SOCIETY & ”INDUSTRY 4.0”
Smart sustainable city
Cities today are highly endangered by the global urbanization trends and the sustainability issues that they may bring. With the increasing environmental awareness and the development of technology, there is an urgent need to rethink how we plan and manage our cities. With the advancements in technology, we are entering the era of smart cities where information and communication technologies are used to collect large amount of data to transform city economies, social cohesion and city governance. This paper explains the concept of the smart city and its characteristics which can be used to solve the sustainability problems that the city may face. Following the introduction, the paper continues by presenting six main characteristics of smart cities and their role in sustainability. The chapter then proceeds to a description of a smart sustainable city model that derives from merging three main city models related to sustainability and smartness, namely the eco-city, compact city and data driven city. Finally, the application of smart city technologies that are being used to achieve sustainability in some randomly chosen cities is presented and discussed.