The Impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on Smart and Sustainable Cities

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the implementation of smart sustainable cities. For this purpose, a data mining process was conducted to analyze the terms that had a higher incidence in the literature in order to classify them by relevance and identify their interdependencies in the concepts of sustainable cities and smart cities. As a result, we highlight that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have implications on several factors that are deeply connected to the success of cities in becoming sustainable: job creation, industries, innovation, environmental preservation, community involvement, and accessibility. In this context, policymakers will have opportunities and challenges that must be faced. Big data, the IoT, augmented reality, and simulations can have positive and negative externalities. Positive externalities include new information that could be mined, analyzed, and used for identifying previously unseen problems, the provision of new industrial innovations that can make economies thrive, helping promote inclusion for disabled people, as well as helping society to foresee problems and hence adapt to them in a timely manner.