A Practical Integration of the Leading Paradigms of Urbanism: A Novel Model for Data-Driven Smart Sustainable Cities of the Future

Abstract

Sustainable urban development is today seen as one of the keys toward 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 as emerging technologies are seen as powerful forces that have significant 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 complex challenges they inherently embody. They are offering a multitudinous array of alternative applied solutions and sophisticated approaches informed by data-driven science and groundbreaking research. As such, they are becoming essential to the functioning of sustainable cities. In the meantime, yet knowing to what extent we are making progress toward sustainable cities is problematic, adding to the fragmented picture that arises of change on the ground in the face of the escalating rate and scale of urbanization. In a nutshell, new circumstances require new responses. One of these responses that has recently gained increasing prevalence is the idea of the “data-driven smart sustainable city.” This chapter sets out to identify and integrate the underlying components of a novel model for data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future. This entails amalgamating the leading paradigms of urbanism in terms of their strategies and solutions, namely compact cities, eco-cities, and data-driven smart cities. This amalgamation is grounded in the results obtained from six case studies conducted on these cities. We argue that the proposed model has great potential to advance sustainability and harness its synergistic effects on multiple scales. This model is believed to be the first of its kind and thus has not been, to the best of our knowledge, produced, nor is it currently under investigation, elsewhere.