Architecting and Designing Sustainable Smart City Services in a Living Lab Environment

Abstract

In terms of sustainability, cities become smart when they provide smart services to the inhabitants using information and communication technologies without threatening the future of the environment, economy, or society. However, the process of developing such sustainable smart services has certain challenges, especially in understanding the real needs of the people living in the city. Citizens or, in a wider perspective, the inhabitants of the city are the key stakeholders in the case of smart services in a city. Active involvement of the people throughout the development process is a way of successfully designing such services. On the other hand, integrating sustainability, for example, including environmental data, into smart city services is challenging. Therefore, this research aims to combine environmental data with regular smart city services, while engaging city inhabitants in the development process. This approach was adapted from the concept of living lab methodology. Finally, an application developed following this method is presented and evaluated.

Arrowhead Technology for Digitalization and Automation Solution: Smart Cities and Smart Agriculture

“…The authors in [66] mention the following use-cases, also valid for Arrowhead: Smart City: Environmental monitoring (Air quality, Waste management), Outdoor parking management, Driver Assistance, Smart Irrigation for parks and public gardens, Augmented reality (for museums, culture institutions and others), Participatory sensing (citizens devices connected to the platform feeding information to enable services dependent on the citizen). According to [67], an architecture comprising Smart Mobility features may be a key factor in reducing travel time and traffic jams.…”

Smart Energy Transition: An Evaluation of Cities in South Korea

“…For that social networks, online participatory tools, and e-governance can be utilized to encourage communities to join and enables mutual communication [23,34,35]. The living lab is an example of a user-driven innovation that fosters citizen involvement in service development [18,29]. Inevitably, citizens need the ability to exploit ICT infrastructure [33].…”

“…There are studies on technological solutions such as big data analytics, self-learning, hybrid power systems for energy transition [7,11,12] and IoT, data management and governance, and a living lab for smart city development [3][4][5]18]. These studies provide valuable ideas on an improved energy system and more efficient data management for smart cities.…”

The Role of an Architect in Creating the Image of an Elderly-Friendly Sustainable Smart City

“…In the discussion on such a concept of urban development, the following notions are taken into account: "sustainability, quality of life, urban aspects, and the main topics comprise: society, economy, environment, and governance" [6]. As it was mentioned above, the knowledge about sustainable smart cities was created by the representatives of various scientific disciplines, who often worked in interdisciplinary teams and describe the problem from various perspectives, such as: social [11,12], economic [13], information technology (IT) and telecommunications [14][15][16], environmental [17], health [18][19][20][21], legal [22], transport and mobility [23,24], urban and spatial planning [25,26], etc. It should be emphasized that the recurring feature of the publications is that they do not concentrate on the discussion of one problem, but they show it in a broader context (therefore, the above pairing of the authors with a given aspect only informs that a given topic occurs in a given publication).…”

“…The diagnosed tasks and roles have been presented in a tabular form, taking into account the division into six building blocks of a smart city (the division has been taken from the already cited publication [32] (pp. [12][13][14][15][16]). It should be added that the partial problems presented below have in many cases been already investigated, but only as general problems, without reference to the issues of designing sustainable smart cities friendly to seniors.…”