No abstract

Many cities in Indonesia are prone to disasters, and the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic taught a lesson on how important for a city to be resilient to disaster. Previous studies indicated that smart city initiatives could improve a city’s resilience toward disasters. This paper sheds light on how implementing innovative initiatives can improve a city’s resilience toward disasters. We review the existing literature on smart city and resilient city concepts and conduct a focus group discussion with the representative of the local government of Tangerang city, Banten province of Indonesia, to understand how the city improves its resilience towards disaster by implementing smart city initiatives. The results indicate that city has developed various software applications and community engagement programs to break the chain of transmission. The results also suggest that city leadership and citizen engagement play an essential role in developing a smart and resilient city.

The smart city concept has been implemented in countries worldwide as the solution for various urban problems. In Indonesia, the smart city movement was initiated in 2017 to create 100 smart cities. Previous studies identify challenges to the implementation and that smart people or smart citizens are essential dimensions of a smart city. This study aims to gain insights into the smart city implementation and citizen engagement in Indonesia through the online social network by conducting a focus group discussion (FGD) with four academicians and in-depth interviews (IDIs) with six representatives of the related government institutions. FGD and IDIs indicate that the implementation of smart cities should be adjusted according to the local situation. The critical success factors of the implementation are namely, local wisdom, transformational leadership, sustainability, and political content. The results also reveal that, in general, the city residents have been involved in implementing of the smart city through the online social network. However, a kind of incentive system is still required to ensure that the city residents are encouraged to solve the city problems.

Increasing urbanization cannot be avoided and occurs throughout the world, including in Indonesia. Population growth in urban areas has various impacts in almost all dimensions of life. One of the innovative efforts made by the government to overcome these problems is to develop and implement the concept of a smart city, by utilizing information and communication technology (ICT) to provide services to improve the quality of life of the community and maintain the sustainability of the urban environment. This study discusses a literature review on environmental quality degradation which occurs in urban Indonesia as well as initiatives in one of the dimensions of a smart city, namely the smart environment, which can be applied to overcome these environmental problems. The literature review shows that the application of IoT by using sensors and RFID, data cloud, and Twitter has been proven successful in overcoming some environmental problems.