Smart Cities

Smart Cities of Serbia

The publication Smart Cities of Serbia – Innovation and Resilience of Local Communities in Serbia in 2021 deals with the Smart City concept that transcends mere technological innovations in urban areas and addresses many challenges of the cities of the future while perceiving the smart city as an ecosystem of smart solutions in which actors and stakeholders are committed to sustainable development and in which new technologies are used to achieve sustainability goals (of economic, social and environmental aspects of development).

Cities, as key economic hubs of our global community, have shown all their vulnerability in the past. Cities did not absorb health risks but deepened and dispersed them throughout their territories. The perceived lack of resilience has been linked to existing territorial and social inequalities that have not been addressed for too long. On the other hand, the pandemic that marked the year 2020 represents an unexpected opportunity to accelerate the introduction of digital technologies in everyday life, especially in cities. The new challenges faced by the cities have led to innovative development of existing digital infrastructure. New parameters such as social distance and the number of people in public places have been introduced into the smart city equation. Optimization has gained completely new indicators.

Certainly, one of the first steps in creating smart communities is to involve citizens in decision-making. To improve the relationship between citizens and local self-government in the application of the concept of smart cities we need: open data collected by local self-government (with anonymization and protection of privacy), interactive maps and schemes, access to data on local government’s performance and results in a certain field, live streaming of local assembly sessions, but also dynamic and active use of local self-government accounts on social networks. These measures can improve the level of civic participation, but also citizens' trust in local institutions.

A survey on the capacity for innovation and on resilience of local communities in Serbia, conducted in September and October 2020, showed that local self-government units see the introduction of the Smart City concept as a very positive trend, with a very good understanding of context, preconditions and assumptions. The research confirmed the need to develop a clear methodological pattern according to which a system of Smart City indicators will be defined.