Towards Sustainability: Smart Cities In The Egyptian Environment, How Much Smart To Be Smart?

Abstract

Egypt, as a developing country, is facing many environmental, social, and economic issues in its cities. Those issues are the challenges for The Egyptian government to achieve sustainability and improve inhabitants' quality of life in the future cities vision of the nation. The fourth cyber-physical revolution and the growing exponentially innovations of information and communications technologies (ICT) were the catalyst for the Egyptian stakeholders to target the sustainable smart city concept for the new future Egyptian cities generation. The research aims to characterize the smart concept for the Egyptian environment by proposing an ICT architecture for the smart city model within the Egyptian cities and highlight the innovative ICT that it will affect the future performance of such smart cities. The research attempts also to identify the main Egyptian smart initiatives that would offer appropriate sustainable solutions and improve the quality of life of the Egyptian inhabitants. To achieve the research objectives the innovative ICT installation requirements were studied to propose a compatible ICT architecture for the future city structure and an interview for experts were statistically analyzed to determine the Smart city initiatives and smart component systems prioritization for the future generation Egyptian cities. The research concluded that there is no unique standards of the city smartness concept and a community requirements study must be considered before deciding the smart initiatives and the smart systems components to be installed. The research determines that nowadays mobility, infrastructure and governance are the main smart initiatives of smartness for the Egyptian cities. Water and energy smart components of infrastructure initiative and the solid waste smart component systems of the environmental initiative are the main requirements for the Egyptian cities. Other smart component system requirements depend on the city concerns and the quality of life state of economic district level of the city.