scholarly journals Smart Tourism as a Pillar for Sustainable Urban Development: An Alternate Smart City Strategy from Mauritius

Smart Cities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yeshna Jessie Dabeedooal ◽  
Vickramsingh Dindoyal ◽  
Zaheer Allam ◽  
David S. Jones

Mauritius, a small island developing state (SIDS), has an approved government-issued smart city framework geared at facilitating the development of smart cities through an application of Internet of things. In an attempt to move away from privately-operated urban developments in the form of newly built smart cities, an alternate framework has been proposed by Allam and Newman to redefine this timely concept for existing cities with the main dimensions being metabolism, culture, and governance. This new framework focuses on liveability and sustainability that builds on the cultural and historical dimensions of existing cities. This study adds to the redefined smart city paradigm by proposing a new pillar in the form of smart tourism for the city of Port Louis, Mauritius. This paper reviews models of smart tourism and explores how this can be grafted to the Allam and Newman’s smart city model. The findings of this study seek to inform policy makers on alternate and the more relevant economic potential of smart tourism for the city of Port Louis.

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Shirowzhan ◽  
Willie Tan ◽  
Samad M. E. Sepasgozar

Smart technologies are advancing, and smart cities can be made smarter by increasing the connectivity and interactions of humans, the environment, and smart devices. This paper discusses selective technologies that can potentially contribute to developing an intelligent environment and smarter cities. While the connectivity and efficiency of smart cities is important, the analysis of the impact of construction development and large projects in the city is crucial to decision and policy makers, before the project is approved. This raises the question of assessing the impact of a new infrastructure project on the community prior to its commencement—what type of technologies can potentially be used for creating a virtual representation of the city? How can a smart city be improved by utilizing these technologies? There are a wide range of technologies and applications available but understanding their function, interoperability, and compatibility with the community requires more discussion around system designs and architecture. These questions can be the basis of developing an agenda for further investigations. In particular, the need for advanced tools such as mobile scanners, Geospatial Artificial Intelligence, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Geospatial Augmented Reality apps, Light Detection, and Ranging in smart cities is discussed. In line with smart city technology development, this Special Issue includes eight accepted articles covering trending topics, which are briefly reviewed.


JASSP ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-92
Author(s):  
Muhammad Iqbal

The concept of developing Smart Cities in Yogyakarta is different from the development of Smart Cities in other cities. The Smart City of Yogyakarta is under the big idea of Smart Culture, divided into two fields, namely Smart Education and Smart Tourism. This big concept was taken because Yogyakarta is very thick with its Culture and is known as an education city and tourism city. The idea of Smart Culture is expected to touch all aspects of the lives of the citizens of Yogyakarta that are inseparable from the six basic principles of developing Smart Cities. This study uses a quantitative approach. Data survey was conducted using a questionnaire to the civil servant in Yogyakarta City. The survey results will be analyzed using SmartPLS 3.0 software. The results of this study are divided into two components, namely Tangible and Intangible Culture. This Smart Culture's primary purpose is to make Tangible and Intangible Culture in Yogyakarta City survive and excel. Smart Culture in the city of Yogyakarta acts as an umbrella that underlies the development and other intelligent programs such as smart education and smart Culture. These two components are revealed to be critical projects that can be included in short and medium-term programs on smart education or smart tourism related to Culture. Other findings show that tangible Culture and intangible Culture have a significant influence on smart Culture development.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul D. Mullins

Since the 1980s, within the broader context of studies on smart cities, there has been a growing body of academic research on networked cities and “computable cities” by authors including Manuel Castells (Castells, 1989; Castells & Cardoso, 2005), William Mitchell (1995), Michael Batty (2005, 2013), and Rob Kitchin (2011). Over the last decade, governments in Asia have displayed an appetite and commitment to construct large scale city developments from scratch—one of the most infamous being the smart entrepreneurial city of Songdo, South Korea. Using Songdo as a case study, this paper will examine, from an urban systems perspective, some of the challenges of using a green-city model led by networked technology. More specifically, this study intends to add to the growing body of smart city literature by using an external global event—the global financial crisis in 2008—to reveal what is missing from the smart city narrative in Songdo. The paper will use the definition of an urban system and internal subsystems by Bertuglia et al. (1987) and Bertuglia, Clarke and Wilson (1994) to reveal the sensitivity and resilience of a predetermined smart city narrative. For instance, what happens if the vision moves from the originally intended international-orientated population towards remarketing the city to attract a domestic middle-class population. The lens of the financial crisis in 2008 revealed that the inherent inflexibility of a closed-system approach in Songdo was not sufficiently resilient to external shocks. The shift towards a domestic middle-class population revealed the inequality in accessing the city services in a system designed with formalized and rigid inputs and outputs. By focusing predominantly on technology, the social dimensions of the city were not part of Songdo’s smart city vocabulary. Therefore, in adopting a technologically deterministic approach (Mullins & Shwayri, 2016) to achieving efficiency and combating environmental issues, Songdo’s green city model was found insufficient in its ability to cope with the complexity and dissonance that occurs in relation to “glocal” challenges facing cities today.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-128
Author(s):  
Jason Cohen ◽  
Judy Backhouse ◽  
Omar Ally

Young people are important to cities, bringing skills and energy and contributing to economic activity. New technologies have led to the idea of a smart city as a framework for city management. Smart cities are developed from the top-down through government programmes, but also from the bottom-up by residents as technologies facilitate participation in developing new forms of city services. Young people are uniquely positioned to contribute to bottom-up smart city projects. Few diagnostic tools exist to guide city authorities on how to prioritise city service provision. A starting point is to understand how the youth value city services. This study surveys young people in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, and conducts an importance-performance analysis to identify which city services are well regarded and where the city should focus efforts and resources. The results show that Smart city initiatives that would most increase the satisfaction of youths in Braamfontein  include wireless connectivity, tools to track public transport  and  information  on city events. These  results  identify  city services that are valued by young people, highlighting services that young people could participate in providing. The importance-performance analysis can assist the city to direct effort and scarce resources effectively.


Smart Cities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 819-839
Author(s):  
Luís B. Elvas ◽  
Bruno Miguel Mataloto ◽  
Ana Lúcia Martins ◽  
João C. Ferreira

The smart city concept, in which data from different systems are available, contains a multitude of critical infrastructures. This data availability opens new research opportunities in the study of the interdependency between those critical infrastructures and cascading effects solutions and focuses on the smart city as a network of critical infrastructures. This paper proposes an integrated resilience system linking interconnected critical infrastructures in a smart city to improve disaster resilience. A data-driven approach is considered, using artificial intelligence and methods to minimize cascading effects and the destruction of failing critical infrastructures and their components (at a city level). The proposed approach allows rapid recovery of infrastructures’ service performance levels after disasters while keeping the coverage of the assessment of risks, prevention, detection, response, and mitigation of consequences. The proposed approach has the originality and the practical implication of providing a decision support system that handles the infrastructures that will support the city disaster management system—make the city prepare, adapt, absorb, respond, and recover from disasters by taking advantage of the interconnections between its various critical infrastructures to increase the overall resilience capacity. The city of Lisbon (Portugal) is used as a case to show the practical application of the approach.


Smart Cities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zaheer Allam ◽  
A. Dhunny ◽  
Gaëtan Siew ◽  
David Jones

The Smart City Scheme, as part of the Smart Mauritius initiative, adopted by the Government of Mauritius in 2014, heavily incentivised the emergence of new smart cities in greenfields. The resulting migration of business and residents from existing cities to new cities affected the liveability standard of existing cities and encouraged property speculation. This shift reduced home pricing affordability further from the grasp of young professionals. With the Mauritian Landlord and Tenant Act of 1999 discouraging investment in Mauritian city centres, property developers were additionally encouraged to invest in housing projects in these emerging Smart Cities. As part of the Smart Urban Regeneration strategy of Port Louis that sought to reduce competition between new and existing cities, the provision of housing was seen as paramount to enabling the Smart Cities concept as promoted by the Government. The findings of this paper, which explores the urban footprint of Port Louis through field survey, provides insights, as to the components of the city, that can assist policy-makers and developers to better shape projects that are more responsive to the Smart Urban Regeneration plan.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonidas Anthopoulos ◽  
Marijn Janssen ◽  
Vishanth Weerakkody

Smart cities have attracted an extensive and emerging interest from both science and industry with an increasing number of international examples emerging from all over the world. However, despite the significant role that smart cities can play to deal with recent urban challenges, the concept has been being criticized for not being able to realize its potential and for being a vendor hype. This paper reviews different conceptualization, benchmarks and evaluations of the smart city concept. Eight different classes of smart city conceptualization models have been discovered, which structure the unified conceptualization model and concern smart city facilities (i.e., energy, water, IoT etc.), services (i.e., health, education etc.), governance, planning and management, architecture, data and people. Benchmarking though is still ambiguous and different perspectives are followed by the researchers that measure -and recently monitor- various factors, which somehow exceed typical technological or urban characteristics. This can be attributed to the broadness of the smart city concept. This paper sheds light to parameters that can be measured and controlled in an attempt to improve smart city potential and leaves space for corresponding future research. More specifically, smart city progress, local capacity, vulnerabilities for resilience and policy impact are only some of the variants that scholars pay attention to measure and control.


Author(s):  
G. Agugiaro

This paper presents and discusses the results regarding the initial steps (selection, analysis, preparation and eventual integration of a number of datasets) for the creation of an integrated, semantic, three-dimensional, and CityGML-based virtual model of the city of Vienna. CityGML is an international standard conceived specifically as information and data model for semantic city models at urban and territorial scale. It is being adopted by more and more cities all over the world. <br><br> The work described in this paper is embedded within the European Marie-Curie ITN project “Ci-nergy, Smart cities with sustainable energy systems”, which aims, among the rest, at developing urban decision making and operational optimisation software tools to minimise non-renewable energy use in cities. Given the scope and scale of the project, it is therefore vital to set up a common, unique and spatio-semantically coherent urban model to be used as information hub for all applications being developed. This paper reports about the experiences done so far, it describes the test area and the available data sources, it shows and exemplifies the data integration issues, the strategies developed to solve them in order to obtain the integrated 3D city model. The first results as well as some comments about their quality and limitations are presented, together with the discussion regarding the next steps and some planned improvements.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (22) ◽  
pp. 10712
Author(s):  
Wilson Nieto Bernal ◽  
Keryn Lorena García Espitaleta

The goal of this research is to design a framework to develop an information technology (IT) maturity model to guide the planning, design, and implementation of smart city services. The objectives of the proposed model are to define qualitatively and measure quantitatively the maturity levels for the IT dimensions used by smart cities (IT governance, IT services, data management and infrastructure), and to develop an implementation model that is practical and contextualized to the needs of any territory that wants to create or improve smart city services. The proposed framework consists of three components: a conceptual model of smart city services, IT dimensions and indicators, and IT maturity levels. The framework was validated by applying it to a case study for the evaluation of the IT maturity levels for the city of Cereté, Colombia.


2021 ◽  
pp. 237-252
Author(s):  
Elena Laudante

The paper focuses on the importance of robotics and artificial intelligence inside of the new urban contexts in which it is possible to consider and enhance the different dimensions of quality of life such as safety and health, environmental quality, social connection and civic participation. Smart technologies help cities to meet the new challenges of society, thus making them more livable, attractive and responsive in order to plan and to improve the city of the future. In accordance with the Agenda 2030 Program for sustainable development that intends the inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable city, the direction of growth and prosperity of urban environments is pursued by optimizing the use of resources and respecting the environment. In the current society, robotic technology is proposed as a tool for innovation and evolution in urban as well as industrial and domestic contexts. On the one hand the users-citizens who participate dynamically in the activities and on the other the new technological systems integrated in the urban fabric. Existing urban systems that are “amplified” of artificial and digital intelligence and give life to smart cities, physical places that allow new forms of coexistence between humans and robots in order to implement the level of quality of life and define “human centered” innovative solutions and services thus responding to the particular needs of people in an effective and dynamic way. The current city goes beyond the definition of smart city. In fact, as said by Carlo Ratti, it becomes a "senseable city", a city capable of feeling but also sensitive and capable of responding to citizens who define the overall performance of the city. The multidisciplinary approach through the dialogue between designers, architects, engineers and urban planners will allow to face the new challenges through the dynamics of robot integration in the urban landscape. The cities of the future, in fact, will be pervaded by autonomous driving vehicles, robotized delivery systems and light transport solutions, in response to the new concept of smart mobility, on a human scale, shared and connected mobility in order to improve management and control of the digitized and smart city. Automation at constant rates as the keystone for urban futures and new models of innovative society. Through the identification of representative case studies in the field of innovative systems it will be possible to highlight the connections between design, smart city and "urban" robotics that will synergically highlight the main "desirable" qualities of life in the city as a place of experimentation and radical transformations. In particular, parallel to the new robotic solutions and human-robot interactions, the design discipline will be responsible for designing the total experience of the user who lives in synergy with the robots, thus changing the socio-economic dynamics of the city.


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