Abstract
Cities are engines of growth, but they have been facing pressing challenges to their sustainability. With the rise of industrial 4.0 and digitalization, daily human interactions, business activities, and public services provisions, which are highly concentrated in cities, are increasingly digitalized and create what so-called big data. The big data becomes vital information that, with digital technologies, has been used to support urban planning and create new solutions to address challenges to sustainability of cities. This kind of practice has been attributed to a smart city metaphor that describes a feature of cities as "smartness". Literature has extensively conceptualized smart city from different perspectives. However, empirical evidences of smart cities are needed to draw best practices and identify challenges of actual implementation of smart city across geographical, social, economic, and political contexts, especially in Cambodia where some cities undergone implementations of initiatives to support smart city transformation since pre-Covid-19 period. The Cambodia Digital Economy and Society Policy Framework (2021-2035) emphasizes the digital transformations of citizens, businesses, and government. Such transformation, at the same time, would expect the emergence of "smart" industries and "smart" cities that benefit from utilization of big data and digital technologies. It is timely to explore progress of smart city implementations in Cambodia when the policy framework's scheduled building foundation and digital adoption phase has passed since last year. This study reviewed the implementations and examine characteristics of those smart city initiatives in Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville, Siem Reap, Kampong Thom, and Battambang. In general, smart city implementations in Cambodia are predominantly project-based and supported by development partners support. Those projects focus on several separated urban aspects such as mobility, security, environment, and governance. A national steering committee for smart city has been established to formulate policies of smart city. However, only two official roadmap documents of smart city, of Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, that set direction for implementation are formulated. This is a preliminary abstract from an ongoing research project. The research and the full report are expected to be completed in November.
Keywords: smart city, phnom penh, siem reap, battambang, sihanoukville, kampong thom
About the presenter
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