Smart Cities in Asia: Regulations, Problems, and Development

This open access book examines different aspects of smart cities, including technology, urban development, sustainable development, finance, and privacy and data protection. It also covers a wide range of jurisdictions in Asia-Pacific: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The book consists of two main parts. The first part includes general chapters that conceptualize smart cities and provide an overview of these cities’ problems such as privacy and data protection concern. The general chapters also discuss the role of public and private sectors in developing and governing smart cities. The second part encompasses country-specific chapters that examine the concepts addressed in the general chapters in practice by analyzing several specific smart city projects.

This book provides researchers and practitioners with some knowledge of a smart city and its implication in the Asia context. The book is designed with some general chapters updating the literature on smart cities for readers who are interested in an overview of this concept. Audiences who are curious about how smart cities are perceived and implemented in some Asian jurisdictions are benefited from country-specific chapters. The book is also helpful to general audiences whose interests lay at the intersection of law, governance, and technology.

Daniela Damian is Professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, where she leads the Software Engineering Global interAction research Lab (SEGAL). Her research has studied socio-technical and organizational aspects in software development, with a particular focus on the communication, information flow and coordination among the diverse set of stakeholders beyond the technical dependencies found in software code. Software development is driven by many other dependencies that are not of technical nature, but most often guided by the project requirements or business needs. In her research, she employs a synergy of empirical methods, data mining and social network analysis techniques to understand these complex interactions as well as develop methods, processes and tools to improve the effectiveness of communication and coordination in large, distributed software projects. Her recent projects also concern consumer data privacy in software development, as one example of non-functional requirements that greatly affect the success of software as it affects more and more aspects of our lives. Smart cities present a large-scale case of user data collection and analysis, and respecting user privacy creates unique challenges.

Thanh Phan is Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Victoria, Canada (UVic). His research is co-funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Canadian Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Advanced Scholars. He is also teaching Engineering Law at UVic. He worked for the Vietnam Competition Agency (VCA) for ten years as an expert in competition law enforcement, after two years at the Ministry of Justice of Vietnam. He also served as Member of the Vietnamese delegation negotiating Vietnam-EU and Vietnam-Customs Union free trade agreements. He has published journal articles in Canadian Journal of Law and Technology, Houston Journal of International Law, Louisiana Law Review, American Bar Association’s International Antitrust Bulletin, among others. He was educated at Hanoi Law University, Nagoya University, and the University of Victoria. He is also Member of the Software Engineering Global Interaction Research Lab where he is conducting research on global governance in cyberspace. His studies focus on three topics: national jurisdiction in cyberspace, the legal aspects of smart cities, and legal obligations of platform owners in peer-to-peer markets.