Smart cities, big data: an overview

Urbanisation proceeds rapidly world-wide as cities continue exhibiting strong agglomeration economies, creating opportunities and challenges for using data driven tools and technologies in city planning. A ‘smart city’ movement is capturing increasing attention with ‘big data’ and ‘big data analytics’ enabling capture and interrogation of vast amounts of existing and emergent sources of data, including through ‘open data’ initiatives, with research infrastructures innovations facilitating on-line data integration, interrogation and visualisation. The chapter addresses how a gulf remains between research approaches - that tend to have a broad focus encompassing sustainable development to enhance economic, social, environmental, and quality of life outcomes - and what is happening in practice - which continue to be ICT driven with a focus on enhancing management to better deliver services, manage traffic, and the like -in ‘smart city’ strategies and projects that harness ‘big data’.