Overview of Smart City Projects in Different Countries

Urbanization, globalization, immigration from different cultures, new demands and expectations, technological advances led the tranformations of our current cities. As cities are growing and transforming, stakeholders of the cities are becoming more complex and city planning need some improvements. Consequently, it is clear to note that city planning is facing disruptive changes and becoming more important each day. Local governments, city leaders, and international organizations always work to find strategic solutions for the optimal and sustainable growth of the cities and new ways of organizing and governing plans to achieve better outcomes for their stakeholders. In the 21st century, smart city is seen to be the answer to all these challenges. The motivation of this thesis started with the lack of common definition of smart cities. Because each country has different social, economic and political backgrounds. Therefore, the usage of ICT and other technologies are shaped by cultures and needs of the cities’ and by political choices of local authorities. Consequently, different cities have different processes to follow. ICT Center for City Logistics and Enterprises (ICE Lab) of Politecnico di Torino introduce a new taxonomy in the paper of “A new taxonomy of smart city projects” (Perboli et al. 2014). According to the literature review, the taxonomy introduced by Perboli et al. (2014) is the one that covers existing smart city concept with a managerial concept of the SCPs such as social inclusion, business and governance model and human and social relations. The aim of this thesis to collect data about different smart city projects at the global level, identify the trends in objectives and tools, promoting the successful business model, and give information about the outputs of the projects. Asia, Australia, Brazil, Europe, Canada, and the USA selected for this study. Therefore, the social, political and economic background of countries are investigated, characteristics of the projects are analyzed, and business model and value propositions are generated for each project. As a conclusion, it was confirmed that Asia has two counterparts of the population growth where China and India have an unprecedented growth, while Japan is facing an aging population. However, smart services for the citizen is the key value proposition cover for all Asian countries with the use of open data and innovative sensors and solid business models. Australia has one of the highest living standards, yet needs to implement big data and ICT to improve energy management, transportation systems, and buildings. Europe has a leadership position in smart cities. Thanks to European Commission initiatives like Horizon 2020, Europe is transforming its cities to become more sustainable and improve the quality of lives. In the case of Brazil, like other countries in Latin America, they need to do more progress in smart cities because they have major problems in traffic, energy, water, and government. For now, Brazil mostly focuses on energy-related strategies. Lastly, the USA and Canada already have advanced organization in most of their cities. However, both countries aim to transform their cities more innovative, more connected and more sustainable. Furthermore, the foundation of public and private entities for the management, infrastructure and equipment financing and financial resources are the key success factor for SCPs around the world.