Evaluating the Context-Adaptiveness of Mobility Visions for Future Smart Cities

The idea of the Smart City, which promises solution pathways to urban problems through the support of ICT integration, is being materialised in cities across the world. However, while any urban transition process should be context specific, and thus different for smaller or larger cities, or low- and middle-income or high-income countries, it appears that technology-forward ‘Smart City solutions’ are often proposed regardless of context, in particular in low- and middle-income countries. To better understand the level of ‘context-adaptiveness’ of Smart City visions, we need tools to help evaluate and compare existing implementations and shape future proposals. In this paper, we specifically focus on the way Smart City visions and projects address or present the theme of mobility, and interpret context-adaptiveness as the adoption or creation of culture-specific smart mobility practices. To evaluate and compare cases, we adopted an existing framework to evaluate Smart City mobility, and extended it to include assessment criteria for Smart City mobility, based on UNESCO’s CCC (Cities, Culture, and Creativity) framework. We used this evaluative framework to perform a comparative analysis of eight Smart City projects from Europe and Asia, from high-income and low- and middle-income countries. We found that low- and middle-income countries have more Uniqueness of Mobility Systems than high-income countries. If future city visions proposed by low- and middle-income countries would focus more on the Uniqueness of Mobility Systems, their smart and context-adaptive level could be comparable with high-ranked Smart Cities in high-income countries. By this evaluation, we demonstrate it is a useful tool to evaluate smart mobility systems, including the cultural aspects that are a key component of the context-adaptiveness of Smart Cities. In the future, we plan to apply this framework to a wider range of Smart City themes to demonstrate and improve its applicability and robustness.