Barriers To The Adoption Of Smart Housing Concept In African Smart City Projects

A city can be termed smart when it is able to effectively apply ICT and other smart technologies in achieving intelligent solutions to everyday challenges posed by the city. In view of this, smart housing concept leverage on smart technologies and data to solve housing problems in smart city projects. In most African smart city projects, the problem lies with the numerous hindrances on techniques to the adopon of Smart housing solutions. The initiative of Nigeria Smart City Iniave (NSCI) is to transform Nigerian major urban centres from traditional dysfunctional cies to modern, efficient, responsive ones capable of satisfying the needs of present and future generations of Nigerians. Using Akwa Millennium City project in Nigeria, this study examines the barriers to the adoption of smart housing concepts in African smart city projects. Structured questionnaires were purposively administered to all the staff of Akwa Millennium City project while all retrieved questionnaires were found suitable for analysis. Descriptive stastics were employed to analyze the data collected from the respondents. Findings depicted that the major barriers could be classified as socio-economic, technical and policy hindrances in the delivery of smart housing in Akwa Millennium City project in Nigeria. It's noteworthy that smart housing concept could be unaffordable due to the most perceived barriers (such as limited consumer demand, retrofitting of existing homes and buildings, lack of financial and financing incentives, high cost of development, and smart technology as divisive, exclusive or irrelevant) in the development of African smart city projects. This study therefore recommends that developers should focus on socio-economic attributes in the adoption of smart housing concepts to achieve an effective planning of smart city projects in Nigeria and Africa at large.