Dr.Hesham Mohamed El-Barmelgy

Existing urban areas in Egypt suffer from environmental, economic and social issues. The smart city concept is an approach that improves urban performance and helps to manage urban areas in different sectors to gain social economic and environmental benefits and improve the quality of life. Most governments around the world adopt the concepts of smartness as a main objective in creating new cities and communities. Studies covering the requirements for applying the concept of smartness in future planning have been well addressed. However, the idea of the ability of existing urban areas to apply the requirements of smartness has received less attention leading to a research gap area. The paper aims to address the issue of applying the concept of smartness within the context of existing urban areas. Based on a profound theoretical study, a model is inducted. The proposed Smart Urban Upgrading Model (SUUM) is able to measure the ability of the existing urban areas to promote and implement the requirements of smartness. In other words, the model is to act as a manual for integrating the concept of smartness into existing urban areas. Finally, aiming to test the ability of the innovated model (SUUM) to address the Egyptian context, an online questionnaire with Egyptian experts is conducted online via Google forms and findings are analyzed using SPSS.