From Smart Cities to Smart Rural Country: challenges and sustainability

This work presents the current progress on smart cities initiatives, major breakthroughs and challenges. It also reviews the smart villages and smart rural environments as the next evolution of the smart cities vision. The purpose of the Smart Cities Mission is to drive economic growth and improve the quality of life of people by enabling local area development and harnessing technology, especially technology that leads to Smart outcomes. Technologies such as IoT (sensors, networks and applications) can be leveraged to improve city services, utilities, the environment and quality of life. All technologies have a common base, big data. Relevant data are collected by local sensors, such as citizens and local activities and global sensors, such as the environment, financial institutions and government sources. Data from disparate sources (traffic, air/water quality and usage, energy usage, resident movement) is constantly collected and is available for analysis The aim is to use the already gained expertise and insights from the smart cities approaches, applications and evaluations as well as the early works on smart villages and rural spaces to formulate the challenges and sustainability goals for the smart rural country. The findings of this work are mostly applied to medium- and long-term challenges as well as toward the notion of smart communities. Smart communities represent the notion of abstract connected objects within or spanning smart urban and rural spaces, such as smart cultural heritage, smart environment, and others. Introducing the non-technical goals for smart communities provides the sense of purpose and tangible targets for the technical-oriented smart urban and rural approaches, for aspiration and sustainability planning for the future.