TOWARD SUSTAINABLE SMART CITIES: CONCEPTS & CHALLENGES

Abstract

The world’s urban population is growing enormously, increasing of energy usage, air toxicity, and traffic congestion in urban areas which need a furthermost effective way for solutions. Smart city as a solution is expected to solve the functionality of urban systems. It needs to improve ICT infrastructure as an authoritative, adaptable, accessible, secure, and flexible one, and improve the quality of daily lifetime, refine citizen’s healthiness as well to achieve economic growth and develop the physical infrastructure services to promote sustainable development. This research is a narrative review, kind of methodological approach presented as open research and structured as follows: First section presents the smart city concept by reviewing the definitions, characteristics, and its dimensions. Based on the creation of smart cities, the research aims to identify and investigate the main challenges that smart cities development will face in the coming years by analysing, estimating, and evaluating the available data. It also includes a various assortment of challenges classified under; infrastructure challenges, theoretical, urban design, interdisciplinary, hackers challenges, urban land use, disability of the elderly challenges, the Big Data, technology trap, cultural and democracy challenges, budgetary and cost constraints, and regulations challenges. Besides, it is important to be conscious of security and privacy risks when implementing new systems. One example specifically discussed, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia smart city practices, provides a general overview of the Saudi Vision 2030. It is enlightened by a brief about “the most recent smart city project in Saudi Arabia”, NEOM and illustrates the smart city practices of Makkah, in the light of the six dimensions of the smart city, also studied the city of Amsterdam as it considered one of the first smart cities at the global level. Finally, the research ends with the conclusions and recommendations.