The social sustainability of smart city: An evidence-based survey

Smart city is a recent phenomenon and hundreds of municipalities around the world have already implemented some type of smart-city scheme. This research in designed to discuss the potentials of smart city in improving, influencing or impacting the features of sustainability particularly in social issues. With this objective, the research explores how the two concepts of smart city and sustainability overlap or collide in theory and in practice. To observe the common ground of the two concepts, the definition, dimensions and features of the two concepts have been studied. Since the measurement issues are a barrier to conceptualizing and testing the links between the two concepts of sustainability and smart city, the methods for the assessment of smartness and sustainability in cities have been investigated through the assessment systems and indicators. The compiles indicators are classified with respect to the features of social sustainability and for the topics that haven’t been covered by the indicators, new ones are defined. Therefore, one of the contributions of this research is presenting a list of indicators that can measure the features of sustainability in a smart city. In the empirical part of the research, two case studies of Turin and Boston have been observed. Both cities had been the location of major industries and they both have shifted from an industrial to a service economy with a significant recent growth in ICT sector. The features of social sustainability have been studied through the goals and visions, processes and preparation, policy making and also project selection in the models of smart city that have been implemented in the two cases of study . The concentration of the thesis in the case study of Boston is on the implemented projects and their impact on society. However, in the case of Turin, the master plan of smart city is the main point of observation. According to the findings of this study, on the one hand, it is true that smart projects offer cities an opportunity to introduce many improvements in service delivery, as well as overall developmental goals which have an impact on society. On the other hand, despite the pervasiveness of smart cities, there are still serious obstacles for smart projects to have positive sustainable effects on societies. These constrains include the limits on physical access to new technologies, the high cost of Internet access for the less advantaged people, and exclusion from access due to the inadequate knowledge. The final goal of this study is to emphasize on the fact that smart city eventually should move toward the principles of sustainability. The research tries to find out how smart city practices could help the cities to approach the goals of sustainability; and what are the possible challenges in the way of achieving this goal.