Generating a vision for smart sustainable cities of the future: a scholarly backcasting approach

Abstract

Sustainable cities have been the leading global paradigm of urbanism. Undoubtedly, sustainable development has, since its widespread diffusion in the early 1990s, positively influenced city planning and development. This pertains to the immense opportunities that have been explored and the enormous benefits that have been realized in relation to sustainable urban forms, especially compact cities and eco-cities. However, such forms are still associated with a number of problems, issues, and challenges. This mainly involves the question of how they should be monitored, understood, analyzed, and planned to improve, advance, and maintain their contribution to sustainability and thus to overcome the kind of wicked problems, unsettled issues, and complex challenges they embody. This in turn brings us to the current question related to the weak connection between and the extreme fragmentation of sustainable cities and smart cities as approaches and landscapes, respectively, despite the proven role of advanced ICT, coupled with the untapped potential of big data technology and its novel applications, in supporting sustainable cities as to enhancing and optimizing their performance under what is labeled "smart sustainable cities." In this respect, there has recently been a conscious push for sustainable cities to become smart and thus more sustainable by particularly embracing what big data technology and its novel applications has to offer in the hopes of reaching the optimal level of sustainability. In the meantime, we are in the midst of an expansion of time horizons in city planning and development. In this context, sustainable cities across the globe have adopted ambitious smart goals that extend far into the future. Essentially, there are multiple visions of, and pathways to achieving, smart sustainable cities based on how they can be conceptualized and operationalized. The aim of this paper is to generate a vision for smart sustainable cities of the future by answering the 6 guiding questions for step 3 of the futures study being conducted. This study aims to analyze, investigate, and develop a novel model for smart sustainable cities of the future using backcasting as a scholarly approach. It involves a series of papers of which this paper is the second one, following the earlier papers with steps 1 and 2. Visionary images of a long-term future can stimulate an accelerated movement towards achieving the long-term goals of sustainability. The proposed model is believed to be the first of its kind and thus has not been, to the best of one's knowledge, produced, nor is it being currently investigated, elsewhere.

Smart Eco-City Strategies and Solutions for Sustainability: The Cases of Royal Seaport, Stockholm, and Western Harbor, Malmö, Sweden

“…There is a wide recognition that advanced ICT constitute a promising response to the challenges of sustainable development due to its tremendous, yet untapped, potential for solving environmental and socio-economic problems. Indeed, a recent research wave has started to focus on smartening up sustainable urban forms by amalgamating the landscapes of and the approaches to sustainable cities and smart cities in a variety of ways in the hopes of reaching the optimal level of sustainability ( [2,3]), especially through promoting the 'eco-city' and 'sustainable city' initiatives in their more recent data-driven smart incarnations. Many urban development approaches emphasize the role of big data technologies and their novel applications as an advanced form of ICT in improving sustainability (e.g., [20,21,106,[109][110][111]).…”

“…In view of the above, Bibri and Krogstie (2019) [3] suggest a complete amalgamation of the eco-city with the compact city as both landscapes and approaches based on several arguments distilled from a detailed review and synthesis of the literature on these two prevailing approaches to sustainable urbanism. Similarly, Farr (2008) [126] discusses the combination of the different elements of ecological urbanism, sustainable urban infrastructure, and new urbanism, coupled with making cities walkable, and then extends this integrated approach to close the loop on resource use and to bring everything into the city.…”

“…Eco-districts focus on community collaboration, integrated communication, and management to help cities to be more successful by working together. Nevertheless, the way ecological urban initiatives and projects conceive of the eco-city status reflects more divergences than convergences [3,14]. In other words, the guiding planning documents in this regard tend to be largely developed as independent islands of locally ecological sustainability.…”

“…It is not an easy task to judge whether or not a certain model of sustainable cities is sustainable [45]. However, the ultimate goal of the endeavor is to develop a more theoretically and practically robust model of sustainable cities [2,3]. This has indeed been one of the most significant intellectual and practical challenges for more than three decades (e.g., [6,[11][12][13][14]19,45]).…”

A scholarly backcasting approach to a novel model for smart sustainable cities of the future: strategic problem orientation

“…Accordingly, achieving the status of smart sustainable cities epitomizes an instance of urban sustainability. This notion refers to a desired (normative) state in which a city strives to retain a balance of the socio-ecological systems through adopting and executing sustainable development strategies as a desired (normative) trajectory (Bibri and Krogstie 2019). This balance entails enhancing the physical, environmental, social, and economic systems of the city in line with sustainability over the long run-given their interdependence, synergy, and equal importance.…”