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

Introduction And The Current Situation

A sustainable smart city is “an innovative city that uses information and communications technology (ICT) and other means to improve quality of life, efficiency of urban operation and services, and competitiveness, while ensuring that it meets the needs of present and future generations with respect to economic, social, environmental as well as cultural aspects” (MTSFB, 2016, p. ii). All smart cities’ economic, social, and environmental facets imply people performing jobs, and their safety is a right, not a mere privilege. Related to this idea, Millard et al. (2014) define a smart city as “a city seeking to address public issues via ICT-based solutions on the basis of a multi-stakeholder, municipally based partnership”(p. 9) while AENOR (AENOR, 2016) points out that a smart city is “a fair and equitable city” that is citizen-centered and continuously improves “sustainability and resilience,” taking advantage of the knowledge and resources, especially ICT, to improve “life, the efficiency of urban services, innovation and competitiveness.” Arduin et al. (2016) and Caragliu et al. (2011) claim that a city is smart “when investments in human and social capital and traditional and modern communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory governance”(p. 1). Therefore, safety in citizen-centered smart cities must be addressed from a governance perspective. Some specific approaches directly emphasize the role of smartness as an essential feature of governance (Gil-Garcia et al., 2016). Furthermore, smart cities should offer people an ideal place to live where the quality of life (as a common good) can be interpreted from a multi-disciplinary perspective through perceived public value (Rodríguez Bolívar, 2019).

Although this usually goes unmentioned, all the above aspects of viable smart cities are related to the specific dimension of improving people’s safety at work, usually referred to as occupational health and safety (OHS). One of the most detailed descriptions of a smart city available (Gil-Garcia et al., 2015) mentions safety, albeit in public rather than occupational safety. However, as Gil-Garcia et al. (2014) argue, regarding the importance of new technologies, “new and emergent technologies, over the last three decades, have continuously disrupted the administrative landscape of bureaucracies and the public sector around the world” (p. I2). This statement reveals that, as a responsibility of modern governments, the safety of workers is another important issue to be addressed by the most recent technologies available for developing smart cities. However, this issue has so far been overlooked, as revealed by Sappa (2022), who reports a comprehensive list of ICT applications for smart cities, limited to urban environment monitoring, intelligent mobility, waste recycling processes, computer-aided diagnosis in healthcare systems, and computer vision-based approaches for efficiency in production processes with no mention of the OHS area.

OHS in smart cities is more than just providing an ergonomic chair or a hard helmet. It systematically comprehends all risks that workers face (irrespective of the workplace), including risks derived from organizational dynamics and culture, which affect people’s emotional stability and peace of mind.

Until 2019, company occupational risk prevention services steered safety at work. However, the global situation caused by COVID-19 led all humankind to stop, think and move fast to adapt and move up a notch. In the OHS sector, there has been much debate about how prepared public and private sector industries, companies, and general organizations were to globally and systemically protect people when all workers were asked to go home and start working in a remote setting, a situation which is now acknowledged to be here to stay. Smart cities are leaders in adopting technologies and driving people, processes, and organizations to adapt. However, no definite methodologies or strategies on how to drive OHS in emergent smart cities have been presented as yet.