Smart Methodologies for Smart Cities: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Smart cities are at the heart of countries’ strategies as an efficient approach for dealing with the global challenges identified by the United Nations in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and in the Paris Climate Agreement. The majority of those challenges reside in urban context and, given the rapid urbanisation trend, they can get worse if nothing is done to mitigate them. The global, national and local challenges, goals and targets are well identified in scientific and policy literature; the problem now is how to address these challenges and achieve the desired goals within a given target. This chapter sheds new light on the understanding on how the challenges can be addressed and the goals achieved through a ten-step methodology approach for smart cities. The proposed methodology for smart cities was a result of a comparative research study carried out with three methodologies of smart cities from Dubai, Istanbul and Montreal and drawn based on the experience gathered by the authors with the design of the smart sustainable city framework of UNU-EGOV.