Abstract
The city of the future is smart. It is entirely interconnected and will regulate traffic, save energy, fight crime, and it will be assisted by big data and the internet of things (IoT). Cities compose of many systems providing services for us. Systems such as transport, energy, health, and others depend on each other. The connections between these systems seem to have been broken and need to be reconnected to provide efficient services for the citizens. To create a smart city, there is the need to combine internet communication network (5G), application software, database and blockchain application, AI, cloud computing, GPS, maps. For the smart city concept to be instrumental and beneficial to the citizens, there should be a centralized large-scale database center that will tie all these pieces of data generated in the various smart sectors together for it to function as an intelligently coordinated, geographically distributed system. On this score, the authors propose nine main dimensions to the smart city concept.
TopAlthough “Smart City” has been widely and variously defined by many researchers, there is no generally acknowledged definition of a Smart City. Usually, the definition of Smart City is equipped towards the focal point of the researcher. Whiles some definition focuses on social or business aspects others too look at it from the technological viewpoint. All the more comparatively, (Hollands 2008; Caragliu et al. 2011) term Smart City as the incorporation of social, physical, and IT framework (structures) to work on the nature of city services. According to (Giffinger et al. 2007), Smart City has six main dimensions namely; Smart Government, Smart Economy, Smart People, Smart Environment, Smart Mobility, and Smart Living. This definition has been extensively espoused by many researchers including (Papa et al., 2013; Hernández-Muñoz et al., 2011), and the dimension is used as a yardstick for ranking the Smartest City. (Hall et al. 2000; and Washburn et al. 2009) in their research work on Smart Cities underscore the need to integrate software services and applications to enhance city services and the lives of city dwellers. In the same vein, (Kanter and Litow 2009) also share the same idea that for creating a Smart City environment, each independent software for each city domain has to be integrated. In their research work, they maintained that city sub-systems such as energy, transport, water, and education have to be networked and synchronized. (K. E. Skouby et al., 2014) stress the need for Advanced Artificial Intelligence (AAI) systems for handling complex IoT patterns. (Saha et al., 2017) advocate the use of Remote Sensing to gather information and subsequently use it to produce a reference map for a City.