Introduction

۱٫۱٫ A huge strain on urban infrastructure and services

The urban growth and city population are growing in a fast pace causing different issues to the environment, economic and social sustainability of cities (Bibri and Krogstie, 2017; Neirotti et al., 2014). The traffic congestion, poor urban infrastructure, health issues, energy shortages, educational challenges (Lee et al., 2013), inadequate housing, increasing crime rates, higher unemployment, ageing infrastructure, power thefts, issues in supply connections, insufficient power generations capacity, high power loss in transmission, frequent power breakdowns and lack of real time data sharing are some of common concerns in existing cities mostly in developing countries like India. The restrictions on critical infrastructures (Mattoni et al., 2015) and resource availability constraints create challenges for the healthy food, energy and clean water supply for increasing population. The cities are under strains on public finances to reduce budgets along with cost cutting measures, paradigm shifts towards online services, concerns about climate changes, economic restructuring with reducing the unemployment. Therefore, smarter ways are needed to manage the urban challenges and to revamp urban life, efficient infrastructures and quality services (Novotný et al., 2014) to its citizens.

۱٫۲٫ Smart cities: a new aspect of urbanization

Wey and Hsu (2014) have argued about the new urbanism and smart growth concept to deal with city problems especially environmental, housing and citizens’ well-being. European Parliament (2014) has defined smart cities as “a place where the traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital and telecommunication technologies, for the benefits of its inhabitants and businesses”. The focuses of smart cities development are improvements in citizens’ life (Neirotti et al., 2014), environment efficiency, security and sustainability (Bulu, 2014; Niaros et al., 2017) with centrally controlled and monitored technological infrastructures. Giffinger et al. (2007) have defined smart governance, smart people, smart environment, smart economy, smart mobility and smart living as six major dimensions of a smart city. The smart cities would incorporate the ICTs (Kramers et al., 2014) and Internet of Things (IoT) (Elmaghraby and Losavio, 2014) embedded into most of the sector of urban development such as government functionality, city operations, services deliveries, and intelligent analytics to optimize the services, production and usability. Ojo et al. (2014) have discussed the objectives of smart cities such as carbon reduction, improving energy efficiency, high quality living environment, green urban areas, state-of-art infrastructure and city evolution as living and innovative laboratory to compete at global standards. The smart city transformation is a complex and multidimensional (De Santis et al., 2014) process. The process of city transformation depends upon the collective integration of technological, governance, institutional and transitional components. Smart cities can provide infrastructural and information-based services along with businesses opportunities (King and Cotterill, 2007) for the economic development.