Challenges for Managing Smart Cities Initiatives: An Empirical Study

Extensive urbanisation is increasing on a global scale. The urban population is estimated to rise to 66 per cent by 2050. This significant urbanisation growth drives the consumption of resources causing resource shortages and posing significant environmental and social concerns. To manage these concerns municipal decision makers' attempt to leverage the smart city concept with collaboration between external actors as a means to maintain the prepossessed living standard in the city. The philosophy of smart cities is to see challenges as opportunities and take advantage of other trends such as digitalization. Smart cities may offer a major market opportunity that can be easily exploited by information and communication technologies providers and their telecom equipment partners. However, although the opportunity exits, capitalizing on it is not as straightforward as it seems. This paper investigates the predominant challenges in smart city initiatives from the municipal decision makers' perspective. The study is based on the findings of a survey conducted via 65 participants from various small and medium enterprises and large organisations. The results show that smart cities decision makers mainly perceive challenges with various technical and non-technical issues such as collaboration, economical, governance, social acceptance, and awareness of technology, as well as high technological risk, security and privacy of users and cyber-crimes issues.