This book explores the recent advances in the leading paradigms of
urbanism, namely compact cities, eco-cities, and data-driven smart
cities, and the evolving approach to their amalgamation under the
umbrella term of smart sustainable cities. It addresses these advances
by investigating how and to what extent the strategies of compact cities
and eco-cities and their merger have been enhanced and strengthened
through new planning and development practices, and are being supported
and leveraged by the applied solutions pertaining to data-driven smart
cities. The ultimate goal is to advance sustainability and harness its
synergistic effects on multiple scales. This entails developing and
implementing more effective approaches to the balanced integration of
the three dimensions of sustainability, as well as to producing combined
effects of the strategies and solutions of the prevailing approaches to
urbanism that are greater than the sum of their separate effects in
terms of the tripartite value of sustainability.
Sustainable urban development is today seen as one of the keys towards
unlocking the quest for a sustainable world. And the big data revolution
is set to erupt in cities throughout the world, heralding an era where
instrumentation, datafication, and computation are increasingly
pervading the very fabric of cities and the spaces we live in thanks to
the IoT. Big data and the IoT technologies are seen as powerful forces
that have tremendous potential for advancing urban sustainability.
Indeed, they are instigating a massive change in the way sustainable
cities can tackle the kind of special conundrums, wicked problems, and
significant challenges they inherently embody as complex systems. They
offer a multitudinous array of innovative solutions and sophisticated
approaches informed by groundbreaking research and data-driven science.
As such, they are becoming essential to the functioning of sustainable
cities. Besides, yet knowing to what extent we are making progress
towards sustainable cities is problematic, adding to the fragmented,
conflicting picture that arises of change on the ground in the face of
the escalating rate and scale of urbanization and in the light of
emerging ICT and its novel applications. In a nutshell, new
circumstances require new responses.
This timely and multifaceted book is intended for a wide readership. As
such, it will appeal to researchers, academics, urban scientists,
urbanists, planners, designers, policy-makers, and futurists, as well as
all readers interested in sustainable cities and their ongoing and
future data-driven transformation.
