On Thursday, the 11th of March 2021, Yirang Lim will defend her PhD dissertation, entitled: Impacts of Smart City Development: Experience of South Korea.
Due to the Covid-19 measures, this defence will take place online. The link to attend the event will be shared a few days in advance.
The dissertation developed by Yirang Lim intends to explain how smart city development influences the sustainability of the cities. It touches upon the impacts of smart cities theoretically and empirically and presents the South Korean experience, where the national government strongly promotes smart city development.
The thesis gives an overview of smart city development’s positive and negative impacts, whether hypothesized or observed by a systematic literature review. The positive impacts are observed in economic, environmental, social, governance, and technological dimensions. On the other hand, some negative impacts were also observed as smart cities are worse in CO2 emission in the industrial sector, equality, transparency and democracy, and privacy issue. Since the results showed both positive and negative impacts, it calls for carefully constructed intervention.
The research also talks about how the South Korean government can regulate and supervise smart city projects by restriction of intention of private corporates that can sometimes be opposing to the public interest. At the same time, top-down and pre-made strategies can enhance efficiency in project implementation. Nevertheless, as critics point out, the top-down approach is rigid and hinders various urban solutions while bottom-up and citizen-initiated projects can identify the city’s real problems and develop innovative solutions. Public, private, academic, and civil initiatives need to work together for desirable results of smart city development.
Join Yirang's defence to hear more about her research.
