SMART CITIES DEVELOPMENT AND TRENDS: CASES AND RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES

The content of this book is intended to contribute to the challenges of managing a smart city, technology acceptance issues, and new, underlying business models. The book provides theoretical and empirical underpinnings regarding the development and current trends of the Smart City concept alongside proposing future research opportunities. Researchers agree that 5G technology and digital transformation are crucial for the development of smart cities and smart public administration. The concept of smart cities derives from the global trend of urbanisation. According to the United Nations Population Fund, the latest figures show that the population share in cities has doubled in the last few years and is expected to reach over 70% of the total population by the end of 2050. Consequently, cities need to cope with related and upcoming changes/challenges, while cities branded as “smart” need to keep or reach a high standard of quality of life for their citizens. With the popularisation of the Smart City concept and through the implementation of digital transformation projects in public administration, information services have radically changed, thus heavily impacting systems in an urban environment. In an effort to identify and explore the challenges as well as the potential and priorities for the implementation of smart city applications, cities often encounter complex problems, assuming considerable uncertainty. Managing digitalisation is becoming increasingly demanding due to rapidly evolving innovations and the difficulty of managing the complexity of related technologies. However, these issues are not challenging only for organizations and individuals but for cities and local communities as well. Cities in particular are faced with major challenges arising from global shifts in the environment, rapid urbanisation and older infrastructure. As a result, several smart-cityrelated initiatives are emerging. Yet not all are successful. The book is thus focused on the analysis of new business models, technological innovations and their use related to the development of smart cities. After all, the spread of technology and the availability of automatically collected data create new opportunities for managing public services and creating new services. The primary audience of this book will be students, academics interested in the Smart City concept, government organizations, managers, policymakers and strategic planners who intend to understand emerging digital technologies as well as their impact and applicability for cities. The book includes strategies for implementing and managing digital technologies together with a discussion on new business models. The chapters in this book are grouped into two parts: part one includes general theoretical and technical discussions of technologies and their benefits for modern cities, and part two includes use cases of different digital technologies and business models