Smart city is one of the most powerful and challenging concepts that could have deep impacts on contemporary cities (Colldahl, C. et al. (2013). Smart cities proved to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to enhance consequences on people quality of urban life. Planners, technologist, developers, and authorities thought that change to a smart city could enhance the quality of urban life; rather, still their impacts on long-term change of social life and behavioral patterns of urban mobility, social activity, and social inclusion; and consequently, impacts on urban social sustainability in contemporary cities are not fully investigated. Some scholars argued that moving from conventional to smart city will greatly encourage social activities in urban space (Bašová, S. et al. 2017, Stadler, 2013; Ayat, 2015; Souici, 2015; Costa, 2015; and Hampton, 2008, Hugoton, 2010). In contrast, this research argues that increasing people familiarity with ICT will create new urban behavioral patterns that could build great barrier to urban social sustainability in urban spaces. This hypothesis needs to be investigated to ensure that proper precautions are taken to minimize any negative impacts. The research adopts a case study of three parks in Madinaty, a gated community in New Cairo developed by a private developer. It aims to find the correlation existing between people familiarity with ICT and changing behavioral patterns. It is concluded that smart cities have great consequences on changing urban social behavior, city spatial structure and urban social sustainability. Finally, the research recommends driving smart design guidelines using social, physical, communicative, and collective activities to mitigate the expected social risks of smartness, and to motivate urban social behavior to rebuild not only the relation between people and urban spaces but also between people and each other |
