This article is a single source introduction to the emerging concept of smart cities. It can be used for familiarizing researchers to the vast scope of research possible in this application domain. The smart city is primarily a concept and there is still not a clear and consistent definition of among practitioners and academia. In a simplistic explanation, a smart city is a place where traditio...

Due to the increasing urbanization around the world, cities are growing at fast pace and following that, many cities face problems that includes both hard and soft issues. This can for instance be transportation, energy suppliance, social inclusion and quality of life for its citizens. As a way to contribute to solving these problems the smart city concept has emerged. This concept is focusing ...

Products and services offered under the smart city umbrella cut across numerous city operations and systems that benefit a range of stakeholders. Increasing urban populations raise the needs for innovative systems that are capable of regulating the use of resources within cities. City inhabitants are first-hand victims of the potential problems accompanying urban living. Much often, the inputs ...

By leveraging advancements in information and communications technology (ICT), Smart Cities offer many potential benefits like improved energy efficiency, management and personal security. However, this dependence on ICT also makes smart cities prone to cyber attacks. In this paper, we investigate the topic of cybersecurity for smart cities. We show how the specific characteristics of smart cit...

A good interaction between public administrations and citizens is imperative in modern smart cities. Semantic web technologies can aid in achieving such a goal. We present a smart urban fault reporting web platform to help citizens in reporting common urban problems, such as street faults, potholes or broken street lights, and to support the local public administration in responding and fixing ...

The drastic increase in urbanization over the past few years requires sustainable, efficient, and smart solutions for transportation, governance, environment, quality of life, etc. The Internet of Things (IoT) offers many sophisticated and ubiquitous applications for smart cities. The energy demand of IoT applications is increased, while the IoT devices continue to grow in both numbers and thei...

Can cities be smart? In this article we define what a smart city is and formulate categories and indicators of smart and/or informational cities. Based on these measures, we investigate four Japanese cities as case studies that appear to be highly developed modern metropolises. We focus on infrastructures essential for an informational city as base for a ubiquitous, smart (in a narrow sense), c...

Contemporary and future cities are often labeled as “smart cities,” “digital cities” or “ubiquitous cities,” “knowledge cities,” and “creative cities.” Informational urbanism includes all aspects of information and (tacit as well as explicit) knowledge with regard to urban regions. “Informational city” (or “smart city” in a broader sense) is an umbrella term uniting the divergent trends of info...

Urbanization grows steadily, i.e. more humans live at one place and rural areas are more unpopular. Urbanization faces challenges for city planning and development. Cities have to deal with large crowds, high energy consumption, large quantities of garbage etc. Thus, smart cities have to meet many requirements of different areas. Hence, realizing smart cities can be supported by linking differe...