Smart cities have been a very active research area in the past 20 years, while continuously adapting to new technological advancements and keeping up with the times regarding sustainability and climate change. In this context, there have been numerous proposals to expand the scope of smart cities, focusing on resilience and sustainability, among other aspects, resulting in terms like smart sustainable cities. At the same time, there is an ongoing discussion regarding the degree in which smart cities put people at their centre. In this work, we argue toward expanding the current smart city definition by integrating the circular economy as one of its central pillars and adopting the term smart (and) circular city. We discuss the ways a smart and circular city encompasses both sustainability and smartness in an integral manner, while also being well-positioned to foster novel business activity and models and helping to place citizens at the heart of the smart city. In this sense, we also argue that previous research in smart cities and technologies, such as those related to Industry 4.0, can serve as a cornerstone to implement circular economy activities within cities, at a scale that exceeds current activities that are based on more conventional approaches. We also outline current open challenges in this domain and research questions that still need to be addressed.
The purpose of the present paper is to show how blockchain and IoT technologies can benefit smart city projects, which tend to spread in the context of the sharing economy. The article also aims to describe the challenges and potentialities of smart city projects. It was found that technology platforms can serve as a strategy to build the basis for product development (goods and services) and technology-based innovation.
In a world with an ever increasing urbanization, governance is investigating innovative solutions to sustain the society evolution. Internet-of-Things promises huge benefits for cities and the proliferation of smart city deployments demonstrates the common acceptance of IoT as basis for many solutions. The city pilots developments occurred in parallel and with different designs thus creating fragmentation of IoT. The European project SynchroniCity aims to synchronize 8 smart cities to establish a shared environment fostering a self-sustained business growth. In this article we present the coll…
Researchers find weaknesses in current strategies for protecting privacy in large datasets. Many anonymized datasets are reidentifiable, and norms for offering data subjects notice and consent over emphasize individual responsibility. Based on fieldwork with data managers in the City of Seattle, I identify ways that these conventional approaches break down in practice. Drawing on work from theorists in sociocultural anthropology, I propose that a Human Centered Data Science move beyond concepts like dataset identifiability and sensitivity toward a broader ontology of who is implicated by a dat…
The research performs urban ecosystem analysis supported by ENVI GIS by integrated studies on land cover types and geospatial modeling of Taipei city. The paper deals with the role of anthropogenic pressure on the structure of the landscape and change of land cover types. Methods included assessment of the impact from anthropogenic activities on the natural ecosystems, evaluation of the rate and scale of landscape dynamics using remote sensing data and GIS. The research aims to assist environmentalists and city planners to evaluate strategies for specific objectives of urban development in Tai…
George Washington University（乔治华盛顿大学）；Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics（数据、民主与政治研究所）
Ridehailing applications that collect mobility data from individuals to inform smart city planning predict each trip's fare pricing with automated algorithms that rely on artificial intelligence (AI). This type of AI algorithm, namely a price discrimination algorithm, is widely used in the industry's black box systems for dynamic individualized pricing. Lacking transparency, studying such AI systems for fairness and disparate impact has not been possible without access to data used in generating the outcomes of price discrimination algorithms. Recently, in an effort to enhance transparency in …
Since the popularisation of the Internet in the 1990s, the cyberspace has kept evolving. We have created various computer-mediated virtual environments including social networks, video conferencing, virtual 3D worlds (e.g., VR Chat), augmented reality applications (e.g., Pokemon Go), and Non-Fungible Token Games (e.g., Upland). Such virtual environments, albeit non-perpetual and unconnected, have bought us various degrees of digital transformation. The term `metaverse' has been coined to further facilitate the digital transformation in every aspect of our physical lives. At the core of the met…
Sharing economy platforms have become extremely popular in the last few years, and they have changed the way in which we commute, travel, and borrow among many other activities. Despite their popularity among consumers, such companies are poorly regulated. For example, Airbnb, one of the most successful examples of sharing economy platform, is often criticized by regulators and policy makers. While, in theory, municipalities should regulate the emergence of Airbnb through evidence-based policy making, in practice, they engage in a false dichotomy: some municipalities allow the business without…
Dwindling nonrenewable fuel reserves, progressing severe environmental pollution, and accelerating climate change require society to reevaluate existing transportation concepts. While electric vehicles (EVs) have become more popular and slowly gain widespread adoption, the corresponding battery charging infrastructures still limits EVs' use in our everyday life. This is especially true for EV owners that do not have the option to operate charging hardware, such as wall boxes, at their premises. Charging an EV without an at-home wall box is time-consuming since the owner has to drive to the cha…
North South University（北南大学）；LUT University（拉彭兰塔-拉赫蒂理工大学）
With unorganized, unplanned and improper use of limited raw materials, an abundant amount of waste is being produced, which is harmful to our environment and ecosystem. While traditional linear production lines fail to address far-reaching issues like waste production and a shorter product life cycle, a prospective concept, namely circular economy (CE), has shown promising prospects to be adopted at industrial and governmental levels. CE aims to complete the product life cycle loop by bringing out the highest values from raw materials in the design phase and later on by reusing, recycling, and…
Smart cities that make broad use of digital technologies have been touted as possible solutions for the population pressures faced by many cities in developing countries and may help meet the rising demand for services and infrastructure. Nevertheless, the high financial cost involved in infrastructure maintenance, the substantial size of the informal economies, and various governance challenges are curtailing government idealism regarding smart cities. This review examines the state of smart city development in developing countries, which includes understanding the conceptualisations, motivat…
Smart cities are being planned for several advanced applications and services for the inhabitants. Smart cities initiative promise many new services which are not possible in the traditional city frameworks. In the smart city framework, the basic aim is to provide all the essential services through sensor based systems which does not need much human intervention. This system is designed to operate on its own in a self-organizing manner. Therefore, the hopes are really big from the smart cities to enhance the quality of lives and the economy. However, some of the promises in the smart cities ar…
The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework, communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services, providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic m…
As we move through cities in our daily lives, we are in a constant state of transformation of the spaces around us. The form and essence of urban space directly affects people's behavior, describing in their perception what is possible or impossible, allowed or prohibited, suggested or advised against. We are now able to fill and stratify space/time with digital information layers, completely wrapping cities in a membrane of information and of opportunities for interaction and communication. Mobile devices, smartphones, wearables, digital tags, near field communication devices, location based …
New York University（纽约大学）；Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）
We present the Sounds of New York City (SONYC) project, a smart cities initiative focused on developing a cyber-physical system for the monitoring, analysis and mitigation of urban noise pollution. Noise pollution is one of the topmost quality of life issues for urban residents in the U.S. with proven effects on health, education, the economy, and the environment. Yet, most cities lack the resources to continuously monitor noise and understand the contribution of individual sources, the tools to analyze patterns of noise pollution at city-scale, and the means to empower city agencies to take e…
University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Florida International University（佛罗里达国际大学）
A smart city can be seen as a framework, comprised of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). An intelligent network of connected devices that collect data with their sensors and transmit them using cloud technologies in order to communicate with other assets in the ecosystem plays a pivotal role in this framework. Maximizing the quality of life of citizens, making better use of resources, cutting costs, and improving sustainability are the ultimate goals that a smart city is after. Hence, data collected from connected devices will continuously get thoroughly analyzed to gain better …
