Abstract
In recent years, it has become increasingly feasible to achieve important improvements of sustainability by integrating sustainable urbanism with smart urbanism thanks to the proven role and synergic potential of data-driven technologies. Indeed, the processes and practices of both of these approaches to urban planning and development are becoming highly responsive to a form of data-driven urbanism, giving rise to a new phenomenon known as “data-driven smart sustainable urbanism.” Underlying this emerging approach is the idea of combining and integrating the strengths of sustainable cities and smart cities and harnessing the synergies of their strategies and solutions in ways that enable sustainable cities to optimize, enhance, and maintain their performance on the basis of the innovative data-driven technologies offered by smart cities. These strengths and synergies can be clearly demonstrated by combining the advantages of sustainable urbanism and smart urbanism. To enable such combination, major institutional transformations are required in terms of enhanced and new practices and competences. Based on case study research, this paper identifies, distills, and enumerates the key benefits, potentials, and opportunities of sustainable cities and smart cities with respect to the three dimensions of sustainability, as well as the key institutional transformations needed to support the balancing of these dimensions and to enable the introduction of data-driven technology and the adoption of applied data-driven solutions in city operational management and development planning. This paper is an integral part of a futures study that aims to analyze, investigate, and develop a novel model for data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future. I argue that the emerging data-driven technologies for sustainability as innovative niches are reconfiguring the socio-technical landscape of institutions, as well as providing insights to policymakers into pathways for strengthening existing institutionalized practices and competences and developing and establishing new ones. This is necessary for balancing and advancing the goals of sustainability and thus achieving a desirable future.
Highlights
Cities are a mark of human civilisation and play a central role in the pursuit of new paradigms of thinking to bring about major transformations to the way people live and change the world in the process
The focus of the results in this paper is on the institutional changes related to the novel model for data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future developed by Bibri and
As to the data-driven smart city, as an emerging paradigm of smart urbanism, it shares the challenges of sustainable development with the eco-city and compact city models, with the main difference being that it focuses more on the use and application of the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data technologies to overcome these challenges—than on the planning practices and design strategies of urban sustainability
Summary
Cities are a mark of human civilisation and play a central role in the pursuit of new paradigms of thinking to bring about major transformations to the way people live and change the world in the process. It is argued that the compact city model is able to contribute to and support the balancing of the three dimensions of sustainability (e.g., Bibri et al 2020; Burton 2002; Jenks and Dempsey 2005; Hofstad 2012; Jenks and Jones 2010; OECD 2012), and that the eco–city model is able to achieve the goals of environmental sustainability and to produce some economic and social benefits of sustainability (Bibri and Krogstie 2020a; Joss 2010; Joss et al 2013; Kenworthy 2006; Mostafavi and Doherty 2010; Rapoport and Vernay 2011; Suzuki et al 2010). The change is still inspiring and the endeavor continues to induce scholars, practitioners, and policymakers alike to enhance the existing models of sustainable cities or to propose new integrated models to improve sustainability in today’s world of advanced science and technology and intensive urban growth
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