Identifying Smart City Indicators and Key Components Before its implementation in the suburbs of Qom city

The rapid increase in urban population has led to the emergence of new features and conditions in the structure of cities. In other words, the massive influx of residents into the suburbs has led to chaos and disorder, which creates conditions that have not only deteriorating the balance of cities, but also have made it impossible to achieve sustainability with current methods of urban management and development. One of the new concepts to address the current challenges of cities in the field of urban planning is the development of smart cities, which has attracted much attention in recent years. Smart cities,as the future of human cities, is a city engaged in technology, flexibility, stability, creativity and livability and are becoming part of the national policies, because they pertain to increasing the quality of life of citizens. The purpose of this study is to identify smart city indicators and their effective key components before its implementation in the suburbs of Qom city. 

This study is an applied study which has an analytical-explanatory nature. both quantitative and qualitative methods were used for the research. Managers and local informants of Qom were selected as the statistical population, and based on purposive sampling, 30 people were selected as the sample group. SPSS software, FAHP model and grounded theory were used to analyze the data.  

47 concepts, 21 semantic units and 9 categories were extracted from interviews with experts which include co-creation and partnership in smart city development, leadership of Qom city to making it smart, empowerment of labor force, formulation of cross-sectoral approaches, reducing the gap for digitalization, institutional gap, improvement and development of new forms of management, innovation, integration. Finally, the results of the FAHP model showed that among the extracted categories the priority is with co-creation and participation in smart development. 

Qualitative data analysis indicates the importance of recognizing the main indicators of the smart city in suburban before implementation. Also the evaluation of the proposal framework in the form of categories showed that co-creation and participation in smart development can be the basis of smart neighborhoods in Qom.