Smart Cities, Biodiversity and Green Infrastructure - Living Dimensions of Future Cities

Dear Colleagues,

The Smart Cities phenomenon has shown promise in demonstrating how data-driven approaches and emerging digital technologies can address sustainability challenges. However, whilst citizen-centric approaches to smart cities are becoming more common, the more-than-human aspects of smart cities have remained peripheral, despite promising advances in the monitoring, design, and planning of ecologies along the constructed–natural continuum. With the boom in smart cities and the concurrent crises in biodiversity, it is critical that the intersection of such phenomena is addressed. With the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework being the focus of the recent COP15 conference in Kunming, China during Oct 2021, this is an opportune moment to explore how the management of urban forests, biodiversity, constructed ecologies, feral and rewilded ecologies, and green infrastructure can be integrated into smart city design, planning and management.

Urban landscapes present a dynamic confluence of social, technological, and biological systems. This extraordinary complexity and diversity has typically been addressed through separate streams of inquiry. Smart cities generally involve technocratic business-driven strategies and research, and scant attention has been paid to the cultural context or more than-human life forms. Urban ecology and biodiversity studies increasingly use a range of smart digital methods and approaches to understand biological organisms and their relationships. Yet such approaches have not generally been conceived in terms of broader smart cities systems, networks or digital urban platforms.

Smart cities involve the integration of a range of advanced digital technologies to design, plan and manage cities. Such technologies include the internet of things, unmanned vehicles such as drones, the use of sophisticated scanning technologies such as LiDAR and the integration of internet-based databases and networking technologies, including social media, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, as well as big data in decision-support systems and visualization systems. These technologies are driven by the data collected within and beyond cities. Smart urban technologies integrate many of these technologies to reimagine and reinvent the traditional functional and material fabric of the city. This technological approach to envisioning the future of cities has been promoted as a way of achieving greater sustainability and efficiency. However, within smart cities research remarkably little attention has been dedicated to the systems underpinning the survival of all cities and system, such as ecosystems and their related biodiversity.

In recent years, there have been calls for a more sustainable approach to Smart Cities. However, current approaches continue to emphasize energy, water, materials, and other production and operational aspects, while ecological underpinnings have remained marginal to Smart City concepts. The booming Smart Cities literature rarely considers the more-than-human, biological and natural systems of urban landscapes. This major gap in the smart cities’ literature, concerning how such digital investments, infrastructures and theoretical approaches change, define and shape biological relationships in future cities, leaves cities vulnerable in various critical ways. Such biological vulnerabilities may even be exacerbated by digital technologies and associated land-use changes, including alterations in existing trophic webs, the disturbance of a range of natural processes and the disruption of natural environments through the new 24/7 technologies that now pervade our cities. This is concerning, as biodiversity and ecosystems, the biological components of our cities, are vital for maintaining healthy urban systems. Biodiversity is fundamental to maintaining ecosystem health and function, and such processes underpin the ultimate sustainability of all urban systems. More generally, there is a lack of a systematic theoretical engagement around biodiversity within the smart city movement, which critically hampers opportunities to achieve the long-term goals of sustainability. The consequences of this can be severe, as biodiversity is the foundation of life on earth and underpins all the sustainable urban development.

When biodiversity is affected, ecosystem services can fail and trigger a cascade of impacts across systems. These can be as diverse as atmospheric health, hydrological health, human health and human-–nature relationships and cultural health. Economic systems and the vulnerabilities exposed through damaged biodiversity include spiking CO2 emissions and capture, agricultural productivity and mental and physical health. Either directly or indirectly, healthy biodiversity can prevent the advent of a variety of public health problems, including exposure to pollution and toxins, vector-borne diseases, and chronic lifestyle diseases. As well as these human-related problems, technologies threaten the viability of biodiversity, which is of value beyond the human related factors. For example, nanoparticles have been linked to impacts on soil microbial communities.

Conversely there are a variety of emerging opportunities around smart cities including a range of digital initiatives that show great promise for enhancing the biodiversity and ecosystems within systems. These include citizen science initiatives that quantify and identify flora and fauna, new monitoring and sensor technologies that can capture the spatial distribution and form of living organisms in space, as well as modelling technologies that can help inform more effective conservation actions. For example, technologies could be used to help reduce wildlife–vehicle collisions or the impacts of artificial light at night.

The beneficial role of biodiversity and environmental urban ecosystems can help to address challenges such as the loss of human-nature contact, declining biodiversity, and ever-expanding public health costs. This Special Issue, therefore, invites scholars to consider both the risks and benefits of smart cities in relation to biodiversity and green infrastructure.

This Special Issue calls for papers on:

• Urban design, urban science and biodiversity;
• Smart urban forests and smart urban forest management;
• Digital tools to improve the delivery, conservation and enhancement of biodiversity and ecosystems;
• Planning support systems to help visualise and manage more-than-human biodiversity;
• Biodiversity, citizen science, open data and citizen engagement;
• Biodiversity mapping through advanced technologies such as GIS and remote sensing;
• Microbiomes and constructed urban ecologies as technologically influenced environments;
• Digital disruption of natural environments;
• Big data analytics and urban biodiversity;
• Smart cities, design, science and green infrastructure;
• Augmented/virtual reality and biodiversity;
• Ecological digital twins;
• Digital design approaches to biodiversity;
• Landscape architecture, smart cities, and biodiversity;
• Environmental planning and smart cities;
• Indigenous biocultural knowledge and smart cities;
• Digital approaches to anthropogenic microbiomes and soils;
• Parametric design and simulated ecologies;
• Sensor networks, robotics, and biodiversity;
• Ecological indicators, monitoring, and smart cities;
• Reflections on the Edinburgh Process for Subnational and Local Governments on the development of the Post-2020 global biodiversity framework;
• Policy and reporting on biodiversity. for example, the IUCN, ICLEI and The Nature Conservancy Cities with Nature Pathway platform has been set up so cities can voluntarily share their journey.

The Special Issue is supported by the Australian Japan Foundation, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Australia.

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Dr. Scott Hawken
Dr. Amy Hahs
Guest Editors

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• urban biodiversity
• biodiversity positive design
• Smart Cities
• green infrastructure
• more-than-human cities
• constructed ecologies
• multispecies cohabitation
• simulated ecologies
• digital twins
• biocultural knowledge
• ecological indicators
• post 2020 global biodiversity framework
• Internet of Nature
• smart urban forests