Are you future ready? The world we see now is very different from that of 25 years ago. Who would have thought by click of a button a taxi will stand in front of your house. Who would have imagined through YouTube each one of us has the power to travel the world with a single click. And the pace of change is accelerating the world in the next five to ten years. Shape up to Smart cities is the blue print of what is coming. Why some countries are better prepared than others, why some cities set the pace of innovation and how people can better prepare from what is coming than just be passive observer for a rude shock. I wrote this book precisely to answer the above questions. This is the first comprehensive book on Smart cities. Electric vehicles, Smart meters and Smart buildings are coming in the way of doing our business. It is time to get ready for these big changes and not left behind. All these concepts are explained in simple terms with no high technical jargon. These powerful concepts strongly connect to smart city initiatives. India, China, US, EU and many other countries are investing lots of resources and money in building the smart cities. It is time for all of us to be part of this discussion. Be Smart in Smart Cities.

Smart cities are a fast-growing species, and a fascinating field for new experiments in a number of critical areas, ranging from urban planning, sustainable energy, and transport strategies to social integration and talent attraction, to name a few. As leaders and citizens around the world continue to assess, design, implement and improve on ways to create better cities, they often find themselves confronted with a multitude of decisions and a wide range of partial solutions to specific problems such as traffic congestion, waste management and crime. Unfortunately, they have precious few tools to enable them to define the strategies required and take advantage of the experience of other smart cities around the world. In such a context, metrics can play a significant and constructive role: by quantifying efforts and results, they increase the ability of decision-makers to identify where their priorities should lie as well as the relative merits of various approaches.

Shaping Smart for Better Cities powerfully demonstrates the range of theoretical and practical challenges, opportunities and success factors involved in successfully deploying digital technologies in cities, focusing on the importance of recognizing local context and multi-layered urban relationships in designing successful urban interventions. The first section, ‘Rethinking Smart (in) Places’ interrogates the smart city from a theoretical vantage point. The second part, ‘Shaping Smart Places’ examines various case studies critically. Hence the volume offers an intellectual resource that expands on the current literature, but also provides a pedagogical resource to universities as well as a reflective opportunity for practitioners. The cases allow for an examination of the practical implications of smart interventions in space, whilst the theoretical reflections enable expansion of the literature. Students are encouraged to learn from case studies and apply that learning in design. Academics will gain from the learning embedded in the documentation of the case studies in different geographic contexts, while practitioners can apply their learning to the conceptualisation of new forms of technology use. Demonstrates how to adapt smart urban interventions for hyper-local context in geographic parameters, spatial relationships, and socio-political characteristics Provides a problem-solving approach based on specific smart place examples, applicable to real-life urban management Offers insights from numerous case studies of smart cities interventions in real civic spaces

This book, based on extensive international collaborative research, highlights the state-of-the-art design of “smart living” for metropolises, megacities, and metacities, as well as at the community and neighbourhood level. Smart living is one of six main components of smart cities, the others being smart people, smart economy, smart environment, smart mobility and smart governance. Smart living in any smart city can only be designed and implemented with active roles for smart people and smart city government, and as a joint effort combining e-Democracy, e-Governance and ICT-IoT systems. In addition to using information and communication technologies, the Internet of Things, Internet of Governance (e-Governance) and Internet of People (e-Democracy), the design of smart living utilizes various domain-specific tools to achieve coordinated, effective and efficient management, development, and conservation, and to improve ecological, social, biophysical, psychological and economic well-being in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of development ecosystems and stakeholders. This book presents case studies covering more than 10 cities and centred on domain-specific smart living components. The book is issued in two volumes. and this volume focus on city studies.

An electronic version of this book is available Open Access at www.tandfebooks.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. One of the major challenges of urban development has been reconciling the way cities develop with the mounting evidence of resource depletion and the negative environmental impacts of predominantly urban-based modes of production and consumption. This book aims to re-politicise the relationship between urban development, sustainability and justice, and to explore the tensions emerging under real circumstances, as well as their potential for transformative change. For some, cities are the root of all that is unsustainable, while for others cities provide unique opportunities for sustainability-oriented innovations that address equity and ecological challenges. This book is rooted in the latter category, but recognises that if cities continue to evolve along current trajectories they will be where the large bulk of the most unsustainable and inequitable human activities are concentrated. By drawing on a range of case studies from both the global South and global North, this book is unique in its aim to develop an integrated social-ecological perspective on the challenge of sustainable urban development. Through the interdisciplinary and original research of a new generation of urban researchers across the global South and North, this book addresses old debates in new ways and raises new questions about sustainable urban development. .

Digital Nations and Smart Cities are rapidly evolving, and the resulting digitalization is leading to several benefits while also exposing the citizens to unforeseen risks. Technologies like Blockchain are enabling risk management for secured automation. The book takes a close look at various paradigms of Smart cities’ & Digital Nations’ Governance while relating to the application of these principles in real life through the case study of Singapore, which is one of the world’s top 3 densest, but also, is one of the most sustainable cities. This book will be a useful resource for professionals, consultants, government servants, and students who wish to come to grip with the emerging technologies and to understand their applications in governance and play an active role in community-building activities. The book explores the emergence, evolution, and adoption of advanced digital technologies like IoT, Analytics and Blockchain for improved governance, sustainable development, and better quality of life and happiness for citizens across the world.