Perspective
Effective policies to overcome barriers in the development of smart cities

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Abstract

The world is facing substantial challenges related to population growth and the derived pressure on environment, energy, and other natural resources. Cities contribute to these problems due to the ever-increasing urbanization. As a solution, smart cities are managed and optimized across traditional boundaries and through the exchange of information between physical objects, citizens, and stakeholders. However, there are barriers in the development of smart cities that should be overcome in order to meet these challenges through smart cities. The main barriers identified in this work are poor private-public participation, utilization of fossil fuels, lack of attention to the environment, insufficient internet technology (IT) infrastructure, and old technology throughout the cities. To overcome these barriers, policies must be implemented to improve private-public participation by encouraging public investments and a wider adoption of electrical vehicles that may act as storage device and provide ancillary services to the electricity grid; reduce the use of private cars; strengthen IT infrastructure, deployment of smart technology to allow residents to monitor and control their energy consumption, installation of roof-top solar panels, and better mobility and efficient public services supported by smart technologies such as IoT (Internet of Things) and information and communication technology (ICT) to enhance the interconnection among smart city systems.

Section snippets

Introduction:

Global warming is strongly correlated with energy supply [1], and governments around the globe are introducing policy measures to lower greenhouse gas emissions [2]. Cities are responsible for 75% of the global greenhouse emissions, with transportation being the major contributor. Developing smart cities may be a key solution to reducing the negative contributions of cities as smart cities offer powerful services for enhancing livability, overall efficiency, and sustainability [3].

In recent

Motivation and objective of the study

A smart city is a sustainable and efficient urban center that provides a high quality of life to its inhabitants through optimal management of its resources. Therefore, attention to all sections of a smart city leads to the development and reduction of global criticals, especially in environmental and energy sectors. With rapid population growth, especially in urban areas, and critical issues such as increase in energy demand and costs, internet accessibility problems, and CO2 emission, the

Methodology

Smart cities are emerging concepts that take full advantage of new technologies to address public issues and achieve sustainable economical and social developments. This work aims to identify the potential barriers to smart city development and find the most effective solutions to address these challenges. This research has been carried out in five steps:

  • 1)

    Smart cities are comprehensively investigated with emphasis on policy.

  • 2)

    The key role of intelligent systems in important sectors such as

Importance of intelligent systems for smart cities

In this section, we consider and analyze the key role of intelligent systems in two important sectors such as transport and energy, which have the highest impacts on smart cities. These factors are able to create significant positive changes in smart cities.

Result and discussion

This section discusses the key impact of policy on several important factors, barriers, and solutions related to the development of smart cities. Based on previous discussions on the transport system, energy, and the importance of technology sectors, it is crucial that suitable corresponding policies be investigated for each of them. The factors impacted by policy include creating and developing information technology, energy security, and implementation of effective strategies.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have investigated the smart cities’ concept, the potential sectors for the development of smart cities, the role of policy in smart cities development, existing barriers against development of smart cities, and have presented appropriate solutions for each of these barriers. After a comprehensive overview of smart cities, the vital role of information technology in two important sectors such as transport and energy were investigated.

These sectors have a large impact on the

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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      Citation Excerpt :

      Poor private-public involvement, the use of fossil fuels, a lack of environmental awareness, limited internet infrastructure facilities, and outdated technology throughout cities are among these barriers. A. Razmjoo et al. presented appropriate measures in [126] to surmount several barriers such as poor private-public involvement, the use of fossil fuels, a lack of environmental awareness, limited internet infrastructure facilities, and outdated technology throughout cities in order to develop smart cities. A. Razmjoo et al. explored as well the policies and critical sectors of smart cities based on IoT applications in their study [127].

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