Journal of Urban TechnologyPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:ABSTRACT At present, sustainable urban development constitutes a major planning goal for many urban environments coping with contemporary challenges and problems confronted by world cities. Towards this end, the concept of smart cities emerges as a promising policy option for effectively dealing with sustainability objectives. In this respect, the focus of the present paper is on the development of an ICT-enabled participatory planning framework for guiding policy-making towards the planning of smart cities. This framework is in alignment with the argument that smart-city solutions must start with the "city" not with the "smart," shifting from a technology-pushed to an application-pulled smart-city planning approach, matching different types of "smartness" (technologies, tools, and applications) with different types of urban functions and contexts. It is also built upon a digital platform, integrating tools and technologies for data management and e-participatory planning that can support city-and citizen-specific decision making, capable of dealing with objectives for urban sustainability.
The focus of the present paper is on the development of a participatory methodological framework, based on the future workshop participatory approach and participatory evaluation tools for planning the integrated development of a specific region, the Region of Sterea Ellada-Greece. Towards this end, particular emphasis is placed upon the sustainable use of natural and cultural resources for the spatial planning of alternative tourist development paths, which are effectively integrated into the local economic structure and its future perspectives. The proposed framework results in the building of scenario-specific policy guidelines which, by taking into consideration developments of the internal and external environment of the study region and the specific decision contexts these outline, support policy makers by providing a range of policy directions and policy measures that can serve effective decision-making within each specific decision context. Moreover, the participatory evaluation approach adopted in the proposed framework supports public and stakeholders' engagement in the decision-making processes, rendering thus these processes more pluralistic, credible, legitimized and transparent, which in turn are to the benefit of the planning process, the final policy decisions and their successful implementation at the local level.
The goal of the paper is to elaborate on sustainability aspects of smart sustainable urban environments. More specifically, at a first step the paper aims at critically reviewing globally initiated state-of-the-art approaches for assessing smart cities' performance as to sustainability objectives. The scope of this effort is to identify sets of indicators used in different approaches as well as convergence/divergence among them. Secondly, an attempt to integrate different indicator sets into a more enriched and coherent indicator system is carried out which, by effectively embedding smart and sustainable city development into sustainability indicators' sets, can be used by various types of cities' examples. Finally, the rationale of the indicators' selection process is depicted, in order to support policy makers and planners' guidance towards choosing an appropriate, city-specific set of sustainability indicators for carrying out relevant assessments.
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