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This paper aims to analyse scientific studies focusing on both environmental sustainability and smart city concepts to understand the relationship between these two. In order to do so the study identifies information about researchers, models, frameworks and tools focused on the chosen themes. This research uses a qualitative methodology, through a systematic review of the literature, which examines the terms, 'smart city' and 'sustainability', aimed at sustainable development of smart cities. For this, three databases were used: Scopus, Science Direct, and Emerald Insight. This paper provides detailed information on the most recent scientific articles focusing on smart cities and sustainability issues. The paper can serve as a basis for researchers seeking background information for further investigations. The findings provide invaluable insights for scholars researching on the subject, and public managers considering applying those into practice in their cities.

The term 'smart cities' is a widely used, but at the same time a highly fuzzy concept. The fuzziness hinders our understanding on the benefits of its adoption, and explains the existence of many relevant activities with fragmented or distorted views of what a truly smart city is. The aim of this paper is to undertake a comprehensive review of how smart cities are perceived in the literature and in the light of the findings propose a clearer definition. Overview of the key terms, concepts and definitions associated to smart cities, reported in this paper, demonstrates that the definitions found in the academic literature have limited scope, and are overly focused on strategic drivers and specific actions, instead of making explicitly the connection between the concept of smart cities and the creation of environments that promote happiness and wellbeing of their residents-which should be the main function of a city. Following the thorough review on the smart cities literature, the paper proposes a comprehensive, human-centred, and context-free definition for smart cities. This definition brings an endogenous view on smart cities in which the central element is the direct participation of local actors and stakeholders in the process of thinking, defining, planning, and executing social, technological and urban transformations in cities.

The smart and sustainable cities concept has become a globally hot topic during the last few decades, particularly following the catastrophic impacts of global climate change. The assessment of smart and sustainable cities, however, is a major challenge due to complex, complicated, and chaotic nature of our cities. This makes the available monitoring and evaluation tools difficult to adopt and apply in different urban contexts to support urban planning and governance and foster evidence-based policymaking. In order to address this issue, the paper brings together knowledge-based development concept with smart and sustainable cities. Knowledge-based development is a vision of development that considers knowledge as the central structuring element of a development strategy. Similarly, its more territory focused version, knowledge-based urban development is an integrated approach for the transition of cities and regions into sustainable, liveable and prosperous localities. The methodological approach of the paper includes the review of the literature on existing approaches on smart and sustainable cities assessment, describing their main aspects, strengths and limitations, and discuss the potential contribution of a knowledge-based urban development strategy for the successful promotion of smart and sustainable cities, presented in a proposed conceptual framework.

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Since the advent of the second digital revolution, the exponential advancement of technology is shaping a world with new social, economic, political, technological, and legal circumstances. The consequential disruptions force governments and societies to seek ways for their cities to become more humane, ethical, inclusive, intelligent, and sustainable. In recent years, the concept of City-as-a-Platform was coined with the hope of providing an innovative approach for addressing the aforementioned disruptions. Today, this concept is rapidly gaining popularity, as more and more platform thinking applications become available to the city context—so-called platform urbanism. These platforms used for identifying and addressing various urbanization problems with the assistance of open data, participatory innovation opportunity, and collective knowledge. With these developments in mind, this study aims to tackle the question of “How can platform urbanism support local governance efforts in the development of smarter cities?” Through an integrative review of journal articles published during the last decade, the evolution of City-as-a-Platform was analyzed. The findings revealed the prospects and constraints for the realization of transformative and disruptive impacts on the government and society through the platform urbanism, along with disclosing the opportunities and challenges for smarter urban development governance with collective knowledge through platform urbanism.

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