شهرهای هوشمند و مدیریت شهری دیجیتالی Smart Cities and Digitized Urban Management

1 Background By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to reside in cities and urban agglomerations (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2014). Cities have always showcased the best and the worst aspects of humanity – gleaming skyscrapers, art, and inventiveness on the one hand; slums, crime, and abject poverty on the other. Such challenges, which cities already face, will be further amplified by increasing urbanization, and it will be coastal cities in particular that bear the brunt of the global threat of climate change. Not without reason is the quest for ‘‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’’ one of the UN’s explicit sustainable development goals (United Nations 2015). To reach this goal, city governments and urban businesses are increasingly turning to information technology and systems as a way to make cities more efficient, sustainable, and resilient. Around the world, various initiatives seek to bring stakeholders together and leverage digital means for improving urban life. Examples include the European Union’s Smart Cities and Communities funding line (European Commission 2018), the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative (100 Resilient Cities 2018), or the Smart Nation Singapore project (Smart Nation and Digital Government Office 2018). Being involved in several of these or similar efforts, when talking to city officials we frequently encounter two issues that are perceived as fundamental for a successful transition to a smart, sustainable, and resilient city. The first relates to a solid IT infrastructure, be it city-wide Wi-Fi, broadband Internet access, or low-power networks to connect smart objects. These and similar technologies are often considered to be a necessary foundation to enable the emergence of smart services within the city. The second issue shifts the focus away from the technology to the people within the city, arguing that smart cities should first and foremost be human(e) cities. Technology should be employed to benefit the people within the city and be designed with the needs of the population in mind. The analysis of the design and use of information technology and systems in its organizational and societal context is central to the Information Systems discipline. Consequently, the digital transformation of cities should be a vibrant research area within our community, allowing scholars to study the impact of IS-induced change at a scale