Data-Driven Smart Ecological Urbanism: Emerging Practices for Integrating the Three Dimensions of Sustainability
A special issue of Urban Science (ISSN 2413-8851).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (2 March 2023) | Viewed by 4550
Special Issue Editor
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 Colleagues,
This Special Issue is about Data-Driven Smart Ecological Urbanism, which is a new strategic approach to sustainable urban development that seeks to integrate the three dimensions of urban sustainability in light of the data-driven technologies and solutions enabled by smart urbanism. This approach has recently emerged as a flexible and responsive means of overcoming the challenges of sustainability in the face of the escalating trend of urbanization.
Cities are a mark of human civilisation and play a central role in the pursuit of new paradigms of thinking to bring about major transformations to the way people live and change the world in the process. Ecological sustainability has, over the last four decades, been one of the most influential paradigms of thinking within urbanism. Modern cities holding unparalleled potential to address and overcome the challenges of sustainable development largely depends on how they can be planned, designed, and managed in response to global trends, scientific discoveries, and technological advances. Appropriately redesigning and restructuring urban places as eco-cities and adopting innovative solutions to make urban living more sustainable is a continuous endeavor towards integrating and achieving the three goals of sustainability.
Ecological urbanism is one of the central paradigms of sustainable urbanism. It is argued that the eco-city model is able to achieve the goals of environmental sustainability and to produce some economic and social benefits of sustainability. In other words, the environmental goals of sustainability tend to dominate in the discourse of the eco-city, with the social goals of sustainability being of less focus compared to the economic goals of sustainability. However, emphasizing one of the dimensions of sustainability remains a shortcoming (i.e., a failure to meet certain standards in plans) and deficiency (i.e., lacking some necessary elements) in the urban context. Indeed, urban sustainability as a holistic approach to thinking demands that all three dimensions of sustainability be equally important. Besides, ecological urbanism draws from ecology to inspire an urbanism that is more sensitive to the environment and also socially inclusive. Regardless, implementing sustainable solutions in the context of the eco-city is more difficult because no unified practical definition is accepted, even though the subject of sustainability has been hotly debated over the last four decades.
The conscious push for eco-cities to be smarter and thus more sustainable in the era of big data is due to the problematicity surrounding their development planning approaches and operational management mechanisms. This has a clear bearing on their performance with respect to the integration of the three dimensions of sustainability. This situation is compounded by the negative consequences of the expansion of urbanization, an irreversible global trend involving a multitude of environmental, social, economic, and spatial conditions that pose unprecedented challenges to politicians, policymakers, and planners. The underlying argument is that more innovative solutions are needed to enable eco-cities to tackle the kinds of problems they embody. This in turn brings us to the question related to the weak connection of eco-cities and smart cities, both at the technical and policy levels. Therefore, eco-cities need to embrace and leverage what smart cities have to offer so that they can optimize, enhance, and extend their performance beyond the environmental dimension of sustainability. In particular, it has become feasible to attain important improvements of sustainability by integrating ecological urbanism and smart urbanism thanks to the proven role and untapped potential of big data technologies for maximizing the tripartite value of sustainability. Consequently, the scope of ecological urbanism has broadened to cover multiple domains of sustainability, including energy efficiency, pollution reduction, urban metabolism, environmental monitoring, in addition to a number of socio-economic spheres.
This Special Issue aims to offer a platform for supporting and advancing the integration of ecological urbanism and smart urbanism on the basis of the IoT and big data analytics and their novel applications so as to achieve the goals of sustainability. Accordingly, it will contribute to enhancing research and practice in data-driven smart ecological urbanism by bringing an informed understanding of the subject to scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and futurists. 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 ecological urbanism. The scope of this Special Issue—which compiles the cutting-edge work of researchers that investigates the state of the art and future perspectives in data-driven smart ecological urbanism—includes, but are not limited to, the following broad topics:
- Eco-urbanism and science fiction;
- The evolution and future of eco-urbanism;
- Eco-urbanism and artificial intelligence;
- Eco-urbanism and urban resilience;
- Eco-urbanism and sustainable development goals;
- Data-driven urban analytics for eco-urbanism;
- Data-driven smart solutions for ecological sustainability;
- Passive solar, low energy, net zero, green, and energy-efficient buildings;
- Opportunities and challenges for promoting data-driven smart eco-urbanism;
- Infrastructural and institutional transformations needed for promoting data-driven smart eco-urbanism;
- Data-driven smart eco-innovations;
- Urban computing and intelligence for eco-urbanism;
- Social, economic, environmental, and institutional dimensions of eco-urbanism;
- Data-driven smart eco-urbanism and climate change mitigation and adaptation;
- Urban green and blue infrastructure for ecosystem services;
- The IoT- and AI- enabled smart eco-urbanism;
- Data-driven smart ecological policy, planning, design, and governance;
- Data-driven smart eco-urbanism goals, indicators, and frameworks;
- Data-driven smart environmental technologies;
- Theoretical underpinnings and analytical frameworks of data-driven smart eco-urbanism;
- Methodological and technical approaches for the evaluation of data-driven smart eco-urbanism;
- Global best practices of data-driven smart eco-urbanism based on case investigations and demonstrations.
Dr. Simon Elias Bibri
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- eco-urbanism
- smart urbanism
- green urbanism
- data-driven smart eco-urbanism
- data-driven smart solutions
- nature-based solutions
- environmental sustainability
- green technology
- energy efficiency technology
- sustainable materials
- sustainable buildings
- waste management
- green infrastructure
- ecological design
- smart urban metabolism
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