Total Quality Management in Smart City Development

Abstract

Wastes and pollution are associated with an uncoordinated urbanization trend. This exploratory study investigates total quality management's (TQM) role in smart city development. It delineates smart cities and its conjoined relationship with digital cities. It submits to the complementary relationship between TQM and quality function deployment (QFD) and highlights stakeholder engagement as central to smart city development strategy, underpinned by social theory. It distils that stakeholders and built environment professionals need to work collaboratively to maximize the benefit of smart cities as being an innovation value chain, leading to the use of IT-enabled platform such as building information modelling (BIM). This culminates in the design of an integrative framework with ICT (focusing on BIM) and TQM serving as the information architecture and the ideological premise respectively. It then presents the close-loop (front-end) and open-loop (back-end) approaches to smart city development, discusses future research directions and concludes with implications.