The Place of Smart Occupational Health and Safety in Smart City Design

Abstract

Smart cities are a very clear example of complex systems, and their development focuses on the use of technology to transform every aspect of society and embrace the complexity of these transformations in order to promote the well-being and safety of the people who inhabit these cities. One essential, but often implicit, aspect that must be considered in the design of a smart city is occupational health and safety (OHS). After identifying a significant number of OHS issues that must be effectively addressed, a prospective analysis reveals that there is still an existing gap to be filled in the context of smart city design: an explicit guarantee of safety for workers in uncertain environments open to constant digital transformation changes. In this article, the authors present the VENTURA2020 model, an architectural capabilities-driven model that describes the main aspects to be taken into account to integrate smart OHS into smart city design.