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 cities 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 due to its multidimensional and multifaceted aspect that goes beyond the mere use of technology and infrastructure. Although technology is a necessary condition to become smart, it is not the only aspect that defines smart cities and communities. Novel studies are indicating that emerging technologies have a huge influence on social life, catalyzing new needs of citizens and transforming the way they are addressed, influencing people’s ability to exercise their “right to the city/community” and impacting on social sustainability on several levels. City administration and community management, information integration, data quality, privacy and security, institutional arrangements, and citizen participation are therefore some of the issues that need greater attention to make a community smarter today and in the near future.

Nonetheless, 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 single way to becoming smart and different communities have adopted different approaches that reflect their particularities. In addition, the advent of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, open government, open data, big data, blockchain, chatbots and so on, have opened new avenues for smart governance in the urban and communities’ contexts, which fosters new research in this area.

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, to understand how new technologies can shape the social sustainability, the livability of local communities, and the wellbeing of its residents. 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 cities and smart government (focal areas, current practices, cases, and potential pitfalls)
• Smart partnerships (triple/quadruple/quintuple helix, public-private partnerships, and citizen participation)
• The impact of digital transformation on the change of citizens’ role in the city
• Smart cities, communities and regions (cases, rankings, comparisons, and critical success factors)
• Benefits of the impact of emerging technologies on citizens and local communities
• Collective intelligence for smart cities and communities
• Emerging technologies in smart cities and communities (artificial intelligence, big data, open data, open government, social media and networks, digital twins, chatbots, etc.)
• Smart governance in cities and communities in the age of the emerging technologies
• Management of smart cities and communities
• Outcomes of smart cities and communities
• The role of digital technologies in both increasing community livability and improving social sustainability and inequalities
• Smart services
• Urban-rural gaps in smart communities
• Resilience and sustainability capacities in smart cities and communities
• Innovative solutions for smart cities and communities
• Building knowledge societies for smart cities and communities
• Smart cities and communities and their contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Minitrack Leaders

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 a total of 117 articles in national and international journals, of which more than 70 are published in journals indexed in SSCI/JCR, ABDC Journal Ratings and Journal Quality List. He is a member of the Editorial Board of 12 international journals (3 of them JCR in Q1 of Information and Library Science) and is part of the team of external evaluators of more than 60 journals, of which 47 are indexed in SSCI/JCR, and of 6 international congresses. He has been also the author of 56 book chapters, 49 of them 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 Sustainability (section sustainable management), IJPADA and series Editor of Public Administration and Information Technology (PAIT) book series in Springer. Finally, he has been collaborating with United Nations and he has co-chaired different tracks in international conferences such as ICEGOV, IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-ePart, HICSS and other conferences during last years.

Anna Domaradzka is a sociologist, an Assistant Professor and Director at the Robert Zajonc Institute for Social Studies, University of Warsaw. She leads a Civil City Lab, that carries out research for the co-creation of better, democratic, and wisely governed cities. The team investigates the consequences of digitalization and smart innovations in the context of urban life, with particular interest in how technology can influence the implementation of the principles of democracy, equality, and social justice expressed by the ‘right to the city’ concept. Anna Domaradzka specializes in intersectional and international comparative research in the areas of urban sociology, civil society and social movements, digital sociology and gender studies. She is engaged in several international projects concerning urban

governance and planning, including Right to the smart city: the impact of new technologies on quality of life, social relations and urban policy (PI, Polish National Science Centre), EuPOLIS: Integrated NBS-based Urban Planning Methodology for Enhancing the Health and Well-being of Citizens (PI, H2020), and HEART: HEAlthier Cities through Blue-Green Regenerative Technologies (PI, H2020). She’s a member of the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR) Board of Directors, and Board member of Research Committee on Social Movements, Collective Action and Social Change (RC48) of International Sociological Association (ISA)

Gabriela Viale Pereira is Assistant Professor for Information Systems at the Department for E-Governance and Administration at University for Continuing Education 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. 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 50 peer-reviewed publications on Information Systems and digital government. In addition, she has been working with a variety of organizations such as United Nations, ITU, and Council of Europe, she is a Board Member of the Digital Government Society (2022/2023) and IFIP WG 8.5 in ICT & Public Administration (2021-2023) and has co-chaired different tracks in international conferences such as ICEGOV, dg.o, IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-ePart and HICSS during last years.