Urban Innovations: Trends and Technologies Shaping Smart Cities

Dear Colleagues,

The term ‘Smart City’ has been used in different contexts since the 1990s, when it was first employed in the United States to describe the use of ICT (information and communication technology) applications in modern urban infrastructures (Gibson, 1992). The different descriptions of “smart” have resulted in numerous similar terms such as digital city, intelligent city, knowledge city, and wired city, in an attempt to specify this “fuzzy concept”—a description used by various scholars (Albino et al., 2015; Camero and Alba, 2019; Caragliu et al., 2011; Cocchia, 2014; Patrão et al., 2020; Sharifi, 2019). The concept remains a contested one, and there is still no general agreement and standard definition of the term “smart city” (Albino et al., 2015; Lai and Cole, 2022; Patrão et al., 2020; Sharifi, 2019).

This Special Issue calls for papers that deal with Smart Cities: Challenges, Trends, and Technologies. Papers are welcome from established and new researchers who are interested in smart cities and urban governance. The themes include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Smart governance foundations, models, frameworks, and principles;
• Open governance, participatory decision-making, and accountability;
• Security, privacy, and identity issues in smart cities;
• Citizen-centricity and citizen-driven solutions for smart cities;
• Sustainable and sustainability solutions for smart cities;
• Sectoral discussions around the smart city (e.g., energy, mobility, health);
• Smart government and e-governance;
• Trust, transparency, and smart cities;
• Narratives of the smart city;
• Comparative studies at global, national, and city levels between China and other countries.

The smart city lies somewhere between a material fact and an urban narrative (Cole and Tran, 2022). It is primarily material, in the sense that it refers to precise policy programs and infrastructure associated with the digitalization of public services. Most definitions converge towards understanding the smart city as one that uses different types of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to promote the city in the digital world and improve public services (economy, mobility, environment, people, and living) and governance. The smart city is also an urban narrative, a city vision beyond the description of a set of technical programs. By combining material and more constructed approaches, this Special Issue breaks new ground in the comparative understanding of smart city dynamics.

Prof. Dr. Alistair Cole
Dr. Dionysios Stivas
Guest Editors

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• trust
• smart city
• transparency
• co-production
• sustainability
• e-governance
• energy
• mobility
• health