Low-carbon Cities

[019] Linking smart city and urban sustainability issue: A comparative study of smart city services in Japan and Korea

Hyunyoung Ryu, Hwajin Lim

Keywords:smart city; urban sustainability, comparative study, Korea; Japan

The smart city constitutes an imagined future city that achieves improved service efficiency through technological development. However, the question of how a smart city approach can contribute to existing or future urban challenges remains unanswered. Therefore, this study attempts to link the smart city trend with urban challenges by comparing two countries, Korea and Japan. Smart city initiatives and plans were collected from 16 cities in Korea and 20 cities in Japan. We then categorized these cities into four urban types and identified potential urban challenges as physical, economic, social, and environmental issues. An overview of the smart city trend shows that new services, such as data, enable key urban transition and that this is more achievable when local governments have an integrated long-term plan. However, local government constraints in service areas reflect their dependency on national government funding and in this respect, local university collaboration and living lab can be effective measures. Nonetheless, due to the existing urban issues in the era of degrowth and aging, smart city strategies can potentially overcome the lack of resources and insufficient governance in the long-term.