Smart and Connected Cities and Communities

Description

Cities and communities around the world are entering a new era of transformation in which residents and their surrounding environments are increasingly connected through rapidly-changing intelligent technologies, sometimes called, smart technologies. This transformation, which has become a top priority for many city and other local governments, offers great promise for improved well-being and prosperity but, also, poses significant challenges at the complex intersection of technology and society.

A smart and connected community can be conceptualized as one that synergistically integrates intelligent technologies with the natural and built environments, including infrastructure, to improve the social, economic, and environmental well-being of those who live, work, or travel within it. Building on the notion of community informatics, smart communities can be seen as enabling and empowering citizens and supporting the individual and communal quests for well-being.

Although the literature is rich in references to smart cities and communities, this is still a developing and fuzzy concept that is not used consistently. Despite the different definitions and studies, there seems to be agreement on the fact that smart cities and communities is a multidimensional and multifaceted concept that goes beyond the mere use of technology and infrastructure. Although technology is a necessary condition to become smart, it is not the only one. City administration and community management, information integration, data quality, privacy and security, institutional arrangements, and citizen participation are just some of the issues that need greater attention to make a community smarter today and in the near future. The literature on smart cities and communities is fragmented, particularly in terms of the strategies that different cities and communities should follow in order to become smarter. What most of the literature does agree on is that there is no one route to becoming smart and different communities have adopted different approaches that reflect their particular circumstances.  

This mini track aims at exploring these issues, paying particular attention to the challenges of smart cities and smart communities as well as to the impact of these initiatives. It also focuses on the orchestrated interplay and balance of smart governance practices, smart public administration, smart communities, smart resources and talent leverage in urban, rural, and regional spaces facilitated by novel uses of ICT and other technologies.

As a result, areas of focus and interest to this mini-track include, but are not limited, to the
following topics:

• Taxonomies of smart cities and communities
• Smart governance as the foundation to creating smart urban and regional spaces
  (elements, prerequisites, and principles of smart governance)
• Smart government (focal areas, current practices, cases, and potential pitfalls)
• Smart partnerships (triple/quadruple helix, public-private partnerships, and citizen
  participation)
• Smart cities, communities and regions (cases, rankings, comparisons, and critical
  success factors)
• Collective intelligence for smart cities and communities
• Emerging technologies in smart cities and communities (artificial intelligence, big
  data, open data, social media and networks, etc)
• Management of smart cities and communities
• Outcomes of smart cities and communities
• Smart services
• Urban-rural gaps in smart communities
• Resilience capacity in smart cities and communities.

Minitrack Leaders

Gabriela Viale Pereira is Assistant Professor for Information Systems at the Department for E-Governance and Administration at Danube University Krems and Research Fellow at CTG UAlbany. She holds a Post Doctoral Degree from the Center for Research on Public Administration and Government at Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV), Brazil (2019) and a Doctoral Degree in Administration from the School of Business at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (2016). She is Project Coordinator of the Erasmus+ Strengthening Governance Capacity for Smart Sustainable Cities (CAP4CITY) project. Gabriela’s activities include research in electronic government and ICT-related Governance projects involving smart governance, smart cities, open data, data analytics and government 3.0. Gabriela has authored and co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications on Information Systems and e-government. In addition, she has been working with a variety of organizations such as United Nations, ITU, and Council of Europe and she is a Board Member of the Digital Government Society (2020/2021) and IFIP WG 8.5 in ICT & Public Administration (2021-2023).

Theresa A. Pardo, Ph.D., is Director of CTG UAlbany at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where she is also Special Assistant to the President, a full research professor in Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy. Dr. Pardo serves as OpenNY Adviser to New York State’s Governor Cuomo and is chair of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Advisory Committee. She is founder of the Smart Cities, Smart Government Research-Practice Global Consortium and a Past-President of the Digital Government Society. She serves on the User Working Group of the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), the Business and Operations Advisory Committee of the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Steering Committee of the North East Big Data Innovation Hub. Dr. Pardo is one of the top five most cited authors in digital government, and in 2018 and 2019, was selected as one of top 100 most influential people in digital government globally. 

Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar is full Professor at the University of Granada. His areas of research are mainly related to information and technology in government and, among other, they include electronic and open government, e-governance, public sector innovation, smart cities, and public policy evaluation. He has authored numerous articles in international journals, among them we can highlight Public Money & Management, Government Information Quarterly, Public Administration and Development, Online Information Review, International Review of Administrative Sciences, American Review of Public Administration, ABACUS, Academia. Revista Latinoamericana de Administración, International Public Management Journal, Environmental Education Research, INNOVAR, Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, Electronic Commerce Research and Administration & Society. He has been also the author of several book chapters published in prestigious international publishers such as Kluwer Academic Publishers, Springer, Routledge, Palgrave, Taylor and Francis and IGI Global, and is author of full-length books published by the Ministry of Economy and Finance in Spain. In addition, he is Editor in Chief of IJPADA and member of the Editorial Board of Government Information Quarterly. He is also editor of other international journals and books.