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...

Internet of Things (IoT) solutions on smart cities are widely recognized to address the complexity of modern city operation. Concentration of population, scarcity of resources and environmental concerns are the significant challenges that face city operators, and make ordinary service provisioning less efficient. Recently, IoT application on smart cities gained a major attention from both acade...

The core argument of this chapter is that the Smart Cities Mission appears to present a disconnect between the actually existing city development and urbanization, and its primary goal of creating wealth by embedding technology in the built environment without first addressing the basic city problems is flawed. This chapter comprehensively presents the three challenges of urbanization facing In...

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...

In a world where resources are scarce and urban areas consume the vast majority of these resources, it is vital to make cities greener and more sustainable. Advanced systems to improve and automate processes within a city will play a leading role in smart cities. From smart design of buildings, which capture rain water for later use, to intelligent control systems, which can monitor infrastruct...

The holy grail of smart cities is an integrated, sustainable approach to improve the efficiency of the city’s operations and the quality of life of citizens. At the heart of this vision is the citizen, who is the primary beneficiary of smart city initiatives, either directly or indirectly. Despite the recent surge of research and smart cities initiatives in practice, there are still a number of...

The rapid urbanization of African cities is one amongst other composite challenges hindering Africa’s objective to provide stable socio-economic development and delivery of quality livelihood for its citizens and visitors at large. The establishment of Smart City initiatives in African cities is meant to improve the quality of lives of the residents of those cities. Information and communicatio...

Sharing information is a key enabler in the transition of a city becoming smart. Information, generated by the ICT backbone of a city, and maintained by distinct public and private entities, comes with processing challenges that must be addressed in order to increase citizens’ quality of life and make their cities sustainable. In CRISALIS and SysSec, we investigate such challenges from a securi...

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...