Sustainability of Smart City Solutions: Impacts on People, Planet and Prosperity
A special issue of Smart Cities (ISSN 2624-6511).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2020) | Viewed by 5511
Special Issue Editors
Interests: smart cities; sustainable urban development; carbon-neutral cities; evaluation; indicators; decision support tools; multi-criteria decision analysis
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: innovation ecosystems, market-creating innovations, co-creation, co-innovation, future proof cities, cognitive built environment, urban intelligence, life cycle assessment, smart sustainable cities
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Our cities and societies are facing massive challenges such as climate change, population growth, and social division. The question is: how we can turn these global challenges into opportunities that result in sustainable impacts for people, the planet, and businesses? Applied research and technology can offer the means to solve these challenges while creating sustainable growth opportunities for businesses and wellbeing for all people.
Smart city solutions have the potential to tackle cities’ environmental, social, and economic challenges through efficient, yet individualized, service provision. However, they are often criticized of being driven by technology companies’ own agendas while lacking proper attention to cities’ needs and environmental sustainability. Too often, the results are sub-optimal from a societal point of view. Many studies presenting smart city solutions are self-congratulatory, without a comprehensive assessment of the claimed benefits and potential negative impacts.
Improved energy efficiency is an example of typically claimed environmental benefits of smart energy solutions, but related studies rarely address the negative impacts caused by the production of ICT, sensors, solar panels, e-vehicles, etc., or electricity consumption due to the use of ICT.
On the other hand, the growth of technological development and new smart consumer technologies is exponential and shapes our society. Studies that carefully evaluate the potential impacts of new technological solutions on their users are more and more important, as the human mind cannot follow the pace of change, and decision-makers need scientific impact assessments to support wise decision making.
Moreover, new crosscutting approaches are increasingly needed, for instance, sector coupling for integrating actors across traditional infrastructure borders towards a system of systems thinking.
In order to address the present shortcomings, we invite research articles, conceptual papers, perspectives, case studies, and methodology papers that provide evidence of the (positive or negative) effects of smart city solutions. We welcome studies from a wide range of disciplines and particularly encourage submissions that approach the topic comprehensively and from multiple angles (e.g., the application of holistic methods such as system dynamics, life cycle assessment, evaluation frameworks and tools, multi-criteria decision analysis, etc.).
Mr. Aapo Huovila
Dr. Antti Ruuska
Prof. Dr. Kari Mäki
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Smart Cities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- Smart cities
- Sustainability
- Impact
- Evaluation
- Environment
- Citizens
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