First Journal - UNDERSTANDING SMART CITIES: AN INTEGRATIVE FRAMEWORK (2012)

Making a city “smart” is emerging as a strategy to mitigate the problems generated by the urban population growth and rapid urbanization. Yet little academic research has sparingly discussed the phenomenon. To close the gap in the literature about smart cities and in response to the increasing use of the concept, this paper proposes a framework to understand the concept of smart cities. Based on the exploration of a wide and extensive array of literature from various disciplinary areas we identify eight critical factors of smart city initiatives: management and organization, technology, governance, policy context, people and communities, economy, built infrastructure, and natural environment. These factors form the basis of an integrative framework that can be used to examine how local governments are envisioning smart city initiatives. The framework suggests directions and agendas for smart city research and outlines practical implications for government professionals

REASEARCH MODEL-FRAMEWORK

VARIABLE & ITEMS (MEASUREMENTS)

1.      Governance

Several cities have started transformational projects and initiatives called smart city initiatives to better serve citizens and to improve their quality of life. These projects involve multiple stakeholders. Thus, several cities have felt an increased need for better governance to manage these projects and initiatives. In general, (public) governance has been defined “as regimes of laws, administrative rules, judicial rulings, and practices that constrain, prescribe, and enable government activity, where such activity is broadly defined as the production and delivery of publicly supported goods and services.”. 

Governance, hence, involves the implementation of processes with constituents who exchange information according to rules and standards in order to achieve goals and objectives. Scholl et al.  studied challenges of e-government key projects, and found that stakeholders’ relations is one of the critical factors to determine success or failure of such projects. “Stakeholder relations” refers to four main issues: the ability to cooperate among stakeholders, support of leadership, structure of alliances and working under different jurisdictions.

Several cities have benefited from the emergence of ICTs that improve their governance. This ICT-based governance is known as smart governance. It widely represents a collection of technologies, people, policies, practices, resources, social norms and information that interact to support city governing activities. 

2.      People and communities

 Addressing the topic of people and communities as part of smart cities is critical, and traditionally has been neglected on the expense of understanding more technological and policy aspects of smart cities. Projects of smart cities have an impact on the quality of life of citizens and aim to foster more informed, educated, and participatory citizens. Additionally, smart cities initiatives allow members of the city to participate in the governance and management of the city and become active users. If they are key players they may have the opportunity to engage with the initiative to the extent that they can influence the effort to be a success or a failure. Table 5 lists the factors related to smart cities and people and communities as found in the literature.

It is critical also not to refer to members of the city not only as individuals, but also as communities and groups and their respective wants and needs within cities. People and communities is a component that requires smart cities initiatives to be sensitive in balancing the needs of various communities.

3.      Economy

Economy is the major driver of smart city initiatives, and a city with a high degree of economic competitiveness is thought to have one of properties of a smart city. As well, one of the key indicators to measure growing city competition is the capacity of the city as an economic engine. Giffinger et al. suggest a smart city framework consisting of six main components (smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment, and smart living). Their operational definition of a smart economy includes factors all around economic competitiveness as innovation, entrepreneurship, trademarks, productivity and flexibility of the labor market as well as the integration in the national and global market.

 A series of studies released by the IBM Institute for Business Value identify business as one of core systems of smarter cities, which comprise city services system, citizens system, business system, transport system, communication system, water system, and energy system. Capacities for smart business systems include ICT use by firms, new smart business processes, and smart technology sectors. The smart city initiatives are designed to develop information technology capacities and establish an agenda for change by industry actions and business development. Creating an environment for industrial development is pivotal to a smart city. The economic outcomes of the smart city initiatives are business creation, job creation, workforce development, and improvement in the productivity. 

4.      Built infrastructure

 The availability and quality of the ICT infrastructure are important for smart cities. Indeed, smart object networks play a crucial role in making smart cities a reality. ICT infrastructure includes wireless infrastructure (fiber optic channels, Wi-Fi networks, wireless hotspots, kiosks), service-oriented information systems.

 The implementation of an ICT infrastructure is fundamental to a smart city’s development and depends on some factors related to its availability and performance. There is a little literature that focuses on ICT infrastructure barriers of smart cities initiatives. As done in the managerial and organizational section, we will refer to e-government technological barriers since smart cities’ initiatives are similar to egovernment initiatives in their use of ICT. Ebrahim and Irani presented a set of factors related to the implementation of ICT. Table 6 presents a set of IT challenges grouped in three dimensions; IT infrastructure, security and privacy, and operational costs.

5.      Natural environment

Smart city initiatives are forward-looking on the environmental front. Core to the concept of a smart city is the use of technology to increase sustainability and to better manage natural resources. Of particular interest is the protection of natural resources and the related infrastructure such as waterways and sewers and green spaces such as parks. Together these factors have an impact on the sustainability and livability of a city, so these should be taken into consideration when examining smart city initiatives.