4 IR Technologies to Facilitate Planning in Smart Cities of the Future

Abstract

Urbanization is becoming a grave concern for city planners. Globally, as the urban population continues to grow and places greater demands on resources, citizens require quick, efficient, and cost-effective services, among other things. Critically, city planners must provide relevant infrastructural support to make their city run effectively. These include but are not limited to potable water, electricity, roads and bridges, housing, transportation, and information and communications technologies, among other things. To address this increasing demand in their cities, planners have turned to the use of technology to better assist them in the delivery of services to improve the lives of their citizens and stimulate the growth of their local and national economies. This chapter provides an overview of the types of technological solutions that are available to planners to assist them in facilitating the fast and efficient delivery of services to their citizens. These technological solutions include but are not limited to big data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), as exemplars. City policymakers will be able to use the knowledge generated from this chapter to derive policies around the employment of 4IR technologies to assist their cities in delivering better and more efficient services to citizens.