THE VIRTUALITY OF INTELLIGENT CITIES - THE ROAD TO HYBRIDIZING OUR NEW CITIES

Abstract

The incorporation IoT into our social systems and the digitization of our everyday life has become the new norm for societies worldwide. This study posits that digitization should apply to our cities as well. The digital aspect of technology is not always tangible – even in the figurative sense of grasping a concept – and its allure lies in this virtual aspect. That is the starting point of discussion in this paper – the virtuality of intelligent cities, the intangible forces that make these new cities smart, and how said forces can be incorporated to create new smart hybrid cities that also aim to be intelligent, connected, and efficient. This research paper was designed to first set a strong theoretical base, which includes how the Circular City Actions CCA assessment framework works. This framework is applied to the three virtual methods, Sharing Economy, Smart Parking, and Virtual Power Plants VPP, as well as an international case study, the VPP in South Australia. The CCA framework was then applied to the data gathered for the local case study, the New Administrative Capital NAC in Egypt, which was chosen because it is the largest smart city being constructed currently in Egypt right now. Since it is still not fully operational, the data collected was based on governmental plans, proposals, and published papers about the city released within the last 5 years. After theoretically incorporating the proposed virtual methods into the NAC’s plans and reapplying the assessment framework, the results were greatly improved in different aspects. This study made it clear that the NAC has a strong hypothetical foundation to become an intelligent connected city, but there were some missed opportunities of incorporating virtual intelligent solutions to be implemented at different levels as the three proposed in this paper to reach its goal.