Smart Collaborating Hubs and a Smart Global Village - An Alternative Perspective on Smart Cities

Most of the prevalent smart city solutions that focus on large metropolitan areas are irrelevant to almost half of the world population that lives in rural areas, small towns, islands and isolated communities. This paper presents an alternate perspective that is based on Smart Collaborating Hubs and a Smart Global Village to serve smaller communities. These hubs provide inexpensive and highly specialized services in health, education, public safety, public welfare and other vital sectors for the underserved populations around the globe. An extensive computer aided methodology is presented that is being used to plan, engineer and manage the smart collaborating hubs for a United Nations Partnership. Key results and examples are used to illustrate the main points.