What are the Challenges of Building a Smart City?

The concept of a ‘smart city’ emerged from studies in urbanism, combined with information and communications technologies (ICTs). It now extends to include interactions with and between governmental organizations, involving broader society, and the use of technology through technology-enablers such as the Internet, and early onset of ‘artificial intelligence’ (Ruohomaa et al., 2019). The term ‘smart city’ became popular around 2009, arising from several descriptive adjectives being used about cities, such as: virtual, digital, wired, intelligent, information, knowledge, creative, green, and clever (Kola-Bezka et al., 2016; Thompson, 2016; Veselitskaya et al., 2019; Min et al., 2019). In the course of this linguistic history, many definitions and classifications have been proposed, yet there is still no agreed upon definition of what constitutes a ‘smart city’. Instead, multiple definitions are now available based on varying perspectives (Meijer & Bolivar, 2016; Serrano, 2018; Schipper & Silvius, 2018).