas for further research and development in this exciting field.

South Korea has a long history of the planning, development, and management of smart cities to integrate emerging technological advances into complex physical infrastructure. This article explores lessons learned from smart city programs in South Korea to better understand the challenges and opportunities of future sustainable smart city innovation and development. This article conducted a comprehensive review and analysis of South Korea's smart city programs and conceptualized a sustainable smart city framework that will assist policymakers, planners, citizens, and other key stakeholders. This research proposed Governance, Policy, and Services (GPS) as the three pillars of a successful smart city framework, in addition to integrating physical and cyber infrastructures. This article argues that a smart city should function as a service platform that incubates and delivers long-term services to citizens and society. This article also emphasizes that a strong groundwork of the GPS framework will lead to the successful adaptation of innovative technologies and ideas for future smart city programs.

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly established a total of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper focuses on SDG-7: "Affordable and Clean Energy". The aim of SDG-7 is to guarantee individuals have access to inexpensive, sustainable, consistent, and modern energy. The UN aims to enhance sustainability through the global sharing of renewable energy, achieved by a diversified energy mix, by 2030. At the same time, ongoing urbanization, modern lifestyle, and the growth of industries increase the demand for energy in smart cities, necessitating the development of a decentralized energy system for sustainability. This paper proposes a customizable Solar PV system integrated with an efficient DC-DC converter, a powerful battery system, and a PSO-based energy distributor to enhance energy sustainability in a smart city without any loss. Compared to earlier works, this storage, and optimal energy distribution to enhance sustainability in smart cities. An intelligent energy management technique is developed to ensure a stable energy flow among these processes. Optimization techniques are applied in conversion, storage, and distribution modules to reduce energy loss and increase utilization. The overall circuit model is simulated in MATLAB software, and the output is verified. From the production, it is evident that the proposed model has decreased grid dependency by over 60% while maintaining system stability and energy resilience. This paper provides a pathway to create a real-time RES to increase sustainability in a smart city as well as to fulfil SDG-7 by 2030.

The cities around the world in general, and in the Mediterranean area in particular, are facing tremendous challenges at the environmental, social, economic, and institutional levels, due to the urbanization trend, environmental climatic changes and challenges due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, cities need to be sustainable and smart in the future. An economically important and innovative sector in urban areas is food security. Nowadays, most of the literature explores the concept of smart cities from the point of view of information and communications technology, indeed, the connection with the sustainability aspects of the food supply chain and the ways to operationalize that, remains unsolved. This paper tries to overcome this gap in the literature. The main aim is to analyze the contribution of the short supply chain of food in terms of sustainability in smart cities, regarding current urban trends in cities in general and in Mediterranean areas in particular. The methodology was based on a literature review and includes quantitative and qualitative analysis. The results confirm the existence of positive impacts in the short supply chains of food in urban areas in terms of sustainability. Despite the existence of a considerable number of papers about smart cities and ICT-related topics, the benefits from society of short supply chains of food, and the linkage among the topics and subjects, remain unreferred to or with a limited knowledge exchange.

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 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.