Abstract
In recent years, there has been significant focus on smart cities, on how they operate and develop, and on their technical and social challenges. The importance of infrastructure as a major pillar of support in cities, in addition to the rapid developments in smart city research, necessitate an up-to-date review of smart cities’ infrastructure issues and challenges. Traditionally, a majority of studies have focused on traffic control and management, transport network design, smart grid initiatives, IoT (Internet of Things) integration, big data, land use development, and how urbanization processes impact land use in the long run. The work presented herein proposes a novel review framework that analyzes how smart city infrastructure is related to the urbanization process while presenting developments in IoT sensor networks, big data analysis of the generated information, and green construction. A classification framework was proposed to give insights on new initiatives regarding smart city infrastructure through answering the following questions: (i) What are the various dimensions on which smart city infrastructure research focuses? (ii) What are the themes and classes associated with these dimensions? (iii) What are the main shortcomings in current approaches, and what would be a good research agenda for the future? A bibliometric analysis was conducted, presenting cluster maps that can be used to understand different research trends and refine further searches. A bibliographic analysis was then followed, presenting a review of the most relevant studies over the last five years. The method proposed serves to stress where future research into understanding smart systems, their implementation and functionality would be best directed. This research concluded that future research on the topic should conceptualize smart cities as an emergent socio-techno phenomenon.
Highlights
The year 2008 was a turning point for cities: the Earth’s population became more urban than rural
This study focuses on smart city infrastructure, that is:
This review developed a classification framework covering technical, social, and governance aspects associated with smart city infrastructure, providing a comprehensive overview of where the research on smart city infrastructure has focused
Summary
The year 2008 was a turning point for cities: the Earth’s population became more urban than rural. More than half of the world’s population—approximately. 3.3 billion—lives in urban areas, increasingly in highly dense cities. By 2030, it is expected that the number of people living in urban areas will reach 5 billion. With the rapid increase in the urban population worldwide, cities are facing various challenges [1]. One of many challenges is the addition of new infrastructure, along with the need to operate and maintain existing infrastructure worldwide. New demand for resilient infrastructure opens the way for governments, in a combined effort with research and citizen input, to build smart cities that promote equity, education, health, and a better quality of life for everybody [2]
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