This book provides multidisciplinary approaches to smart and sustainable urban ecosystems. Urbanization is a global tendency, and up to 70% of the world population is projected to live in cities by 2050. How will this rapid urbanization alter the face of the world? What are the environmental consequences of megacities’ expansion? What are smart solutions to make life in cities safe, comfortable, and environmentally friendly? These and other important questions are addressed by the conference Smart and Sustainable Cities (SSC). This year’s theme for the conference will be « Sustainable urban ecosystems: challenges and solutions». Megapolises are complex ecosystems. Air and water quality, vegetation, and soils in megapolises are exposed to anthropogenic influence. Studying negative environmental consequences of the anthropogenic and technogenic pressures is among the key tasks of urban ecology and environmental impact assessment. Advanced approaches and smart technologies to monitor, model, and assess environmental consequences and risks in megapolises will be widely discussed at the conference. Searching for solutions of the environmental problems of modern megapolises will be the key point of the conference. Successful experiences of sustainable urban development and nature-based solutions to support climate adaptation, carbon neutrality, and human health will be presented in the conference proceedings.

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.

These proceedings of the Smart and Sustainable Cities Conference (SSC) in Moscow from May 23 to 26, 2018 addresses important questions regarding the global trend of urbanization. What are the environmental consequences of megacities’ expansion? What smart solutions can make life in cities safe, comfortable and environmentally friendly? It is projected that 70% of the global population will live in cities by 2050, and as such the book describes how this rapid urbanization will alter the face of the world. Focusing on solutions for the environmental problems of modern megapolises, it discusses advanced approaches and smart technologies to monitor, model and assess the environmental consequences and risks. The contributors present examples of successful sustainable urban development, including management and design of green infrastructure, waste management, run-off purification and remediation of urban soils. The SSC conference and its proceedings offer a valuable contribution to sustainable urban development, and are of interest to the scientific and research community, municipal services, environmental protection agencies, landscape architects, civil engineers, policy makers and other stakeholders in urban management and greenery.

This volume examines the applicability of nature-based solutions in ecological restoration practice and in contemporary landscape architecture by bringing together ecology and architecture in the built environment. Green infrastructure is used to address urban challenges such as climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and stormwater management. In addition, thermal comfort nature-based solutions reintroduce critical connections between natural and urban systems. In light of ongoing developments in sustainable urban development, the goal is a paradigm shift towards a landscape that restores and rehabilitates urban ecosystems. The ten contributions to this book examine a wide range of successful cases of designing healthier, greener and more resilient landscapes in different geographical contexts, from the United States of America and Brazil, through various European regions, to Singapore and China. While some chapters attempt to conceptualize the interconnections between cities and nature, others clearly have an empirical focus. Therefore, this volume provides a rich body of work and acts as a starting point for further studies on restoration of ecosystems and integrative policies such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Ecological and technological (eco-tech) planning provides a possible response to the essential issues of sustainability and rehabilitation in rapidly growing urban spaces. Green and Ecological Technologies for Urban Planning: Creating Smart Cities addresses the ecological, technological, and social challenges faced in the smart urban planning and design of settlements when using eco-technologies – from sustainable land use to transportation, and from green areas to municipal applications – with a focus on resilience. Containing research from leading international experts, this book provides comprehensive coverage and definitions of the most important issues, concepts, trends, and technologies within the planning field.

Nature-Based Solutions for More Sustainable Cities makes a clear case of performances, impacts, and benefits generated by NBS in cities providing a comprehensive framework approach to understand the real and full potential of NBS at the urban level.