Creating Smart Cities: A Review for Holistic Approach

Abstract

With the rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) into urban people’s everyday walk of life, the functions of smart cities are fast approaching to be embedded in every step of people’s life. Despite the concept of smart cities founded in the late 1990s, there has been limited growth until recent popularity due to the advancements of IoTs. However, there are many challenges, predominantly people-centric, that require attention for the realisation of smart cities and expected real-life success. In this paper, we intend to investigate the state-of-the-art focus of smart cities from three angles: infrastructure engineering, information technology and people-centric management. We adopt a mixed-methods analysis of currently published literature on the topic of smart cities. Our study attempts to draw attention to the need for developing smart cities with a holistic approach involving multiple perspectives rather than a siloed emphasis on technology alone. We highlight that the fields of specialisations such as information technology and infrastructure engineering in contributing to smart cities need a cross-domain holistic approach of managing people-centric service requirements for improving consumer satisfaction and sustainability.