Publication
Over the course of the past 10 years, the urban population in the Global South has grown at a rate of 1.2 million people per week, putting developing countries at the center of urban development in the twenty-first century. This rapid urbanization resulted in the emergence of serious challenges, such as the provision of decent mobility, requiring innovative solutions. Currently, many northern cities use Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for answering urban challenges, but there are certain doubts about their applicability to southern cities. This paper aims at studying the transferability of IoT solutions from urban north to urban south. We first discuss the impacts of one prominent example of IoT solutions in the urban transportation sector, by presenting the ability of Seoul to manage the complexity of its public transportation system with the introduction of a smart transportation card. Then, we examine how Bogota used the same technology, originally designed for Seoul, for resolving the challenges they were facing in their transportation system. We ultimately compare both cases using a conceptual framework from the co-evolution between technology and institutions literature to understand the extent to which technological innovation can be a driver for institutional changes in urban transportation systems, and vice versa. This chapter, we hope, sheds more light on how to implement IoT solutions for cities, that might, if exploited successfully, help addressing the challenges of the urban South and ultimately reaching the Development Goals.