# Creating Smart Cities: A Review for Holistic Approach
## 2 Research Questions, Significance and Outcome  
This paper aims to investigate the current distribution of publications in the literature related to research studies on smart cities where the focus was on three domains namely engineering, information technology and management. This study explores if these areas were studied in a silo or there are overlaps, and in particular investigates if there is a lack of research publications from the management perspective with a people-centric focus. Our study attempts to draw attention to this problem and presents the importance of addressing this limitation. We envisage that our study would encourage more research undertakings with a holistic approach in understanding and implementing smart cities from a people-process-technology perspective.  
This study pursues answers to the following two research questions and discussions, as illustrated in Figure 1 below depicting the 'what', for the research analysis followed by the 'how' and 'who' to obtain the context to the study. An underlying assumption that existing scholarly publications are disproportionately distributed between the three popular fields of IT, engineering and management is made based on a preliminary analysis that was carried out for this research. This resulted in the following two 'What' questions supported by the following 'How' and 'Who' questions as solutions as illustrated below:  
1. What is the proportion of distribution in the academic/scholarly publications related to smart cities among infrastructure engineering, IT and management?
2. What concerns can arise due to possible disproportionate distribution in publications, in the understanding of the concept of smart cities?  
Figure 1: Research questions—What—How—Who.  
There is a misconception that designing a city that is intended to incorporate fancy technology and innovation to be called a'smart city' would rebrand the city as a modernised or digitalised city [17]. However, if the city has only the highly smart technologies but has not been designed to make it safe and liveable for a normal resident, it would only result in effort and money wasted [15]. A city that has smart technologies but not connecting the citizens for their well-being could not produce intelligence for real problem solutions or life quality uplift [18]. Many cities transformed into smart cities to cater to the benefits of large businesses; for example, those technologies that advance transportation, logistic and business-to-business networking [18; 19], but not so much attention given to the workers who are employed by these businesses [16], but inherently experiencing problems such as commuting to work timely, safely and comfortably. These employees are the common citizens who would need to get to work and back home and have a desired standard of living. If the smart city development focuses on the macro aspect but ignores the micro aspect in which the people live, then the concept scope of a smart city should be revised to first accommodate the key stakeholders' requirement for a conducive environment [20]. Failing to understand that people-process-technology are interrelated would result in the implementation of the concept of'smart city' to falter thereby not catering to the necessities of people who are at the heart and core of a successful and functional city [21]. Therefore, it is essential to give due importance to the management of people (e.g., employees, students, volunteers, customers, public) or businesses (e.g., micro-enterprises, social enterprises, home-based businesses) to capture the regular local citizens' expectations while developing'smart cities' that have a technology-human connection [22]. This all-around course of action integrating people-process-technology would result in a more holistic approach to embrace engineering and information technology with equal importance of managing people's requirements.