Exploring Social Capital in Situation-Aware and Energy Hub-Based Smart Cities: Towards a Pandemic-Resilient City

Abstract

Although the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic has appears to have subsided in most parts of the world, nevertheless, in addition to six million deaths, it has yielded unprecedented challenges in the economy, energy, education, urban services, and healthcare sectors. Meanwhile, based on some reports, smart solutions and technologies have had significant success in achieving pandemic-resilient cities. This paper reviews smart city initiatives and contributions to the prevention and treatment of coronavirus disease, as well as reducing its destructive impact, leading towards pandemic-resilient economic and health systems. Furthermore, the situational awareness contributions are reviewed in pandemic-resilient governance. The main contribution of this study is to describe the construction of social capital in smart cities as a facilitator in creating a pandemic-resilient society in crisis through two analyses. Moreover, this research describes smart cities’ energy as interconnection of energy hubs (EHs) that leads to a high level of resiliency in dealing with the main challenges of the electricity industry during the pandemic. Energy-hub-based smart cities can contribute to designing pandemic-resilient energy infrastructure, which can significantly affect resilience in economic and health infrastructure. In brief, this paper describes a smart city as a pandemic-resilient city in the economic, energy, and health infrastructural, social, and governmental areas.