Planning, Development and Management of Sustainable Cities: A Commentary from the Guest Editors

Abstract

Cities are the most dramatic manifestations of human activities on the surface of the earth. These human-dominated organisms-i.e., cities-degrade natural habitats, simplify species composition, disrupt hydrological systems, and modify energy flow and nutrient cycling. Today, these consequential impacts of human activities, originated from population increase, rapid urbanization, high private motor vehicle dependency, deregulated industrialization and mass livestock production, are increasing exponentially and causing great deal of environmental, social, and economic challenges both at global and local scales. In such a situation, establishment of sustainable cities, through sustainable urban development practices, is seen as a potential panacea to combat these challenges responsibly, effectively, and efficiently. This paper offers a critical review of the key literature on the issues relating to planning, development and management of sustainable cities, introduces the contributions from the Special Issue, and speculates on the prospective research directions to place necessary mechanisms to secure a sustainable urban future for all.

Smart Cities as Organizational Fields: A Framework for Mapping Sustainability-Enabling Configurations

“…A smart city approach implies the exploitation of high technologies, and particularly information and communication technologies (ICT), to improve city resilience and quality of life, along with its economic, social and environmental sustainability [10][11][12][13]. The smart city idea has much in common with the sustainable city movement [14], but is characterized by a particular focus on technology-enabled innovation as the key means to achieve sustainability. Therefore, entrepreneurship is expected to play a pivotal role in smart city initiatives [15,16], since new opportunities must be discovered, and new business models must be developed [17], for the smart city idea to translate into practice.…”

Worldwide Research on Energy Efficiency and Sustainability in Public Buildings

“…Semprini et al [13] analysed a building with these characteristics, making some minor modifications to improve the energy efficiency and they obtained some very promising results. Moreover, on the urban scale, energy sustainability is also a point of reference for the rise of smart cities [14,15].…”

Economic Aspects Analysis in Calculation and Application of the Urban Environment Quality Index

“…The issue of sustainable development of cities and regions has been the mainstream of world urbanism for several decades [1,2]. Problems and the approaches tackling them are extremely diverse.…”

“…They cover, first of all, economic, nature-and-ecological, social (including demographic), town-planning (including land use), infrastructure (energy, transportation, housing and communal) aspects, often interwoven and interlinked [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. During the previous three decades the prevailing approach was based mainly on ensuring long-term environmental and ecological sustainability [1,5,9], however recent research done in developed countries (the USA, Canada, European countries), as well as in the developing ones (China, Indonesia, Iran, etc.) has demonstrated a certain bias toward ensuring economic, social and infrastructural development of cities and towns, provided the environmental and ecological situation does not deteriorate [2 , 4-7].…”