ABSTRACT
Urbanization is an emerging topic in the 21st century, with 68% of the world’s population expected to shift from rural to urban areas by 2050. One of the remarkable dynamics of this process has been industrial revolutions, where disruptive technologies have empowered social and physical infrastructures to create new standards of prosperous and successful cities. At the center of the fourth industrial revolution, the ‘smart city’ has become a paradigm for what constitutes one of these new, prosperous, and successful cities. However, there is no common definition of a smart city; rather, the notion and vision of a smart city embraces multiple meanings and pathways. The Pacific Rim possesses some of the greatest economies as well as the largest smart city network in the world; however, ‘smartness’ does not make these cities in the region less vulnerable to the menace of climate change, widening socio-spatial inequality, and overcrowded urban cores. To seek an improved understanding of how Pacific Rim smart cities can cope with these ongoing challenges as well as the further rapid development of disruptive technologies, this chapter presents a systematic review of 141 studies of smart cities that were published from 1990 to 2018. The findings illustrate the evolution of smart cities, from their very first empirical appearance in Europe in 1994, through their insignificant development until 2010, and then a booming rise in their appearance in academic literature over the last decade. Through different chronological, geographical, and framework analyses, the chapter provides a holistic mapping toward a smart city biography and its association with economic advancement, constitutional supports, and innovative technologies.
