Melasutra Dali

AN INITIATIVES-BASED FRAMEWORK FOR ASSESSING SMART CITY

Smart Cities have grown in prominence due to advancement in ICT and the new paradigm of sustainable city management and development. Whilst many authors have proposed guidelines and framework for Smart City implementation, less attention has been given to the assessment of Smart City performance. The mainstream Smart City assessment framework generally entails the quantitative assessment of factors, elements and initiatives categorised under the Smart City dimensions. However, this approach is problematic and impractical because it requires a large amount of different baseline data that is often at times unavailable due to various reasons. This paper describes an alternative framework for smart city assessment, one that is based on the modification of Giffinger’s to make it amenable to leaner data. The proposed assessment framework was adopted to assess the smart city performances of Seoul, Singapore, and Iskandar Malaysia which were then compared. With the use of the framework for the performance assessment, the city that has performed better than the others is able to be identified.

Sustainable Community Initiatives: A Unique Partnership And Participatory Approach

Existing research on partnerships between local governments and community-based organizations within Local Agenda 21 processes across the globe have embarked primarily on the advantages of partnership within the philosophical discourse of community participation as well as the barriers of such participation and their effects on intended partnership. Both empirical and qualitative findings which mostly cover the cases from the United Kingdom and European countries revealed the need to explore more in-depth aspects of Local Agenda 21 programme implementation. In Malaysia, the study of Local Agenda 21 programme participation and implementation remains deficient. In an attempt to evaluate the nature of partnership and participation through document analysis and participant observation, this qualitative study reports two major findings; first, there is a need for strong leadership within a community-based organization in order to mobilize its local resources, and second; there must be a willingness by the local government to employ external expertise and work closely with the main stakeholders to keep Local Agenda 21 processes growing and improving.