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Smart Cities
Special Issues
Data-Driven Smart Sustainable Cities: Advanced Solutions for Environmental Sustainability
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Data-Driven Smart Sustainable Cities: Advanced Solutions for Environmental Sustainability

A special issue of Smart Cities (ISSN 2624-6511).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2022) | Viewed by 69409

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Simon Elias Bibri

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science and Department of Planning and Architecture, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway
Interests: sustainable development; urban sustainability; urban planning and design; smart urban governance; big data science and analytics; urban science; the Internet of Things (IoT); urban computing and intelligence; data-driven smart sustainable cities; sustainable cities (e.g., eco–city, low-carbon city, green city, compact city); smart cities (e.g., real–time city, data–driven city, ubiquitous city); integrated renewable energy and smart energy technologies; data-driven smart solutions for environmental sustainability; environmental innovations and sustainable energy transitions; sustainability transitions and socio-technical shifts; science, technology, and innovation studies; circular economy and business model innovation for sustainability; technological and sectoral innovation systems; and technology, innovation, and environmental policies
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear colleague,

This Special Issue intends to stimulate in-depth research and discussion on the advanced solutions for environmental sustainability in the context of data-driven smart sustainable cities. The concentration of economic activities, the high-intensity use of resources, and the massive deployment of non-renewable energy in cities demonstrate that they have major negative impacts on the environment. In the current climate of the unprecedented urbanization of the world, it is becoming increasingly more challenging for both smart cities and sustainable cities to configure themselves more sustainably and efficiently from an environmental perspective. Indeed, urban growth raises a variety of problems that jeopardize the environmental sustainability of modern cities, as it puts an enormous strain on urban systems and thus great demand on energy resources.

Currently, greater importance is given to economic development and social development at the cost of environmental protection. In recent years, major topics discussed in the area of environmental sustainability have included the depletion of non-renewable resources, the harvesting of renewable resources, the destruction of ecosystems, and the generation of pollution, as well as the role of advanced ICT in tackling environmental problems through innovative control and monitoring systems. With respect to the latter, computational data analytics approaches are being extensively used to observe and discover hidden patterns of energy production and consumption in order to devise more effective solutions that could avert the multidimensional effects of devouring energy on the environment. There is a general consensus that innovative data-driven technology solutions hold great potential to improve energy efficiency and mitigate climate change. This is at the core of the vision of smart energy, which aims to achieve energy systems that are highly efficient, increasingly powered by renewable and local energy sources enabled by new technologies, and less dependent on fossil fuels. This vision has spurred the development of new approaches to future sustainable energy systems, such as smart grids, automated metering infrastructure, smart buildings, integrated renewable solutions, solar photovoltaic panels, and so on.

In light of the above, we can make a positive impact on the environment by making smart cities more sustainable and sustainable cities smarter in terms of their energy and environmental efficiency. In particular, the recent advances in the IoT, big data analytics, and Artificial Intelligence, coupled with higher-level urban computing and intelligence infrastructure, have offered many new opportunities to develop and use new urban intelligence and planning functions for energy efficiency, pollution reduction, and urban metabolism. Therefore, these emerging technologies have become essential to the functioning of both smart cities and sustainable cities with respect to environmental sustainability.

This Special Issue of Smart Cities is devoted to promoting the investigation of the latest data-driven technologies and applied solutions offered by smart cities for advancing sustainable cities in terms of their contribution to the goals of environmental sustainability. And more importantly for integrating their strategies and solutions within the framework of data-smart sustainable cities.This Special Issue seeks contributions—in the form of research articles, literature reviews, case reports, futures studies, short communications, project reports, and discussion papers—that offer insights into data-driven smart sustainable urbanism. The scope of this Special Issue includes, but is not limited to, the following broad topics:

  • Data-driven smart cities and environmental sustainability;
  • Sustainable cities and data-driven environmental technologies;
  • Environmental challenges for smart cities and sustainable cities;
  • The role of data-driven urban analytics in environmental sustainability;
  • Data-driven solutions for smart grids and automated metering infrastructure;
  • Data-driven solutions for smart environmental monitoring;
  • Data-driven smart solutions for sustainable transportation;
  • Data-driven solutions for smart transport and traffic;
  • Data-driven solutions for smart mobility and parking;
  • Data-driven solutions for smart buildings and homes;
  • Data-driven solutions for smart street lighting infrastructure;
  • Data-driven solutions for urban infrastructure management;
  • Data-driven smart solutions for sustainable energy;
  • Data-driven smart solutions for sustainable waste management;
  • Data-driven smart solutions for urban metabolism models;
  • Integrated renewable solutions based on big data analytics;
  • Practical examples and best practice insights in smart energy and smart environment;
  • Urban intelligence functions for smart energy and smart environment;
  • IoT- and AI-enabled energy systems for smart sustainable cities;
  • Data-driven smart environmental planning and climate policy.

Dr. Simon Elias Bibri
Guest Editor

Keywords

  • Smart cities
  • Sustainable cities
  • Smart sustainable cities
  • The IoT
  • Big data analytics
  • Smart grids and smart meters
  • Smart environmental monitoring
  • Smart transport
  • Smart traffic
  • Smart mobility
  • Smart parking
  • Smart buildings
  • Smart street lighting
  • Smart waste management
  • Smart urban metabolism
  • Air and noise pollution
  • Energy efficiency
  • Environmental planning
  • Environmental sustainability

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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43 pages, 818 KiB  
Article
The Social Shaping of the Metaverse as an Alternative to the Imaginaries of Data-Driven Smart Cities: A Study in Science, Technology, and Society
by Simon Elias Bibri
Smart Cities 2022, 5(3), 832-874; https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities5030043 - 28 Jul 2022
Cited by 107 | Viewed by 15666
Abstract
Science and technology transform the frontiers of knowledge and have deep and powerful impacts on society, demonstrating how social reality varies with each era of the world. As a set of fictional representations of technologically driven future worlds, the Metaverse is increasingly shaping [...] Read more.
Science and technology transform the frontiers of knowledge and have deep and powerful impacts on society, demonstrating how social reality varies with each era of the world. As a set of fictional representations of technologically driven future worlds, the Metaverse is increasingly shaping the socio-technical imaginaries of data-driven smart cities, i.e., the outcome of radical transformations of dominant structures, processes, practices, and cultures. At the core of the systematic exploration of science and technology is the relationships between scientific knowledge, technological systems, and values and ethics from a wide range of perspectives. Positioned within science of science, this study investigates the complex interplay between the Metaverse as a form of science and technology and the wider social context in which it is embedded. Therefore, it adopts an analytical and philosophical framework of STS, and in doing so, it employs an integrated approach to discourse analysis, supported by a comparative analysis of the Metaverse and Ambient Intelligence. This study shows that the Metaverse as a scientific and technological activity is socially constructed, politically driven, economically conditioned, and historically situated. That is, it is inherently human and hence value-laden, as well as can only be understood as contextualized within the socio-political-economic-historical framework that gives rise to it, sustains it, and makes it durable by material effects and networks. This view in turn corroborates that the Metaverse raises serious concerns as to determinism, social exclusion, marginalization, privacy erosion, surveillance, control, democratic backsliding, hive mentality, cyber-utopianism, and dystopianism. This study argues that, due to the problematic nature of the Metaverse in terms of its inherent ethical and social implications, there need to be more explicit processes and practices for enhancing public participation and allowing a more democratic public role in its shaping and control, especially early in the decision-making process of its development—when the opportunity for effective inputs and informed choices is greatest. The novelty of this study lies in that it is the first of its kind with respect to probing the link between the Metaverse and data-driven smart cities from an STS perspective. The main contribution of this study lies in deepening and extending social scientific critiques and understandings of the imaginaries of data-driven smart cities based on the analysis and evaluation of the Metaverse and the warning signals and troubling visions it conveys and animates in order to help construct desirable alternative futures for the greater good of all citizens. The ultimate goal is to structure the Metaverse in ways that are morally acceptable and collectively the most democratically beneficial for society. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Data-Driven Smart Sustainable Cities: Advanced Solutions for Environmental Sustainability)
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31 pages, 1059 KiB  
Article
The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges for Environmental, Economic, and Social Sustainability in Urban Futures
by Zaheer Allam, Ayyoob Sharifi, Simon Elias Bibri, David Sydney Jones and John Krogstie
Smart Cities 2022, 5(3), 771-801; https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities5030040 - 8 Jul 2022
Cited by 311 | Viewed by 43650
Abstract
Data infrastructures, economic processes, and governance models of digital platforms are increasingly pervading urban sectors and spheres of urban life. This phenomenon is known as platformization, which has in turn given rise to the phenomena of platform society, where platforms have permeated the [...] Read more.
Data infrastructures, economic processes, and governance models of digital platforms are increasingly pervading urban sectors and spheres of urban life. This phenomenon is known as platformization, which has in turn given rise to the phenomena of platform society, where platforms have permeated the core of urban societies. A recent manifestation of platformization is the Metaverse, a global platform project launched by Meta (formerly Facebook) as a globally operating platform company. The Metaverse represents an idea of a hypothetical “parallel virtual world” that incarnate ways of living and working in virtual cities as an alternative to smart cities of the future. Indeed, with emerging innovative technologies—such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, the IoT, and Digital Twins—providing rich datasets and advanced computational understandings of human behavior, the Metaverse has the potential to redefine city designing activities and service provisioning towards increasing urban efficiencies, accountabilities, and quality performance. However, there still remain ethical, human, social, and cultural concerns as to the Metaverse’s influence upon the quality of human social interactions and its prospective scope in reconstructing the quality of urban life. This paper undertakes an upper-level literature review of the area of the Metaverse from a broader perspective. Further, it maps the emerging products and services of the Metaverse, and explores their potential contributions to smart cities with respect to their virtual incarnation, with a particular focus on the environmental, economic, and social goals of sustainability. This study may help urban policy makers to better understand the opportunities and implications of the Metaverse upon tech-mediated practices and applied urban agendas, as well as assess the positives and negatives of this techno-urban vision. This paper also offers thoughts regarding the argument that the Metaverse has disruptive and substantive effects on forms of reconstructing reality in an increasingly platformized urban society. This will hopefully stimulate prospective research and further critical perspectives on the topic. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Data-Driven Smart Sustainable Cities: Advanced Solutions for Environmental Sustainability)
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13 pages, 525 KiB  
Viewpoint
The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Data-Driven Smart Urbanism: On Post-Pandemic Governance through the Prism of the Logic of Surveillance Capitalism
by Simon Elias Bibri and Zaheer Allam
Smart Cities 2022, 5(2), 715-727; https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities5020037 - 31 May 2022
Cited by 69 | Viewed by 8652 | Correction
Abstract
The Metaverse, as a gigantic ecosystem application enabled mainly by Artificial Intelligence (AI), the IoT, Big Data, and Extended Reality (XR) technologies, represents an idea of a hypothetical "parallel virtual environment" that incarnates ways of living in virtually inhabitable cities. It is increasingly [...] Read more.
The Metaverse, as a gigantic ecosystem application enabled mainly by Artificial Intelligence (AI), the IoT, Big Data, and Extended Reality (XR) technologies, represents an idea of a hypothetical "parallel virtual environment" that incarnates ways of living in virtually inhabitable cities. It is increasingly seen as a transition from smart cities to virtual cities and a new target for city governments to attain “new” goals. However, the Metaverse project was launched amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis purported to be a rare opportunity that should be seized to reset and reimagine the world—though mainly in regard to its digital incarnation, and what this entails in terms of both cementing and normalizing the corporate-led, top-down, technocratic, tech-mediated, algorithmic mode of governance, as well as new forms of controlling ways of living in urban society. The “new normal” has already set the stage for undemocratically resetting and unilaterally reimagining the world, resulting in an abrupt large-scale digital transformation of urban society, a process of digitization and digitalization that is in turn paving the way for a new era of merging virtuality and urbanity. This has raised serious concerns over the risks and impacts of the surveillance technologies that have been rapidly and massively deployed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. These concerns also relate to the global architecture of the computer mediation of the Metaverse upon which the logic of surveillance capitalism depends, and which is constituted by control and commodification mechanisms that seek to monitor, predict, control, and trade the behavior of human users, as well as to exile them from their own. This viewpoint paper explores and questions the Metaverse from the prism of the social and economic logic of surveillance capitalism, focusing on how and why the practices of the post-pandemic governance of urban society are bound to be undemocratic and unethical. The novelty of the viewpoint lies in providing new insights into understanding the dark side of the ostensible fancier successor of the Internet of today, thereby its value and contribution to the ongoing scholarly debates in the field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS). In addition, by shedding light on the emergence of the Metaverse as a computing platform, the viewpoint seeks to help policymakers understand and assess the ramifications of its wide adoption, as well as to help users make informed decisions about its usage in everyday activity—if it actualizes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Data-Driven Smart Sustainable Cities: Advanced Solutions for Environmental Sustainability)
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