A Novel Model for Data-Driven Smart Sustainable Cities of the Future: A Strategic Planning Process of Transformative Change towards Sustainability

Abstract

Sustainable cities have been the leading global paradigm of urbanism and the most preferred response to the challenges of sustainable development. Significant advances have been achieved in knowledge and a multitude of exemplary practical initiatives have been realized, thereby raising the profile of sustainable cities worldwide over the last four decades or so. The change is still inspiring and the endeavor continues to induce scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to enhance the existing models of sustainable cities, or to propose integrated models in response to new global trends and paradigm shifts in science and technology. Besides, sustainable cities epitomize complex systems par excellence, and as such, they are characterized by wicked problems. The problematicity surrounding sustainable cities lies in their development planning approaches and operational management mechanisms, as well as the fragmentary design strategies and environmental technology solutions pertaining to compact cities and eco-cities, respectively. This has a clear bearing on the performance of sustainable cities with respect to their contribution to the three goals of sustainability. This situation is compounded by the escalating trend of urbanisation and its negative consequences. Most of the problems, issues, and challenges related to sustainable cities largely relate to how these human settlements should be monitored, understood, analyzed, planned, designed, and managed in order to improve and advance sustainability. The underlying argument is that more innovative solutions and sophisticated methods are needed to tackle the kind of complexities and wicked problems inherently embodied in sustainable cities. This in turn brings us to the issue of sustainable cities and smart cities being extremely fragmented as landscapes and weakly connected as approaches, both at the technical and policy levels. Therefore, sustainable cities need to embrace and leverage what smart cities have to offer so that they can optimize, enhance, and maintain their performance and achieve the desired outcomes of sustainability. Especially, it has become increasingly feasible to attain important improvements and advancements of sustainability by integrating these two models of urbanism thanks to the proven role and untapped potential of data-driven technologies as an advanced form of ICT. The aim of this PhD study is to analyze, investigate, and develop a novel model for data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future. Using a methodological framework combining normative backcasting and descriptive case study as qualitative approaches, the study is performed through the assessment of the current situation, the analysis of major societal trends, the generation of a vision of a desired future, the investigation and understanding of the prevailing models of sustainable urbanism and the emerging models of smart urbanism in their real-world settings, and the development of the strategic planning process of transformative change towards sustainability. The contributions of the PhD study are as follows: C1: Analysis and evaluation of the state of the art in smart sustainable cities C2: Analysis and evaluation of the state of the art in smart cities of the future C3: Assessment of the current situation and trend analysis C4: Construction of the future vision C5: Illumination of the urbanism paradigms underpinning the strategic planning process of backcasting C6: Development of an applied theoretical framework for strategic sustainable urban development planning C7: Development of a novel model for data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future The proposed model serves as a strategic sustainable urban development framework for facilitating progress towards achieving the long-term goals of sustainability for those cities that are badging or regenerating themselves as sustainable, or manifestly planning to be or become smart sustainable in the era of big data. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first of its kind and thus has not been produced elsewhere.