Publications

Implementing E-Government applications and technologies enables a country to address the fundamental questions of how cities function, how they are organized, and how businesses and processes could be made intelligent for citizens. These questions constitute the key elements, which existence is crucial as an enabler for the transformation towards Smart Sustainable Cities (SSC). Currently, there exists a competition on how to interpret the concept of SSC, its definition and elements. However, the international community identified its dimensions to be Smart Economy, Smart People, Smart Governance, Smart Mobility, Smart environment and Smart Living. SSC has become a notion that countries around the globe aim to being associated with it as a sign of development. In line with this, many countries have been claiming to have developed their Information Societies and increasingly focused on sustainable development policies. The latter is true as evidenced by various existing measurement models developed by the international community tackling different aspects of the Information Society and sustainability. Selected countries also claimed that given their advancement in developing their information societies and development policies, then they have progressed enormously in the transformation towards SSCs. These claims cannot, so far, be properly proved as there is still no holistic measurement model that allows us to identify and differentiate between the levels of smartness of SSCs while considering sustainability in parallel. Therefore, in this research, a multidimensional methodological model that assists in evaluating the smartness level of a city will be introduced. It will help building an integrated vision of a city and identify what makes cities smarter than others while maintaining sustainability at the core of the research.