It’s Not a Fad: Smart Cities and Smart Villages Research in European and Global Contexts

Abstract

Abstract:Research on smart cities matures and new interdisciplinary approaches to the study of smart cities are proposed. At the same time, problems pertinent to communities inhabiting rural areas tend to be addressed, as if by the way, i.e., as a part of discussions in neighboring fields of research, be it environmental studies, sociology, or agriculture. Arguably, the concept of 'the village' has been largely absent in the academic debate, even if rural areas and countryside communities have been a subject of concern for robust policy frameworks, such as the European Union's Cohesion Policy and Common Agricultural Policy. As a result, when advances in sophisticated information and communication technology (ICT) led to the emergence of a rich body of research on smart cities, the application and usability of ICT in the context of a village remained underdiscussed in the literature. Through this Special Issue, and the Editors' earlier research on this topic, the Editors hope that the idea of the 'smart village' will be introduced into the debate. Against this backdrop, the objective of this opening review is three-fold: (i) to outline the conceptual boundaries of the term smart village, (ii) to highlight the thrust of the challenge inherent in smart villages research, and (iii) to shed light on the smart village research agenda as it unfolds. The relevance and validity of these claims are supported by references to research submitted to the Special Issue titled "Sustainable Smart Cities and Smart Villages Research".

Smart City Development and Residents’ Well-Being

“…This shows that the roles of safety experience, usefulness experience and convenience experience are different in affecting residents' SWB. In summary, with consideration of residents' experience of SISS, these results supported the views of Anthopoulos [3], Visvizi and Lytras [24], and Lytras and Visvizi [39] regarding the relationship of smart city construction and residents' well-being: safety, usefulness and convenience are three key characteristics of residents' experience in SISS influencing their SWB. In addition, we incorporated residents' experience into smart city construction, which expanded the research scope of the smart city from urban planning and technological progress to a humanistic perspective, and promoted user orientation in smart city construction.…”

“…In this way, residents' need for autonomy and competence will be better satisfied, and their happiness will be improved [67]. On the other hand, an effective convenience experience will help residents save time and effort in accessing information and services based on SISS [24,63,68], which allows them to have more time and energy to engage in social interactions and interpersonal communication than before. Moreover, self-determination theory believes that the satisfaction of individuals' relatedness need is related to social interaction and interpersonal relationships, which is beneficial to individuals' pursuit of meaningful happiness [50,69].…”

Development of Smart Healthcare System Based on Speech Recognition Using Support Vector Machine and Dynamic Time Warping

“…There are a lot of underlying issues when providing smart solutions based on IoT devices. As a result, we studied the main issues that should be considered from the literature research in References [19,20]. The authors stated that security, and privacy are the main concerns for smart city applications.…”

Towards a Smart and Sustainable City with the Involvement of Public Participation—The Case of Wroclaw

“…From the viewpoint of this article, it should be noted that the concept of smart city can be also considered in terms of research issues undertaken by scientists. A holistic and interdisciplinary approach to the issue of SC research in the cities and villages is presented in papers of Visvizi and Lytras [70][71][72] . They argue [71] (p. 134) "that smart cities research needs to be based on real tangible experiences of individuals inhabiting rural and urban space and that it also needs to mirror and feed into policy-design and policymaking processes".…”

“…They argue [71] (p. 134) "that smart cities research needs to be based on real tangible experiences of individuals inhabiting rural and urban space and that it also needs to mirror and feed into policy-design and policymaking processes". Visvizi and Lytras notice also that [72] (p. 1) "the application and usability of ICT in the context of a village remained underdiscussed in the literature" introducing the idea of the 'smart village' into the debate. Annapoulos et al [73] carried out a review and comparison of the smart city conceptualization models, indicating architecture, governance, planning and management, data and knowledge, facilities, services, people, and finally environment as occurring directions of conceptualization.…”