Sustainable Urban Regions: Opportunities and Challenges for Planning Smart Cities

Running head: SUSTAINABLE URBAN REGIONS
SUSTAINABLE URBAN REGIONS
Name of Student
Name of University
Author’s Note

SUSTAINABLE URBAN REGIONS1
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Discussion..................................................................................................................................2
Attributes of a smart city........................................................................................................2
Connection between one technology and the smart city........................................................3
Opportunities and challenges for planning sustainable cities through the technology..........5
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................9
References................................................................................................................................10

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Introduction
Smart city can be termed as a particular designation that is provided to a certain city
which tends to incorporate information as well as communication technologies (Ahlgren,
Hidell and Ngai 2016). This is done in order to enhance performance along with the overall
quality of numerous services like transportation, energy, and many more for the purpose of
reducing the overall consumption of resources, wastage of resources and the total cost that is
incurred in the entire process. The main objective of a smart city is enhancing the overall
quality of the life that is led by citizens with the help of using numerous technologies (Ojo,
Curry and Zeleti 2015). The technology that has been chosen include open data and the city
chosen is New York City.
Discussion
Attributes of a smart city
The culture of smart cities is being established with the help of a combination of
necessities of the society and human aspiration had established a culture of smart cities. Thus
had created numerous projects for smart city in numerous countries (Sun, Song and Jara
2016). There are numerous attributes that aim in describing a smart city, these attributes are
as follows
1. Information, communication and technology: this had enabled numerous public
services (Meijer and Bolívar 2016). The usage of technology platforms that are
integrated in nature and can be accessed easily across numerous devices that are
distinct play a vital role in providing access, speed, transparency, participation and
many more in numerous public services.
2. Public services that are efficient: the usage of meters that are smart in nature along
with energy conservation, renewable energy, effluent recycling, water harvesting as

SUSTAINABLE URBAN REGIONS3
well as appropriated waste disposal of solid wastes contribute to be a hallmark for the
entire city (Pereira, Macadar and Luciano 2017).
3. Financial sustainability: the independence in terms of finance would be possible along
with elaborate as well as extensive tapping of numerous sources of revenue like taxes,
ad payments and many more.
4. Enough social capital: cities that are small could not be devoid of exact level of
infrastructure such as hospitals, schools public spaces, recreational grounds, sporting
along with entertainment and retail venues.
5. Safety and security: this particular attribute of security and safety gets a high level of
consciousness (Biswas and Muthukkumarasamy 2016). Numerous networks used by
cameras, bright public places, intensive surveillance and pay rolling, access to identity
verification and many more are all on the list of expectations.
6. Green environment: minimization of carbon footprint as well as maintaining eco
friendliness have been important (Hashem, Chang and Anuar 2016). Open spaces
such as parks, usage of energy sources that are renewable in nature, conservation as
well as recycling have been very mandatory.
7. Reduced pollution criteria: estimate of the actual size of the population is very vital
for the purpose of planning smart city services like needs of energy sources as well as
traffic among the citizens.
Connection between one technology and the smart city
The technologies that are involved within the implementation of smart city include
smart energy, smart transportation, smart data, smart infrastructure, smart mobility, smart IoT
devices and some more. The technology that has been selected for this particular assignment
is open data. In this particular assignment, various case studies and the findings mentioned in
them have been represented. First case study discusses regarding what is being done with the