Enhancing sustainable urban development through smart city applications

Abstract

Purpose This paper investigates the potential contribution of smart city approaches and tools to sustainable urban development in the environment domain. Recent research has highlighted the need to explore the relation of smart and sustainable cities more systematically, focusing on practical applications that could enable a deeper understanding of the included domains, typologies and design concepts, and this paper aims to address this research gap. At the same time, it tries to identify whether these applications could contribute to the “zero vision” strategy, an extremely ambitious challenge within the field of smart cities. Design/methodology/approach This objective is pursued through an in-depth investigation of available open source and proprietary smart city applications related to environmental sustainability in urban environments. A total of 32 applications were detected through the Intelligent/Smart Cities Open Source (ICOS) community, a meta-repository for smart cities solutions. The applications are analyzed comparatively regarding (i) the environmental issue addressed, (ii) the associated mitigation strategies, (iii) the included innovation mechanism, (iv) the role of information and communication technologies and (v) the overall outcome. Findings The findings suggest that the smart and sustainable city landscape is extremely fragmented both on the policy and the technical levels. There is a host of unexplored opportunities toward smart sustainable development, many of which are still unknown. Similar findings are reached for all categories of environmental challenges in cities. Research limitations pertain to the analysis of a relatively small number of applications. The results can be used to inform policy making toward becoming more proactive and impactful both locally and globally. Given that smart city application market niches are also identified, they are also of special interest to developers, user communities and digital entrepreneurs. Originality/value The value added by this paper is two-fold. At the theoretical level, it offers a neat conceptual bridge between smart and sustainable cities debate. At the practical level, it identifies under-researched and under-exploited fields of smart city applications that could be opportunities to attain the “zero vision” objective.

Backcasting in futures studies: a synthesized scholarly and planning approach to strategic smart sustainable city development

“…Sustainable development goals and smart targets should be well understood with respect to their synergy and integration (see, e.g., [1,5,9,12,13,16,19,43]) in the context of city planning, a valuable force for attaining a sort of integrated objectives in the realm of smart sustainable cities. As a management and government function, city planning involves formulating a detailed plan to achieve optimum balance of demands for growth with the available resources and the need to protect the environment, or to provide and maintain a livable and healthy human environment in conjunction with minimal demand on resources and minimal impacts on the environment-by integrating urban strategies with technological innovations as well as formulating and implementing policy regulations and institutional frameworks.…”

“…Regardless, this endeavor should consist in adopting a holistic approach to decision-making, a pathway that can best be pursued by employing advanced technological systems and analytical methods, thereby the need for big data technologies and related data-driven decision-making with respect to urban policy design and analysis. As noted by Angelidou et al [5], the incorporation of the systematic use of big data in the policy development and monitoring process is a key success factor towards better policy design and implementation, with significant positive impacts on contemporary cities on multiple levels. To put it differently, new sources of urban data coordinated with urban practice and policy can be applied on the basis of the fundamental principles of data science and analytical engineering to devise powerful solutions to urban sustainability problems.…”

“…Adding to these is the weak or lack of connection between the two urban development strategies, despite the proven role of ICT in supporting cities in their transition towards the needed sustainable development (e.g., [1,19,43]). On this note, Angelidou et al [5] conclude that the smart city and sustainable city landscapes are extremely fragmented both on the policy and the technical levels, and there is a host of unexplored opportunities towards smart sustainable city development. The basic idea of smart sustainable cities of the future is that this holistic urban development approach seeks to explicitly bring together sustainable cities and smart cities as urban endeavors in ways that address and overcome the key shortcomings of both classes of cities in terms of their contribution to the goals of sustainable development.…”

A Risk Management Model for Sustainable Smart City

“…2 by referring to the study of U.S. Department of Homeland Security [4], Lacinak & Ristvej [7], McClellan et al, [8], and Angelidou et al, [9]. …”

“…Angelidou et al, [9] defined risk factors and suggested mitigation strategies considering the environmental aspects of possible risks in smart cities.…”