The term “smart cities” is now entering its third decade, and during that time some of the discussions about cities using technologies to become “smart” have been included in these pages. The article that opens this issue is a bibliometric analysis of this contested term. Luca Mora and his co-authors, Roberto Bolici and Mark Deakin use their paper to report on the first two decades of research on smart cities. What becomes apparent through their analysis is a bifurcated vision of smart cities. One is propagated in peer-reviewed research produced mainly by European universities, while the other originates from the “gray” literature of reports and descriptions produced by transnational corporations, mainly in America. The authors argue that their bibliometric analysis reveals that much of the knowledge generated by the scholarship is primarily and narrowly technological and “lacks the social intelligence, cultural artifacts, and environmental attributes, which are needed for the ICT-related urban innovations that such research champions.”
The next two articles in this “open issue” focus on the decision support tools necessary for developing resilience in urban environments and the standards that are necessary for evaluating urban sustainability. Brian Deal, Haozhi Pan, Varkki Pallathucheril, and Gale Fulton write of the need for planning support systems that are “sentient.” While they note that there are not yet technologies that are truly sentient, they describe what planning support systems would look like if they were to aim toward resilience. Such systems would “(a) possess a greater awareness of application context and user needs; (b) be capable of iterative learning; (c) be capable of spatial and temporal reasoning; (d) understand rules; and (e) be accessible and interactive.”
In their paper, “Eco-City Projects: Incorporating Sustainability Requirements during Pre-Project Planning,” Farah Mneimneh, Issam Srour, Isam Kaysi, and Mona Harb explain that while international standards exist for evaluating building or neighborhood sustainability, no such standards exist for large-scale developments. Their paper does two things: First, it offers a framework that could be used to integrate sustainability principles into pre-project planning, and then it uses a case study of an already planned eco-city to compare that plan to their proposed framework. This comparison shows the importance “of regular interactions between business planners and master planners to incorporate sustainability requirements at early planning phases.”
On a different scale and for a different purpose—to determine prospective costs instead of sustainability—the issue’s next article uses evidence from mid-sized Spanish cities to show how the length of roads and the density of housing are two distinct determinants of the operating costs for urban services. Francisco Javier Garrido-Jiménez, Francesc Magrinyá-Torner, and Maria Consuelo del Moral-Ávila argue that while these two urban variables are often thought to be proportional in determining costs, their research shows that to be so only in developments based on homogeneous, single-family dwellings. In more diverse urban morphologies, housing density can explain the operating cost per unit related to road and park maintenance, but the relative length of roads better explains the costs of water supply, waste collection, disposal, and treatment as well as street cleaning.
The final article in the issue, “Behaving Clean without Having to Think Green? Local Eco-Technological and Dialogue-Based, Low-Carbon Projects in Sweden,” by Eva Gustavsson and Ingemar Elander reports a study the authors did to compare two kinds of low-carbon initiatives in Sweden: The first was a program of the central government and the other was a program initiated by individuals and municipalities. The authors note that despite public awareness programs and the lip service paid by most individuals in Sweden to live a more low-carbon daily life, “overall consumption by households in Sweden is steadily increasing, contributing to excess of GHG-emission globally.” Their paper charts two Swedish approaches to addressing these increases. One was a
local dialogue-based approach focusing directly on individual values, attitudes, and behavior and another, an eco-technological approach, intended rather to influence the behavior of individuals through “nudging,” i.e., trying to change people’s behavior by eco-technological inventions, notably by not necessarily changing individual attitudes.
Their research found flaws in both approaches, and while they held out some hope for programs that combine the two approaches, even then the authors saw patterns of consumption that did not bode well for the future of low-carbon lifestyles and behaviors.