Fostering Smart City Development to Enhance Quality of Life

    Major global cities are faced with the increased concentration of urban areas and mounting complex problems caused by rapid urbanization and industrialization. Therefore, to have the quality of city life improved while ensuring our environment is sustained, those issues need to be handled by changing the way the urban spaces are managed. Urban development practices should be done in a sustainable way in which cities can adapt and integrate smart solutions to meet the demands of the citizens while keep protecting the environment.
    Smart city, with the extensive use of digital technology, has been deployed for urban planning, development, and management to help the city achieve its goals of improving the quality of life, creating a sustainable environment, and enhancing economic development. By having digital technologies play a significant role in all aspects of its urban life, the city can effectively address several emerging urban problems and develop an advanced smart city that considers citizens’ active engagement in designing solutions for urban management. Smart infrastructure, industry, energy, healthcare, and transportation using sensor networks, automated systems, smart grid, and further enabling service innovation through smart governance are amongst others of smart city’s characteristics. For example, a smart city can deploys autonomous vehicles as the backbone of a public transportation system, offering mobility-as-a-service to the citizen. As a result, on-demand and dynamic route of a driverless car, safer environment, more efficient urban mobility, eliminating congestion and GHG emissions, and providing mobility to people with disabilities and special needs. The technology for healthy building through automated digital technology can optimize building performance, enhance occupant experiences, and meet sustainability goals. Smart city increase citizen’s quality of life. 
    Therefore, the assessment of smart cities is built on measuring the sustainability and livability of cities with the emphasis on the inclusion of technological and informational elements to meet the citizens’ needs, optimize existing infrastructure, and increase innovative business through the collaboration amongst city’s economic stakeholders.