If some civilians are pushing against the idea of smart cities, then it defeats that specific purpose. One of the main purposes of smart cities is to get civilians to be more proactive in civic life. Another potential problem could be to get people on board with the whole smart city concept and the likelihood of everyone adopting the smart city lifestyle. City officials could put privacy policies in place where the cities vow to protect individual privacy, but how protected would our privacy actually be? If we lived in a space where information is constantly being passed around and used, privacy is something we could lack, and the feeling of constant 'policing' could make civilians feel uneasy. However, one of the primary concerns we need to take into consideration is privacy.

In theory and on paper, the concept of smart cities is very appealing and seems to pose a great deal of benefits for urban development because they are designed to be more eco-friendly, accessible, sustainable and profitable. This in turn would also create more accountability on the civilians to be more proactive in civic participation, improving the quality of life in urban areas not only for themselves, but for other civilians as well. The other primary benefit of smart cities is that city officials would have a better way to communicate with civilians about the issues the civilians are running into.

The hope is that gathering this information will provide insight on potential urbanization solutions that will lower costs, protect the environment, provide essential services to civilians, reduce carbon footprint and improve traffic conditions to name a few. Sensors would be strategically placed to transmit and gather information, and big-time data would be used to point out flaws and help city officials remedy those flaws. These smart cities will be able to overall improve city operations by regulating traffic, transportation, telecommunications, range of services provided to civilians and more.

So how would this all work? The basic idea of smart cities is that by merging ICT and IoT together, the quality of life will improve because real-life monitoring and predictive analytics will be able to anticipate potential inefficiencies in various aspects of urban city life.

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