This book enhances the reader’s understanding of the theoretical foundations, sociotechnical assemblage, and governance mechanisms of sustainable smart city transitions. Drawing on empirical evidence stemming from existing smart city research, the book begins by advancing a theory of sustainable smart city transitions, which forms bridges between smart city development studies and some of the key assumptions underpinning transition management and system innovation research, human geography, spatial planning, and critical urban scholarship. This interdisciplinary theoretical formulation details how smart city transitions unfold and how they should be conceptualized and enacted in order to be assembled as sustainable developments. The proposed theory of sustainable smart city transitions is then enriched by the findings of investigations into the planning and implementation of smart city transition strategies and projects. Focusing on different empirical settings, change dimensions, and analytical elements, the attention moves from the sociotechnical requirements of citywide transition pathways to the development of sector-specific smart city projects and technological innovations, in particular in the fields of urban mobility and urban governance. This book represents a relevant reference work for academic and practitioner audiences, policy makers, and representative of smart city industries. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology.

Smart city development has emerged a major issue over the past 5 years. Since the launch of IBM’s Smart Planet and CISCO’s Smart Cities and Communities programmes, their potential to deliver on global sustainable development targets have captured the public’s attention. However, despite this growing interest in the development of smart cities, little has as yet been published that either sets out the state-of-the-art, or which offers a less than subjective, arm’s length and dispassionate account of their potential contribution. This book brings together cutting edge research and the findings from technical development projects from leading authorities within the field to capture the transition to smart cities. It explores what is understood about smart cities, playing particular attention on the governance, modelling and analysis of the transition that smart cities seek to represent. In paving the way for such a representation, the book begins to account for the social capital of smart communities and begins the task of modelling their embedded intelligence through an analysis of what the "embedded intelligence of smart cities" contributes to the sustainability of urban development. This innovative book offers an interdisciplinary perspective and shall be of interest to researchers, policy analysts and technical experts involved in and responsible for the planning, development and design of smart cities. It will also be of particular value to final year undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in Geography, Architecture and Planning.

Smart cities promise to generate economic, social and environmental value through the seamless connection of urban services and infrastructure by digital technologies. However, there is scant evidence of how these activities can enhance social well-being and contribute to just and equitable communities. Smart and Sustainable Cities? Pipedreams, Practicalities and Possibilities provides one of the first examinations of how smart cities relate to environmental and social issues. It addresses the gap between the ambitious visions of smart cities and the actual practices on the ground by focusing on the social and environmental dimensions of real smart city initiatives as well as the possibilities they hold for creating more equitable and progressive cities. Through detailed analyses of case studies in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, India and China, the contributors describe the various ways that social and environmental issues are interpreted and integrated into smart city initiatives and actions. The findings point towards the need for more intentional engagement and collaboration with all urban stakeholders in the design, development and maintenance of smart cities to ensure that everyone benefits from the increasingly digitalised urban environments of the twenty-first century. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Local Environment.

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 enhances the reader’s understanding of the theoretical foundations, sociotechnical assemblage, and governance mechanisms of sustainable smart city transitions. Drawing on empirical evidence stemming from existing smart city research, the book begins by advancing a theory of sustainable smart city transitions, which forms bridges between smart city development studies and some of the key assumptions underpinning transition management and system innovation research, human geography, spatial planning, and critical urban scholarship. This interdisciplinary theoretical formulation details how smart city transitions unfold and how they should be conceptualized and enacted in order to be assembled as sustainable developments. The proposed theory of sustainable smart city transitions is then enriched by the findings of investigations into the planning and implementation of smart city transition strategies and projects. Focusing on different empirical settings, change dimensions, and analytical elements, the attention moves from the sociotechnical requirements of citywide transition pathways to the development of sector-specific smart city projects and technological innovations, in particular in the fields of urban mobility and urban governance. This book represents a relevant reference work for academic and practitioner audiences, policy makers, and representative of smart city industries. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology.

This book considers the impact of global climate change, advocating to promote sustainable development from the perspective of low carbon and climate resilience, by reducing carbon emissions in different aspects of urban and regional development. As the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, China is continuously exploring a sustainable path to achieve the momentous goal of 2060 carbon neutrality. In addition, this book reviews and summarizes China's green development and predicts the transformation of China's carbon emission and energy structure before and after the peak of carbon emission in 2030. It examines the role of governance in decarbonization efforts, focusing on decision making processes, policies and regulations, as well as the significance of regions, cities, and communities. This book highlights typical methods of implementing and achieving low carbon development in light of China's practical situation, which helps to resolve some of the problems that may arise in achieving the carbon neutral goal. Therefore, this book is suitable for the reference of scholars in low-carbon environment science, sustainable urban development, and other related fields. It also provides inspiration for China's medium and long-term sustainable development plans in the future.

This book constitutes the proceedings of this year’s Sustainable Smart Cities and Territories International Conference (SSCt 2021), held in Doha, Qatar, from the 27th to the 29th of April 2021. The SSCt 2021 is an open symposium that brings together researchers and developers from academia and industry to present and discuss the latest scientific and technical advances in the fields of Smart Cities and Smart Territories. It promotes an environment for discussion on how techniques, methods, and tools help system designers accomplish the transition from the current cities towards those we need in a changing world. The program includes keynote abstracts, a main technical track, two workshops, and a doctoral consortium. The symposium is organized by the Texas A&M University at Qatar. We would like to thank all the contributing authors, the members of the Local Committee, Scientific Committee, Organizing Committee, and the sponsors (Texas A&M University of Qatar, AIR Institute and the IoT Digital Innovation Hub) for their hard work and dedication.