Smart cities in Jordan: Challenges and barriers

The smart city has emerged as a revolutionary concept that connects all the different aspects of our life, and the world is witnessing a change of the cities to become smart. As most of the literature related to smart cities refers to the experience of such projects in the context of developed countries, the primary aim of this study was to examine the factors affecting the implementation of smart city projects in a developing one, namely Jordan, through covering the gaps that existed in previous research. The factors examined were divided into: governmental, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental. The findings were based on semi-structured interviews undertaken with experts (seven participants from the private sector, five from the public sector, and three from academia) entrenched in smart city projects in Jordan. The findings of the study reveal that a lack of cooperation and coordination, unclear smart city vision, and poor private-public participation from the governmental group are found to be the top factors that hinder the transformation into a smart city. In the other groups, the need for more flexible legislation to obtain funding (economic factors), community involvement (social factors), poor data availability and scalability, integration and convergence issues across IT networks, and the lack of a database and a centralised analytics system (technological factors), the need for open data and access to such datasets, and lack of regulatory norms, policies, and directions (legal factors) and growing population problems (environmental factors) are the significant factors. This research project is useful to the government and policymakers in several ways. The paper ends with a number of recommendations and avenues for future research.