Big Data Science and Analytics for Smart Sustainable Urbanism

The anatomy of the data-driven smart sustainable city: instrumentation, datafication, computerization and related applications

“…In particular, there is an urgent need for developing and applying data-driven innovative solutions and sophisticated approaches to overcome the challenges of sustainability and urbanization. In other words, the world is drowning in data-and if planners and policymakers realize the potential of harnessing these data in collaboration with data scientists, urban scientists, and computer scientists, the outcome could solve major global challenges [12].…”

“…In recent years, there has been a marked intensification of datafication. This is manifested in a radical expansion in the volume, range, variety, and granularity of the data being generated about urban environments and citizens (e.g., [12,33,34,36], with the primary aim of quantifying the whole of the city and thus putting it in a data format that can be organized, processed, and analyzed to generate useful knowledge for enhanced decision-making, as well as deep insights pertaining to a wide variety of practical uses and applications. We are currently experiencing the accelerated datafication of the city in a rapidly urbanizing world and witnessing the dawn of the big data era not out of the window, but in everyday life.…”

“…Indeed, as a consequence of datafication, a new era is presently unfolding wherein smart sustainable urbanism is increasingly becoming data-driven [12]. At the heart of such urbanism is a computational understanding of city systems and processes that reduces urban life to logical and algorithmic rules and procedures, while also harnessing urban big data to provide a more holistic and integrated view or synoptic intelligence of the city.…”

“…At the heart of such urbanism is a computational understanding of city systems and processes that reduces urban life to logical and algorithmic rules and procedures, while also harnessing urban big data to provide a more holistic and integrated view or synoptic intelligence of the city. This is increasingly being directed towards improving, advancing, and maintaining the contribution of both sustainable cities and smart cities to the goals of sustainable development [12].…”

“…However, topical studies tend to deal mostly with data-driven smart urbanism (e.g., [7,[35][36][37]40] while barely exploring how this approach can improve and advance sustainable urbanism under what is labeled 'data-driven smart sustainable cities' as a leading paradigm of urbanism [11,12]. Moreover, research on big data applications in the context of smart cities tends to deal largely with economic growth, the quality of life, and governance (e.g., [5, 8, 15, 26, 30-33, 35, 49] while overlooking the rather more urgent issues and complex challenges related to sustainability.…”