This publication advocates a "cities-based" approach to sustainable development which recognizes the central and integrating role that cities and urban living play in developing sustainability. It highlights that, similarly to the financial crisis of 2008, the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic has shown that different cities have different capacities to cope with crises. Both crises disproportionally affected different cities and population groups; the most vulnerable suffering most. Cities need to develop innovative methods to confront infectious diseases without relying on drastic lockdown restrictions.

This book is intended to help explore the field of smart sustainable cities in its complexity, heterogeneity, and breadth, the many faces of a topical subject of major importance for the future that encompasses so much of modern urban life in an increasingly computerized and urbanized world. Indeed, sustainable urban development is currently at the center of debate in light of several ICT visions becoming achievable and deployable computing paradigms, and shaping the way cities will evolve in the future and thus tackle complex challenges. This book integrates computer science, data science, complexity science, sustainability science, system thinking, and urban planning and design. As such, it contains innovative computer–based and data–analytic research on smart sustainable cities as complex and dynamic systems. It provides applied theoretical contributions fostering a better understanding of such systems and the synergistic relationships between the underlying physical and informational landscapes. It offers contributions pertaining to the ongoing development of computer–based and data science technologies for the processing, analysis, management, modeling, and simulation of big and context data and the associated applicability to urban systems that will advance different aspects of sustainability. This book seeks to explicitly bring together the smart city and sustainable city endeavors, and to focus on big data analytics and context-aware computing specifically. In doing so, it amalgamates the design concepts and planning principles of sustainable urban forms with the novel applications of ICT of ubiquitous computing to primarily advance sustainability. Its strength lies in combining big data and context–aware technologies and their novel applications for the sheer purpose of harnessing and leveraging the disruptive and synergetic effects of ICT on forms of city planning that are required for future forms of sustainable development. This is because the effects of such technologies reinforce one another as to their efforts for transforming urban life in a sustainable way by integrating data–centric and context–aware solutions for enhancing urban systems and facilitating coordination among urban domains. This timely and comprehensive book is aimed at a wide audience across science, academia industry, and policymaking. It provides the necessary material to inform relevant research communities of the state–of–the–art research and the latest development in the area of smart sustainable urban development, as well as a valuable reference for planners, designers, strategists, and ICT experts who are working towards the development and implementation of smart sustainable cities based on big data analytics and context–aware computing.

This book discusses and analyzes past and ongoing national urban policy development efforts from around the globe, particularly those that can lead the way toward smart and green cities. In view of the adoption of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, especially the goal to have cities that are inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, urban policies that can help achieve this goal are urgently needed. The UN-Habitat (HABITAT III) puts national urban policies at the heart of implementing and rethinking the urban agenda, and identifies them as being integral to the equitable and sustainable development of nations. Against this background, this important book, which gathers contributions from academics, planners and urban specialists, reviews existing urban policies from developing and developed nations, discusses various countries’ smart and green urban policies, and outlines the way forward. As such, it is essential reading for all social scientists, planners, designers, architects, and policymakers working on urban development around the world.

This volume provides the most current research on smart cities. Specifically, it focuses on the economic development and sustainability of smart cities and examines how to transform older industrial cities into sustainable smart cities. It aims to identify the role of the following elements in the creation and management of smart cities:• Citizen participation and empowerment • Value creation mechanisms • Public administration• Quality of life and sustainability• Democracy• ICT• Private initiatives and entrepreneurship Regardless of their size, all cities are ultimately agglomerations of people and institutions. Agglomeration economies make it possible to attain minimum efficiencies of scale in the organization and delivery of services. However, the economic benefits do not constitute the main advantage of a city. A city’s status rests on three dimensions: (1) political impetus, which is the result of citizens’ participation and the public administration’s agenda; (2) applications derived from technological advances (especially in ICT); and (3) cooperation between public and private initiatives in business development and entrepreneurship. These three dimensions determine which resources are necessary to create smart cities. But a smart city, ideal in the way it channels and resolves technological, social and economic-growth issues, requires many additional elements to function at a high-performance level, such as culture (an environment that empowers and engages citizens) and physical infrastructure designed to foster competition and collaboration, encourage new ideas and actions, and set the stage for new business creation. Featuring contributions with models, tools and cases from around the world, this book will be a valuable resource for researchers, students, academics, professionals and policymakers interested in smart cities.

The future of humanity is urban, and the nature of urban space enables, and necessitates, sharing -- of resources, goods and services, experiences. Yet traditional forms of sharing have been undermined in modern cities by social fragmentation and commercialization of the public realm. In Sharing Cities, Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyeman argue that the intersection of cities' highly networked physical space with new digital technologies and new mediated forms of sharing offers cities the opportunity to connect smart technology to justice, solidarity, and sustainability. McLaren and Agyeman explore the opportunities and risks for sustainability, solidarity, and justice in the changing nature of sharing. McLaren and Agyeman propose a new "sharing paradigm," which goes beyond the faddish "sharing economy" -- seen in such ventures as Uber and TaskRabbit -- to envision models of sharing that are not always commercial but also communal, encouraging trust and collaboration. Detailed case studies of San Francisco, Seoul, Copenhagen, Medellín, Amsterdam, and Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) contextualize the authors' discussions of collaborative consumption and production; the shared public realm, both physical and virtual; the design of sharing to enhance equity and justice; and the prospects for scaling up the sharing paradigm though city governance. They show how sharing could shift values and norms, enable civic engagement and political activism, and rebuild a shared urban commons. Their case for sharing and solidarity offers a powerful alternative for urban futures to conventional "race-to-the-bottom" narratives of competition, enclosure, and division.