Can North-made IOT solutions address the challenges of emerging cities in the South? The case of Korean born Smart transportation card implementation in Bogota

Over the course of the last ten years, the urban population in the Global South has grown at a rate of 1.2 million people per week, putting the developing countries at the center of the urban development in 21st century. This rapid urbanization resulted in the emergence of serious challenges, such as 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 transferability to southern cities. This paper aims at studying the transferability of IoT solutions from urban north to urban south. We firstly discuss the impacts of one prominent example of IoT solutions in 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 the key factors that enabled Bogota to benefit from the same technology, originally designed for Seoul, for resolving the challenges they were facing in their Transportation system. This case study, we hope, sheds more light on the impact of IoT solutions for cities, which usually have origins in north, on addressing the challenges of urban south and reaching the development goals.