YOUR GUIDE TO THE FUTURE

Mu et al. (2022) classifies four organisational conditions that influence the depth of technology enactment in government-led smart city projects. The four organisational conditions are Financial Capacity (FC), Information Sharing (IS), Human Resources Pressure (HR) and Leadership (LD).

Mu et al. (2022) classifies four organisational conditions that influence the depth of technology enactment in government-led smart city projects. The four organisational conditions are Financial Capacity (FC), Information Sharing (IS), Human Resources Pressure (HR) and Leadership (LD).

Mu et al. (2022) conducted a study to fill in the gaps of knowledge of causal relationship between organisational conditions and government-led smart city projects. This exploration contrasts with the widely studied business-led smart city projects.

There are four organizational conditions of governments that may influence the depth of technology enactment in smart city projects. The success of a smart city project usually depends not on how advance the technology that is being adopted but by the social, cultural and environmental attributes, such as political stalemates or interest conflicts in organisations.

Depending on the city’s organisation capacities and conditions, a Smart City Project may display different level of technological “smartness”. Mu et al. (2021) specified three level of “smartness” of intelligent technology that cities adopted to support the government function.

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.

Urban agriculture gains relevance as it not only provides direct benefit in food security but also has other embedded environmental benefits. A study investigated Rooftop Kitchen Garden (RTG) as one urban agriculture initiative to assess and quantify the benefit of the urban agriculture at household level in South Delhi, India.

Urban parks can promote city dweller’s quality of life as it provides a medium for various social activities. It also beneficial for city dweller’s physical and mental health and improve the sense of community. Inhabitants of Anyang City in South Korea has a strong park-going culture, with a survey indicating that 75% of the respondents has more that one year experience of visiting the parks regularly.

Compared to conventional green roofs that only installed vegetation or other green infrastructure, multilayer green roofs are an innovative tool that combine the green infrastructure with blue infrastructure with a rainwater harvesting system.

Rapid rate of urbanisation in major cities have driven many governments struggling to provide various public services to the inhabitants. Thus, many city governments resort to reaching out to Social Enterprise to support the mobilising & dispensing of socio-economic resources.

Smart Cities thrive where innovation is fully supported in the governance. Urban Living Labs (ULL) is one medium that can provide the supporting environment for innovation. Urban Living Labs uses co-creation or a process of value creation by sharing information, promotes iterative, nonlinear innovation processes.

Addressing complex urban challenges require innovative problem solving, including through co-creation of urban solution with Urban Living Labs (ULL). ULL function as meeting arenas to support communities’ diversity, significance and connectedness, where participants can experiment with practical ideas and solutions towards a more cohesive, inclusive and sustainable every-day life.

To overcome the deindustrialisation that affected many Italian cities in the late 1990s, city leaders and decision makers promotes new lifestyle and sustainable working model to encourages new economic competitiveness and urban quality. Adaptive reuse design strategy is actively adopted to preserve the physical and cultural heritage of abandoned building and industrial sites.

Land commodification and housing marketisation as a result of industrialisation in Chinese cities have pushed many traditional villages out of the market to make room for more profitable high-rise development. Architect Wu Liangyong pushed back by using the organic renewal concept, to repair the traditional courtyard houses in the Ju’er Hutong project.

China has strong restriction on urban expansion as the growing concern of farmland loss that threatens their food security. There are various ways that have been implemented in urban areas in China to limit land conversion to urban areas throughout the years. One example is the Quota System, that puts a cap on land conversion in terms of location, rime and construction purpose.

New demographic trends, changing households need and evolving home-ownership outlook has accelerated urban expansion in Europe to accommodate the citizens’ need. On the European policy level, major concerns regarding urban expansion and social integration became evident in the late 1980s through the “Green Paper on Urban Environment”, published by the European Commission.

Limiting urban development through legal and governmental approach is one way to control land expansion. Schiappacasse et al. (2021) introduces another approach that can not only hinder urban expansion but also promote social integration.

With rapid urbanisation, cities seem to expand their area to meet the needs of housing of the growing population. Yet, this urban expansion occasionally goes out of hand with oversupply of housing and depletion of green area that leads to various environmental deterioration.

In the development of Smart Cities, increasing the Transformative Capacity is critical to close the gap between planning and implementation of the Smart City goals. Transformative Capacity is the city government’s capacity to conceive, prepare, initiate, and perform cutting-edge urban changes.

The City of Stockholm put significant weight in the improvement of their transformative capacity. This is ensured by the implementing measures that support the sustainability of their smart city agenda. For Stockholm, it is not only crucial to have a long-term vision but also that the goal is shared and democratically legitimised by a wide range of stakeholders.

Despite the strong top-down approach of smart city planning, Chinese Smart City successfully nurture the innovative and collaborative environment in their governance system by encouraging local municipality to adapt national strategic plan based on the local context.

Smart City thrive in a system that support collaboration and innovation. Yet, many smart cities still operate in a top-down governance structure that may limit the progress of development. One of the problem arise from the conventional governance structure is the gap between planning and implementation of smart city advancement.

A side effect that may impose in creating more accessible and affordable digital platform for smart cities is the threat of privacy and safety of individual data. Thus, city government should put in place practices that strengthen the safety of people, their data and identity.

Data collection through various sensors and monitors, and analysing them with the help of Artificial Intelligence can be a powerful system that Smart Cities use to understand the municipal needs in real time. However, without transparency and accountability of how the government use the data and process of the decision making, can be a hazard to democracy.

Connecting the vulnerable social groups to the digital infrastructure and service can provide significant impact to the communities. Such as the case in Latin America, where grass-root network owned by locals jointly collaborate to provide affordable internet access to low-income groups that lacks the digital literacy and have no access to the information and technology.

A successful initiative that improves digital literacy and bridge the digital gap is the Urban Governance Lab. This is medium that digital upskilling of the most marginalised, especially women, and young people who have a large demographic footprint within many countries and cities of the developing world.

To fully reap the benefits of Smart City development with the upgrade of technology and service provision, city government must address the issue of “digital divide” that may persist in the municipality. However, to bridge the digital gap of infrastructure and services, it cannot be handled by only one department or a single IT-agency.

To establish the sustainability of the equal digital governance initiative, mechanisms that city applies in the beginning must be coupled with recurring process of monitoring and evaluation to measure the progress. City shall appoint diverse external advisory team with key local actors.

In achieving great quality of life in the city, connections to digital infrastructure and services are ubiquitous. Online services as well as offline public services must be coupled together to manage the urbanisation process and communication between local government and the residents.