Abstract
This Special Issue of Sustainability was devoted to the topic of “Sustainable Smart Cities and Smart Villages Research: Rethinking Security, Safety, Well-being, and Happiness”. It attracted significant attention of scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers from all over the world. Locating themselves at the expanding cross-section of the information systems and policy making research, all papers included in this Special Issue contribute to the debate on the exploitation of advanced information and communication technologies (ICT) for smart applications and computing for smart cities and rural areas research. By promoting a thorough scientific debate on multi-faceted challenges that our villages, cities, urban and rural areas are exposed to today, this Special Issue offers a very useful overview of the most recent developments in the multifaceted and, frequently overlapping, fields of smart cities and smart villages research. A variety of topics including well-being, happiness, security, Open Democracy, Open Government, Smart Education, Smart Innovation, and Migration have been addressed in this Special Issue. In this way they define the direction for future research in both domains.
Highlights
Overview of the Edited VolumeIt was a pleasure to have delivered a special issue on smart cities and smart villages research in Spring 2018
Building on our earlier work, drawing from our field research, and driven by a genuine concern about the process and the implications of the rapid depopulation of rural areas, we introduced the concept of ‘smart village’ in the academic debate in Summer 2017 [1]
The overall collection of research studies provides an integrative discussion for the key issues and challenges related to Smart Cities and Smart Villages Research, and several soft issues associated to this scientific domain including Happiness, Well-being, Security, and Safety
Summary
It was a pleasure to have delivered a special issue on smart cities and smart villages research in Spring 2018 (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/special_issues/Smart_Cities). Papers included in this Special Issue contributed to the opening of new avenues of research, and triggered a lively debate on diverse aspects of well-being in urban and rural areas as they evolve [4]. The excellent contributions from all over the world included in that Special Issue allowed us to disseminate the latest high quality interdisciplinary research in the domains of urban computing, smart cities, and, most importantly, smart villages [5]. To capitalize on that work, today, the imperative is to move to the stage of the debate To this end, the Editors of this volume initiated a new call for contributions that address (but are not limited to) the following issues and aspects related to the diverse aspects of socio-economic processes as they unfold in rural and urban areas and have a bearing on individuals’ security, safety, well-being, and happiness:.
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