Smart Cities: Concept, Pillars, and Challenges

The concept of a smart city is synonymous with the enhancement and enrichment of quality of life. Smart city holds the promise of digitization of a city’s systems and processes, revolutionizes the green city concept, and has the potential to revert the global warming phenomenon. It ensures democratizing the data securely. Although smart city projects vary in their scopes and scales across the globe, in general, the fundamental building blocks of a smart city are consistent. In this chapter we review the common blocks and discuss challenges to be addressed in the future.