Cities and sustainability: Exploring contributions, opportunities and challenges of smart city implementation towards social sustainability

The past few decades have witnessed the smart city concept's worldwide popularity as the way forward for struggling with urban issues and challenges, bringing about sustainability of cities. Smart city implementation, however, has been researched chiefly within the context of major cities where the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure and connectivity is readily available and reliable. In contrast, little was known of smart city implementation in many other fast-growing secondary cities. Drawing from the concept of social sustainability, this research seeks to explore contributions, opportunities and challenges of smart city implementation towards social sustainability of secondary cities in developing countries, using Udon Thani – a fast-growing secondary city of upper northeastern Thailand – as a research context. Grounded in 42 in-depth interviews, the findings show that smart city implementation contributes to social sustainability of Udon Thani in terms of enhancing the safety of the public, the provision of public services and offering opportunities for building a better urban society. Nevertheless, low public awareness of smart city development, inadequate collaboration between different sectors in the locality, and a lack of a smart city plan are posing significant challenges to smart city implementation, reflecting that the development of a smart city project in Udon Thani is not based on a holistic approach; hence, the implementation of the project is decidedly patchy. This research argues that the achievement of smart city implementation relies upon a holistic and multidimensional approach, taking into account integrated urban planning, cross-sector collaboration, marketing campaign strategies and the identification of context-specific instruments.