Population grow and rapid urbanization generate several consequences such as congestion, air, water and urban pollution, health issues, social inequality, natural resource shortage, among others. These challenges added to the technological development and digitalization of governments motivated new urbanization models relying on the use of technologies, which we can call digital city, intelligent city, eco city, sustainable city, and smart city. Besides, in 2015 the United Nations (UN) Member States published the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to balance the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, increasing the attention to sustainable ways of urban development. This context contributed to the emergence of the Smart Sustainable City (SSC) concept, which can be seen as a strategic response to overcome the urbanization challenges with the help of Information Communication Technologies (ICT). However, there is still uncertainty over the Smart Sustainable City concept and its main characteristics. In addition, limited attention has been given to smart governance aspects, which is recognized as crucial for sustainable development. Thus, this research aims to contextualize the emergence of the SSC concept, identify its characteristics, and to offer a Smart Sustainable City conceptual framework considering the main aspects of a SSC and highlighting the governance dimension. In order to do so, a literature review was performed. The contributions of this research are twofold: (i) strengthening the scientific discussion on smart sustainable city governance, providing its definition; and (ii) suggesting a conceptual model that illustrates a SSC including the three pillars of sustainability (social, economic and environmental), urban infrastructure connecting the SSC elements, and the governance dimension, aiming to guide and provide a balance between the other SSC dimensions.
Building smart sustainable cities initiatives requires governance capacity, which is constantly challenged by a diversity of actors and the transformation towards a digital society; however, the process of identifying the conditions for building a smart sustainable city (SSC) is not straightforward. As an attempt to map the key governance conditions, the goal of this study is to suggest guidelines for the development of SSC initiatives in the format of a generic roadmap. This research applies design science research methodology and builds the roadmap based on identified antecedents that may hinder or facilitate the development of SSC initiatives from a systematic literature review and the analysis of key governance aspects from 12 smart city initiatives in Europe and Latin America. This paper builds its results through a four-step approach including: (1) defining the main concepts and dimensions within the smart sustainable city context; (2) identifying sustainability challenges for the development of smart sustainable city initiatives; (3) analysing key governance aspects from smart sustainable city initiatives; and (4) designing an actionable research-based roadmap and practical recommendations. The resulting roadmap contains 11 key governance conditions for developing strategies for smart sustainable city initiatives that were classified into three main phases: (1) planning; (2) implementing; and (3) adopting, monitoring, and evaluating. In terms of contribution, this research provides a tool to support the development of initiatives, addressing sustainability challenges and strengthening governance capacity to ensure the long-term impacts of smart sustainable cities.
The term Smart Sustainable City (SSC) has been gaining popularity due to the growth of initiatives to address urban problems towards sustainable development. SSC can be considered as a combination of sustainable city and smart city, and some variance between the concepts may be expected. As this is a modern term, the literature falls short of studies presenting factors that hinder and/or facilitate the complex phenomenon of SSC development. Therefore, this paper aims to analyse scientific studies to identify aspects that influence the progress of smart sustainable cities. The methodological approach undertaken was a systematic literature review that included 169 papers. The results offer a comprehensive list of 57 drivers and 63 barriers, classified according to five main dimensions of a smart sustainable city, which are the three sustainability pillars (society, environment, and economy), combined to governance, and urban infrastructure. The findings revealed 'governance' as the most significant domain for SSC development, and multistakeholder engagement as one of the main challenges. This study shows that SSC is not a research field itself, but an interdisciplinary concept, contributing to academics, government, and policymakers for eradicating potential interferences in the development of smart and sustainable cities.
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