Enhancing sustainable urban development through smart city applications
Abstract
Purpose: This paper investigates the potential contribution of smart city approaches and tools to sustainable urban development in the environment domain. Recent research has highlighted the need to explore the relation of smart and sustainable cities more systematically, focusing on practical applications that could enable a deeper understanding of the included domains, typologies and design concepts, and this paper aims to address this research gap. At the same time, it tries to identify whether these applications could contribute to the “zero vision” strategy, an extremely ambitious challenge within the field of smart cities. Design/methodology/approach: This objective is pursued through an in-depth investigation of available open source and proprietary smart city applications related to environmental sustainability in urban environments. A total of 32 applications were detected through the Intelligent/Smart Cities Open Source (ICOS) community, a meta-repository for smart cities solutions. The applications are analyzed comparatively regarding (i) the environmental issue addressed, (ii) the associated mitigation strategies, (iii) the included innovation mechanism, (iv) the role of information and communication technologies and (v) the overall outcome. Findings: The findings suggest that the smart and sustainable city landscape is extremely fragmented both on the policy and the technical levels. There is a host of unexplored opportunities toward smart sustainable development, many of which are still unknown. Similar findings are reached for all categories of environmental challenges in cities. Research limitations pertain to the analysis of a relatively small number of applications. The results can be used to inform policy making toward becoming more proactive and impactful both locally and globally. Given that smart city application market niches are also identified, they are also of special interest to developers, user communities and digital entrepreneurs. Originality/value: The value added by this paper is two-fold. At the theoretical level, it offers a neat conceptual bridge between smart and sustainable cities debate. At the practical level, it identifies under-researched and under-exploited fields of smart city applications that could be opportunities to attain the “zero vision” objective.
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A key factor leading to the emergence of environmentally sustainable smart cities is the large body of research criticizing the weak connection between smart cities and sustainable cities and the fallacies and misunderstanding associated with smart cities in the context of environmental sustainability.
“One of the key factors that has led to the emergence of this paradigm of urbanism is the large body of research criticizing the weak connection between smart cities and sustainable cities and the fallacies and misunderstanding associated with smart cities in the context of environmental sustainability”
From Environmentally sustainable smart cities and their converging AI, IoT, and big data technologies and solutions: an integrated approach to an extensive literature review (2023) · cites this paper as Angelidou et al. 2018
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- Authors
- Angelidou, M., Psaltoglou, A., Komninos, N., Kakderi, C., Tsarchopoulos, P., & Panori, A.
- Affiliations
- Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (GR)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Journal of Science and Technology Policy Management
- Publisher
- Emerald
- Published
- 2017-12-08
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 146-169
- ISSN
- 2053-4620 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2771820309
- Cited by
- 399
- References
- 54
- Citations by year
- 2026: 23 · 2025: 55 · 2024: 69 · 2023: 43 · 2022: 35 · 2021: 64 · 2020: 68 · 2019: 30 · 2018: 11
- FWCI
- 24.75
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Science and Technology Policy Management (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Media Technology › Smart Cities and Technologies
- Social Sciences › Urban Studies › Sustainable Urban and Rural Development
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Building and Construction › Sustainable Design and Development
- Keywords
- smart cities, sustainable urban development, environmental sustainability, smart city applications, Vision Zero, open source software, information and communication technologies, urban environmental problems, smart city policy, innovation mechanisms, niche markets
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