Abstract
The Smart City paradigm has already become a well-known trend in planning science, whereas the Smart Village concept is currently an emerging idea. It was initially formulated in the works of Brian Heap (e.g., Heap 2015; Heap and Hirmer 2020; Holmes, Jones, and Heap 2015). Very few books have been written on the topic thus far and even fewer are available in English (e.g., Visvizi, Lytras, and Mudri 2019). Besides, the books written so far primarily address the British and European experience and hardly go beyond that. A new edited monograph Smart Village Technology: Concepts and Developments is a valuable and long-expected addition to the field of planning and constructing eco-friendly and sustainable rural settlements.
The book consists of four parts (Smart village policy and technology; Smart agriculture and water management; Smart renewable energy management; and IoT and Smart Application) divided into twenty chapters written by fifty-eight researchers whose scholarship focuses on sixteen countries, including Brazil, Brunei, China, Germany, India, Iran, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, and the United States. This impressive list reflects the editors’ brave endeavor to find suitable responses to the contemporary challenges of villages and rural populations at the global scale. In doing so, Patnaik, Sen and Mahmoud integrate the Global North and Global South; developed and developing countries; European and Asian attitudes; modernist and traditional societies; and Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Confucian religious, cultural, and social heritage in an attempt to develop a common framework for planning smart villages all over the globe.
Part 1 (chapters 1–7) focuses on different aspects of smart village innovations, policies, and technologies, for example, Internet of Things (IoT), epidemiological screening, nanotechnology application, digitization of health programs, wireless sensor networks, and so on. Part 1 introduces the reader to the smart village paradigm which is based on the philosophy of a self-sustaining ecosystem. In addition to describing the specific technological aspects of smart villages, the authors in this section also highlight new approaches to resilience and innovation in rural area planning including social education and empowerment; health education of administrators and officials; the introduction of new applied courses on smart village administration for MBA students; encouraging entrepreneurial activities; raising investments through tourism; re-considering water management systems (introducing reverse osmosis and rain water harvesting); and enhancement of sanitation conditions in villages. Part 2 (chapters 8–15) discusses smart agriculture, water management/supply, waste removal, epidemic-free rain and stormwater harvesting, vertical farming, big data application, and green infrastructure in rural communities. Part 3 (chapters 16–18) analyzes novel smart energy techniques that can be applied in smart rural areas, especially in zero-energy communities, to reduce the global climatic impact. Renewable energy receives close attention here including solar electrification, biofuel production, and algae-powered factories. Finally, part 4 (chapters 19 and 20) investigates various possibilities of computing and using smart electronic applications in smart villages.
Taken altogether, the authors’ conceptualization of the smart village has several distinct features: it is a self-sustaining settlement; it is mainly ecological-friendly; along with dumping (or removing by transport) drainage and waste to the outside areas, it includes partial recycling; its agricultural products make it a “classical” rural habitation; it has modular structure; each module has its own IT controller; all IT controllers are connected into the local network; IT processes are controlled and managed by artificial intelligence (AI) which uses capacities of cloud computing (CC) and IT Management and Control Centers; it is not only sustainable but resilient as well (Sassin 2020). The authors emphasize that “education, health, sanitation, information connectivity, electrification, and the establishment of cottage and small-scale industries are the critical dimensions of a ‘smart village’” (p. 3). Much of the daily routine of the smart village is done by machines and robots. Chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5 direct significant attention to remote control and wireless operations. Every structural component in the smart village is more or less automated—for example, the authors suggest using GPS-enabled robots with embedded IT controllers for many types of work in the agricultural sector, from plowing to harvesting (chapters 8–11). While chapters 8 to 11 focus on the main structural elements of smart villages, chapters 12 to 20 describe sustainable technologies for building infrastructure in and around the smart rural settlements.
The case studies provided in the book highlight the challenges and opportunities of applying smart information and communication technologies in specific cases such as in small-scale farms, isolated communities, peri-urban areas, urban-type villages, circular economy-based settlements, hard-to-reach regions, including mountainous and highland areas, and depopulated zones.
Smart Village Technology’s target readership might be local administrators, government officials, engineers, architects, and other planning professionals. The book might appeal to two types of readers: those interested in using the book to access a conceptualization of what a typical smart village should look like and those interested in the nuances and diversity of smart villages from around the world.
While the strengths of the book are the global case studies and a common framework that can be used to understand smart villages, the book does not resolve for a reader, the contexts within which smart village technologies might be translated globally. For example, chapter 4 describes the Swiss experience of building smart networks and other digitalization initiatives in the Alpine mountain regions. Chapter 5 elaborates the experience of the United States and Germany. However, social attitudes toward smart villages in the United States, Europe, Canada, and British Commonwealth countries may be dissimilar from that of developing countries. The smart village structure as described by the authors of the book is designed to incorporate many automated operations accomplished by robots, vehicles, and other devices. All or almost all operations in a smart village are to be done with the use of wireless sensing, remote control, and networks. However, the book does not contemplate the challenges of automation and data such as information safety and data protection, and the economic imbalances that might be created by automation.
Smart Village Technology is a must-have for those who work within smart village programs in suburban and rural regions. In addition to providing invaluable and detailed technological descriptions of smart villages, the book contains a grand vision of innovative rural settlement planning that is more eco-friendly than most contemporary types of settlements. The book, therefore, is successful in describing contemporary practice, futurism, the mundane realities of rural life, and visionary projects. That is why the importance of the book cannot be overestimated. Perhaps, with more and more smart villages built around the world, the consequences of such devastating epidemics of infectious disease as COVID-19 may be deadened if not overcome. However, as it is always true with grand ideas, they need considerable time to be fully comprehended and accepted by the professional community and general population.
This work was supported by Government program of basic research in Koltzov Institute of Developmental Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in 2022, no. 0088-2021-0008.
