IDENTIFICATION AND PRIORITIZATION OF BARRIERS IN BUILDING SMART CITIES

The concept of Smart Cities (SC) is turning into a major focus for government which aims to ensure development in country. In the last decade the growth of urbanization has been exponential, this exponential rate has raised the pressure for adjusting the prevailing infrastructures and financing in new infrastructures, to support the flow of goods and people, as well as to minimize the effect which has occurred due to it like environmental degradation and quality of life of citizens etc. This growth of population and urbanization has led to innovative methods to manage urbanization with minimal impact on environment, peoples lifestyles, governance and then initially integrating city operations with ICT (information and communication technology) and later with IOT (internet of things) which founded the smart city with minimum human interaction in city operations and then smart city emerged as a solution to handle the issues raised due to exponential growth of urbanization and population. However, there are still several barriers which act as a challenge in smart city initiative. Therefore, this work aims at identification and evaluation of barriers in implementation of smart city initiative. Now after this the 26 identified barriers from the research work and expert's inputs were found and categorized into sub categories of Governmental, Technical, Environmental, Societal and Financial barriers. The listed barriers are then evaluated to determine their relative impact on smart city concept using an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique. In this process pairwise comparisons are done on the basis of the opinion of the experts as it is not necessary that the opinion of expert is always unbiased. According to the findings from the research work, the category of barriers related to ‘Government'was given the highest importance among other barriers in adopting smart city initiatives. Overall the purpose of this work is to provide policy makers and officials with useful guidelines to define and implement their Smart city strategy against the barriers on the basis of impact of barriers on implementation of smart city which lead to better quality of life of citizens, sustainable environment etc.