Building on Smart Cities Skills and Competences

More and more smart cities are emerging worldwide aiming to improved urban management and sustainable growth by the use of digital technologies. People comprise a crucial axis in these efforts, and a high-skilled workforce is key in making them a reality. However, the digital transformation of urban places has disrupted the skills that professionals need to possess in order to remain productive and competitive. Skilled workers are lagging behind demand, and therefore addressing the skill shortage of the smart cities’ workforce is vitally important. Our research aimed at identifying emerging smart city job roles and skills and providing a mapping among them to steer the development of contemporary lifelong education programs for smart cities’ workforce. We concluded that three primary new job roles are required for smart city professionals: the smart city planner, the smart city IT manager, and the smart city IT officer. Moreover, we created a framework with 102 skills classified into 4 categories (transversal, generic IT, DevOps, and smart city-related skills) and determined the 42 most important ones for smart cities. Transversal (soft) skills dominated the top 10, while social skills came in first. Finally, three curricula were produced by defining which of these 42 skills are mandatory for each smart city job role.

All European municipalities are by now engaging into major or minor efforts to transform into smart cities because smart means more opportunities for their citizens, businesses, and public-private collaboration. Becoming or being smart is intrinsically linked with skills necessary for appropriate developments and operations of digital infrastructure, platforms, and services. There is a virtuous circle of agglomeration benefits attracting skills, which in turn lead to more agglomeration economies. This explains the dynamics of model digital cities but also why many municipalities are left behind.

This chapter analyses the meaning and characteristics of smart cities. Their history, the concept, as well as the six axes of smart cities (smart economy, smart mobility, smart environment, smart people, smart living, and smart governance) serve as a basis to appreciate the skills needed for the transition. The labour market for smart cities is highly demanding in terms of the type of skills needed, which go well beyond ICT to include management and modern soft skills. We discuss them for the actors who will develop/use these skills and indicate ways how such skills can be obtained.

Nowadays, given the rapidity of recent technological advancements and their influence in all areas, key competences are needed as necessary requirements to cope with the complexity in different domains, where changes will become the norm in the future. Aiming to explore the topic of competences in smart cities, which is present at different disciplines, this study uses bibliometric analysis to achieve insight into new trends. The analysis was done on peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers, published after 2010 in the Web of Science database. The publications are classified into distinct clusters so formed by using classifying techniques, hence, to make the voluminous data more understandable. This research firstly aims to contribute to the advancement of the understanding for the competence concept and relating researching aspects in the academic literature regarding smart cities by building a visual map of the keyword concepts used and obtain a conceptual atlas of the existing literature. Secondly, it studies recent competence reviews emphasizing the most relevant thesis in the area. The impact of this study will be an update to the pool of knowledge on smart cities’ competences needed to reflect needs not only for a specific group of persons but for all involved domain stakeholders.

The complexity and diversity of the transformation of cities toward smart cities poses major challenges for decision-makers developing lifelong education concepts in this context for a variety of stakeholders as well as for teaching smart city competences. Blended learning education models pose further challenges regarding the didactic and organizational implementation of such education concepts. The aim of this chapter is to present an education concept to teach the transformation of cities toward smart cities. The concept integrates problem-based learning, gamification, and a virtual group work. In the virtual group work, students acquire theoretical and practical, transferable knowledge and competences concerning diverse and complex concepts of smart cities. After completing the group work, students will be able to tackle new and complex tasks in the context of smart cities and acquire further required smart city competences independently. The necessary design requirements for such an education concept are also briefly outlined, and the underlying design process is briefly described before the transferability of the education concept is discussed.

This research tries to capture the dynamics behind the municipality’s strategic design and implementation of smart initiatives. There are different types of municipalities in Greece, which translates to different needs motivating each to invest in smart initiatives. In parallel, cities always try to position their smart transformation in comparison with others. Along these lines, this research aims at mapping the adaptation process of a smart city strategy. The comparison is based on the unique characteristics the municipalities have. By using a unique, tailor-made questionnaire and advanced statistical techniques, PLS-SEM, the chapter identifies and analyses the unique characteristics of each type of municipality in different thematic areas of action during the strategic design and implementation of smart initiatives. Results show that most cities have embedded various forms of smart projects in their strategies with rather a partial implementation. Furthermore, we identify the characteristics of the variations in the implementation of a strategy, thus helping form policies and more efficient strategies. By mapping the crucial factors, it may open to successful mechanisms in developing smart strategies and help municipalities speed their smart transformation.

In the last couple of decades, with various societal, economic, technological, and environmental paradigm shifts, and increasing focus on global imperatives such as resilience, natural and health calamities/disasters, sustainability, circular economy, net zero, and the climate crisis, citizens’ expectations have changed. New disruptive technologies have emerged, bringing smart solutions to improve business and services operation, and digital transformation to change the way society is organized. Further, the recent pandemic has brought new challenges, concerns, and imperatives to the attention of smart city leaders. The impact is being felt in every nuance of the way cities are run, citizens live their lives, and urban infrastructure is designed and managed. With the ongoing development and maturity of Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, artificial intelligence, automatic control, and 5G, the standard of living quality of modern humans has been refined. Cities are complex organisms with multiple interdependent systems and numerous independent organizational units. All individuals and even autonomous residents make urban governance highly challenging. And, to meet these imperatives, new skills and competencies are critical for the existing and future workforces. This chapter enumerates the shifting paradigms and the required skills and competencies for sustainable digital transformation of urban landscape.

The number of smart cities is growing rapidly, a trend driven by changing conditions and needs within cities. To ensure the sustainability of smart cities, it is necessary to identify risks and develop appropriate risk response strategies to address the risks that threaten their existence. This chapter intends to constitute a guide on risks and relevant remedies to practitioners and academics who are involved in the development or operation of smart cities, as well as to highlight the required skills to achieve proper risk management. In order to achieve this, a systematic literature review is carried out. A total of 65 risks are identified which are grouped into the following 9 categories: economic, social, organizational, environmental, technological and technical, strategic, political, legal and security, while they are also presented in a Risk Breakdown Structure (RBS). Finally, an integrated risk response strategy system and the rationale behind it are proposed, in order to enhance opportunities and mitigate threats regarding smart city development and operation, by utilizing modern technologies and systems.

So far, cities have largely managed to face common risks and reduce the chances of happening. Regarding old, but especially new, risks, cities and communities need to show resilience—the ability to mitigate, absorb, adapt, and transform external pressures and threats. Over the years, cities tend to develop into smart cities. Like every other, a smart city has to face risks, like climate change, pandemics, etc., which cause huge losses in human lives and the economy. A major question arises here. Are the aspects of a smart city enough to make it resilient? Many of these aspects, indeed, contribute to a more resilient city. Although resilience is achieved mostly in smart cities, the features of a smart city may not be enough to make it resilient. Literature review shows that the research on the smart city or resilient city skills and competencies is in the early stages and there are insufficient findings to compare skills and competencies for a smart or resilient city. This chapter helps overcome this barrier, up to a point, by presenting major similarities and differences between a smart and a resilient city, as the background of topics and areas, where relevant skills and competencies will be needed.

Smart cities constitute complex ecosystems and urban fabrics, both physical and intangible, which are very promising in terms of improving, among other factors, sustainability, urban liveability, and citizens’ workability. Now, more than ever, smart cities attract considerable attention from both academics and practitioners. This growing interest often focuses on the evaluation of smart city’s development and deployment projects by specifically assessing if these projects successfully contribute to the “intelligence” of a city. The current chapter attempts to further contribute to this research direction. In particular, the chapter accelerates a city’s competencies by emphasizing a smart city projects evaluation framework that emerges from a bibliometric analysis focusing on the plethora of parameters that are set in relevant bibliographic sources with the aim to evaluate the success or not of a smart city. The performed bibliographic analysis highlighted, in terms of evaluating the success of smart city projects, the increased appearance of technical parameters and less interest in social or citizen-centric factors. The results of this study map the major bibliographic trends on the subject of smart cities or projects evaluation or success and, then, highlight the gap of the citizen-based approach in the evaluation of smart cities.

Smart city is a relatively new form of city that increasingly gains popularity and is considered as the way modern cities will achieve sustainable growth, service efficiency, and the well-being of their citizens. This transformation is a complex process that is implemented through projects that are usually an inherited complex. This research proposes a 12-dimensional complexity model with 45 corresponding metrics for assessing the complexity of smart cities’ projects based on project management aspects, technical characteristics of software (IT) development, and special characteristics of smart cities’ projects aiming to help project managers to deal with project complexity and hence to increase the possibilities for project success which will bring one step closer the “smart” transition of the city.

The effectiveness of government policies seems to be a function of increasing citizen participation through the active shaping of public policy and public service delivery (Singh & Kaushik, Platform for citizen engagement for good governance in India (pp. 48–66), 2020). Recognizing the importance of civic engagement, as part of participatory urbanism (Rahmat, Open cities | Open data: Collaborative cities in the information era (pp. 107–128). Palgrave, 2019) and collaborative governance (Bartoletti & Faccioli, Partecipazione e Conflitto, 13(2), 1132–1151, 2020), this article attempts to highlight and quantify its role in trying to develop the intelligence of a city. This article is based on two pillars. Initially, it decrypts and analyzes the concept of civic engagement and its potential by mapping the dominant bibliographic trends. It then considers the utilization of civic engagement and its integration in the process of developing the intelligence of a city, via a pilot study, the case of the Thessaloniki metropolitan area. Through its two pillars, this article highlights and quantifies the role of civic engagement in the effort to achieve the intelligence of a city and concludes by proposing actions to strengthen and redefine this role. Finally, it is important to emphasize that this article underlines civic engagement in the decision-making process of the respective municipal council or the phase of consultations and proposals and not at the phase of evaluating implemented smart projects. In other words, this article recognizes the importance of preliminary actions and chooses to focus on their benefits. At the same time, it is based on the fact that nowadays, due to the challenges of COVID-19, residents have recognized more keenly than ever the importance of urban space and the benefits of its proper design, so that they may desire to participate more in its urban processes. In addition, residents have become more familiar with the use of technology and are able to use smart applications to evaluate, propose, or vote on municipal project proposals for their cities.

Developing skills for smart cities need not happen only through formal educational programs. This chapter describes an initiative in Oman to develop a group of smart city ambassadors who are expert in some aspect of smart cities and to use these ambassadors to share knowledge with other stakeholders and contribute their expertise to smart city projects. The program provided an innovative, low-cost approach that contributed to developing a supportive ecosystem for smart cities. This chapter uses a case study approach to examine the key factors of the structure and operation of the program that contributed to its success as well as the skills development outcomes that were achieved. We discuss the potential for replicating the study as good practice in other contexts.

This chapter illustrates the relevance that smart learning ecosystems can assume in the education of smart citizens, considered as indispensable agents of the development of the smartness of the cities. Starting from the description of an alternative model of smart city—i.e., a people-centered one in which the smartness of the city and the citizens’ well-being can be identified as a multidimensional construct to the development of which the citizens themselves should actively contribute—we come to the definition of the space of competences that smart citizens should acquire. Therefore, we describe the subspaces that compose the main space—hard, life/soft and digital soft digital competences—together with their interdependencies and the transformations that the framework could undergo due to the continuous technological evolution. Finally, smart learning ecosystems, consisting of one or more schools linked to the context of reference and to their stakeholders by territorial pacts aimed at fostering regional development and social innovation, are identified as the elective contexts capable to train future smart citizens. Case studies of alternation schemes aimed at the development of the expected competences by students are provided, together with an overview on the associated process of micro-certification and, as well, some final warnings.

This chapter presents how e-deliberation can become a major tool to increase citizens’ participation in the decision-making process consequently enhancing the democratic process. We present a definition of e-deliberation and its main components along with a state of the art of relevant systems and their main operational characteristics. We argue that smart cities need “smart citizens” which is a willing subject in digitally shaped urban governance, infrastructure, and services. At the end, the participation of smart citizens to e-participation platforms (such as e-deliberation, e-voting, e-comment, etc.) raises an opportunity for citizens to get involved in the political and administrative process. Finally, the architecture and basic building blocks of a generic e-deliberation system (PODS) are presented.

This chapter explores how no-code development platforms could be used to empower smart city citizens with tools to change and improve their city systems. A city-wide API is discussed as well as its security and DevOps concerns. Example applications of these concepts are provided. Lastly, a vision of smart assistants helping citizens is explored.

Municipalities are called upon to adopt big data practices to organize and analyze the flow of the data that is collected in data silos, for the benefit of their citizens. In the Municipality of Patras, many of the existing smart services are not reclaimed to provide added value and benefits to the stakeholders. This occurs mainly due to the ineffective support and lack of knowledge and expertise in the big data and data analytics technologies that could be used for timely forecasts and effective interventions. This work presents a conceptual framework for the data integration of the existing and future smart systems of Patra’s municipality into an interoperability center. The aim is to normalize and organize the operation of the systems and also to optimize the interpretation of the data. Due to the specialized knowledge required for the understanding of the processes and the systems, the proposed conceptual framework should rely on one hand on the creativity of analysts and business knowledge and on the other hand on the application of automated discovery and evaluation of the induced patterns.

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed new challenges in preserving the goal of developing smart and sustainable cities worldwide while improving urban resilience. In the smart city domain, disaster or crisis management operations require contributions and collaboration from different types of entities with various functions, rules, and protocols, forming complex contexts in decision-making or event coordination. The management of the corresponding information usually coming from multiple heterogeneous sources and sometimes with attributes revealing semantic inconsistencies constitutes an emerging challenge. Furthermore, the demand for interoperability between the various services and IoT devices at local and national level is imperative. Yet, existing literature highlights that the conceptualization of a holistic reference schema that covers all the dimensions of the smart city disaster/crisis management domain and allows the exchange of information through different agents has not been fully addressed so far. We present the RES-Q (RESCUE) semantic model, which includes the needed domain knowledge streams for the smart city crisis management domain. This model aims for data consolidation and linkage in order to be further utilized for the implementation of a common knowledge repository and advanced analysis. In this context, semantic web technologies are proposed as a promising solution for providing semantic interoperability in crisis and/or disaster management in the smart city discourse. Finally, data consolidation and harmonization methodology is presented, which is used for the integration of different data sources, according to the RES-Q model.

Following a systematic literature review methodology, we focus on answering the following questions pertaining to smart cities and blockchain: (i) what was the reason that blockchain was proposed as the chosen solution? (ii) What blockchain-based applications are being proposed for smart cities? Based on 45 peer-reviewed academic studies all published in journals that met predefined search criteria, we find that the desire for high security, privacy, and trust are the reasons most cited for the use of blockchain for smart cities. Further, we discuss smart cities’ blockchain applications from the literature using a taxonomy framework. We conclude, highlighting the current blockchain challenges and future research opportunities, the skills that are needed to implement blockchain for smart cities and the need to change the current mindset of centralized control and trusted third parties to a more participative engagement model across smart cities.

Modern urban life is seeing an increasing rate of adoption of artificial intelligence and smart solutions; however, citizens are still struggling to keep up the pace, and the rate at which they acquire skills and knowledge around artificial intelligence and data analysis in smart cities is lagging behind. This paper is an attempt to determine which digital skills are necessary when dealing with smart cities. This article is structured as follows: we first refer to the two basic and fundamental branches of artificial intelligence and continue with applications that exist in these branches regarding smart environments. The research contribution of this article is important since it is one of the few in the international literature dealing with all branches of AI and big data (e.g., machine learning and rule-based applications) in smart cities. The conclusion of the present work is that there is an urgent need to create an education system in the new concepts of AI and big data analysis not only for scientists but also for citizens.