Though there have been a lot of emphases on explaining the concept of smart city, the general description is often vague. Some of the literature refers to case studies, while others explain technological advances in terms of smart power back up, smart grids, smart health care, smart road safety system, smart water management system, etc. But there is no clear definition that describes the features of smart city in a broader sense. To facilitate this, it is useful to dig into the past compositions given by various authors. The following sections elaborate on this further.
2.2.1 Past: ICT-Driven City, Ef ficient City, Cyber City, Digital City, and U-City
The era of smart cities came into existence as of 1994, in Netherlands, when the term Digital City (DDS) was first coined as a virtual public domain [8]. That interval of time is prominently recognized for the boom in growth and popularity of Internet-based applications. Numerous researchers began to focus on ICT and smart intelligent devices. Some researchers, for example, those at the Brookhaven National Laboratory disclosed the concept of the next big thing: efficient smart cities. Till late 1999, when Internet get commercialized and became a necessity, the concepts of ubiquitous computing, U city, and cyber city were proposed, and eventually in 2000 the idea of smart city was brought into existence.
Korea leads the way in development of U cities as post-ubiquitous computing, in 1998. Mark Weiser, the chief technologist of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, came up with a desktop model of human–computer interaction. Korean government has put the concept of U City in use for many development projects since 2005.
A ubiquitous city (U City) is a hybrid of ubiquitous computing within an urban environment. It can be explained as a unification of information systems with social systems, where all the devices and services are connected with wireless fidelity, sensors, and RFID tags [9]. Anthony Townsend, a research director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, and a former Fulbright scholar in Seoul visualize U City as an exclusively Korean idea [10].
2.2.2 Present: Intelligent City, Knowledge City, Smart City
These days, the notion of smart city has become prevalent, though it has resem-blance to U-City. The only way to differentiate between the two ideas is through the degree of intelligence. Smart city is known as a post-ubiquitous city. Well U city is a city which has artificial intelligence, facilitated by information technology to render basic facilities. Latest smart city is an extension of U city post-telecommunication revolution, in which humans can stay in touch connection of individuals to the city with human neural network. Smart cities follow people interaction and communication irrespective of their location. The importance of two assets namely social and ecological capital paints smart city in a totally different color among its other counterpart technology-driven urban cities. Moreover, smart city is not fundamentally stands on the ground of hard concrete infrastructure, i.e., physical capital but it also relies on the intellectual and social capital made available by quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure [11]. Smart city is not a stagnant concept; it is changing with time, adapting according to the needs, and hence its implementation on initial stage is hard and complex. Another explanation of smart city is a city which is equipped with all the smart systems interacting with each other through smart communication system, latter is a boon from innovations in the ICT.
2.2.3 Future: MESH City —Sense, Soft, and Warm Technology City
In modern terms, smart cities can be termed as MESH cities [12], referring to the following:
• M for Mobile (mobile networks that support them provide the data, real-time information, conduit to supply feedback about a city, its users, and its systems),
• E for Efficient (about sustainability achieved through effective usage, monitor-ing and management of energy, traffic, etc.),
• S for Subtle (invisible and non-intrusive systems, easy-to-handle modern sys-tems for citizens),
• H for Heuristics (Heuristics-based consistent improvement, which conforms to the system self-reflexing, self-adapting, and citizen-oriented).
Futuristic ICT will be a combination of the soft as well as warm techniques.
Artificial intelligence will provide the feature of emulating human emotions [13].
Future of smart cities can be visualized as cities having a blend of sense, soft, and warm technology. Lee and Hancock [14] categorize the facts of smart city by subjective view on them. Three distinctive categories are given in Table2.1.
According to these practical and academic interpretations of a smart city, there is none which gives a generalfit to all idea of a smart city. Based on the several kinds
of conceptual schemas given above to define smart city framework, this paper presents a universal set of components that are required to decode the concept of smart city projects.
As explained above, the concept of smart city is still evolving; it will take a substantial amount of time to conceptualize itselffirmly [15,16]. The concept has been put to use everywhere in world with different naming classifications, semantics, and context. A variety of adjectives have been extensively used in the place of word smart, viz., intelligent, hi-tech, digital, etc. Some has even replaced the use of the word smart with modern urbanization, if it is urbanized it has to be smart. Referring smart cities as an urban labeling phenomenon [16] for better understanding of the fact that is why there is a need of a conceptual research in this field. Table2.1shows some of the working definitions that currently exist in the literature.
Giffinger et al. [17] consider smart as performing in a forward-looking way. The forward-looking development for smart city projects issues like awareness, flexi-bility, transformaflexi-bility, and strategic behavior, synergy, individuality, and self-decisiveness [17]. The Harrison et al. study [19] depicts it as an equipped, intelligently interconnected city. Instrumentation empowers seizure and assimila-tion of real-time data with the help of sensors, kiosks, meters, personal devices, cameras, smartphones, incorporated medical devices, web, and other likewise data-acquisition systems, with social networks as human sensor network.
Table 2.1 Working
definitions of a smart city A city soundly performing in a forward-looking way in terms of economy, governance, mobility, ecologically created on the smart composition of endowments and activities of self-decisive, independent, and responsible citizens [17]
A city which supervises and integrates specific conditions of all of its critical infrastructures comprising roads, bridges, tunnels, rails, subways, airports, seaports, network communications, water, power, and buildings, can better modify its resources, plan, and draft its maintenance acts and optimizing its services to citizens [18]
A city linking the physical infrastructure to the IT infrastructure to the social infrastructure, to the business infrastructure to gain the summed up intelligence of the city [19]
A city endeavoring to make itself smarter, i.e., more sustainable, efficient, equitable, and livable [20]
A city fusing ICT and Web applications and technology with other organizational, design and planning efforts to hasten up the bureaucratic operations and assist to mark novel, innovative solutions to city management, with the improvement in sustainability index [3]
It makes use of smart computing technologies to build critical infrastructure elements and services for the city, which includes city administration, education, efficient healthcare, public safety measures, entrepreneurship, real estate, transportation, as well as impeccable, interconnected, and reliable [4]
Interconnection encompasses the integration of data through an enterprise com-puting system and the communication of processed data to different city services.
Intelligence relates to ability to the take improved operational decisions by taking inputs from complex analytics, optimization, data modeling, and visualization in operational processes. The Natural Resources Defense Council [20] elucidates smarter in the urban context as more sustainable, efficient, and livable. Toppeta [3]
recommends the betterment in sustainability and livability. Washburn et al. [4]
envisage a smart city as an assemblage of smart computing technologies collabo-rated with components of infrastructure and services. Smart computing specifies a brand new progeny of integrated chips, hardware, and software network tech-nologies that hand carry IT systems and real-time applications with advanced analytics to enhance business processes [4].
After having an overall comprehensive look at the smart city concepts, it can be viewed as a huge organic system possessing properties of a system, working with many interdependent subsystems, i.e., all subsystems within a system strive to obtain a common objective. Dirks and Keeling [21] decipher smart city as the organic integration of systems. The interaction between a smart city’s core systems has taken into account to make the system of systems smarter. No system operates in isolation. In this sense, Kanter and Litow [22] consider a smarter city as an organic whole—a network and a linked system. While systems in industrial cities were mostly skeleton and skin, postindustrial smart cities are analogous to organ-isms that develop an artificial nervous system, which prepares them to behave in intelligent manner [23]. The novel intelligence of cities, therefore, is situated in the increased efficient digital telecommunication networks (the nerves), ubiquitously embedded intelligence (the brains), sensors and tags (the sensory organs), and software (the knowledge and cognitive competence).