Page 17 - Smart public health emergency management and ICT implementations - A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

3 Smart Sustainable Cities and public health

The international definition for smart sustainable cities, embraced by 17 United Nations agencies,
entities and programmes, under the umbrella of the United for Smart Sustainable Cities, is as
follows: "A smart sustainable city is an innovative city that uses information and communication
technologies (ICTs) and other means to improve quality of life, efficiency of urban operations, services
and competitiveness, while ensuring that it meets the needs of present and future generations with
respect to economic, social, environmental as well as cultural aspects ”.
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According to this definition, smart sustainable cities (SSCs) are in the process of leveraging cutting-
edge technologies to become greener, autonomous and more homogeneous 33,34 . In this respect,
cities form strategies and follow frameworks to adopt the best and most advanced technologies,
especially in the field of data management, big data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to make
cities autonomous or, in other words, enable them to make informed political and management
decisions. Such AI-based services could detect emerging trends in the absence of any human
intervention. However, it is still arguable whether AI’s superiority in terms of speed, accuracy,
reliability, latency, volume and convergence is still behind human decision-making capabilities,
especially on contentious issues 35,36 .

The campaign about SSCs has been associated with the importance of city resilience. In this regard,
a broad discussion about smart and resilient cities has been uncovered, especially after the UN SDGs
were established . Additionally, as indicated in Table 1 and its findings showed, there is a strong
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interrelation between city and public health systems. However, the interrelation between SSCs
and public health is still to be highlighted. An online search of the terms “smart city” and “public
health” provided 522 records in March 2020 (based on Google Scholar and none in ScienceDirect
and Scopus), all of which dealt with environmental disasters. In an attempt to focus on this article’s
scope, another online search with “smart city” and “health emergency” furnished 178 articles (on
Google Scholar and none in ScienceDirect and Scopus) of which only the work of Kickbush and
Sakellarides approached the role of SSC during a pandemic from an optimistic perspective –
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a set of principles were outlined in Flu City that enable cities to battle the threat of a pandemic
(p. 86). These include:

1. The public health system

2. Public-private partnerships
3. Trust in leadership

4. Citizen participation

The difference is that SSCs could enhance communication during pandemic threats, which does
not meet the past IBM’s predictions for early warnings and self-generated alerts .
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