This book investigates the new urban geographies of “smart” metropolitan regionalism across the Greater Seattle area and examines the relationship between smart growth planning strategies and spaces of work, home, and mobility. The book specifically explores Seattle within the wider space-economy and multi-scaled policy regime of the Puget Sound region as a whole, ‘jumping up’ from questions of city politics to concerns with what the book interprets as the “intercurrence” of city-regional “ordering." These theoretical terms capture the state-progressive effort to promote smarter forms of regional development but also the societal/institutional tensions and outright contradictions that such urban development invariably entails, particularly around problems of social equity. Key organizing themes in the text include: the historical path-dependencies of uneven economic and social development, particularly between Tacoma-Pierce County and Seattle-King County; current patterns of high-wage, medium-wage, and low-wage jobs; the emerging spatial and social structure of recent residential changes, especially with respect to class and race composition; and, finally, transit trends and new urban spaces associated with policy efforts to mitigate highway congestion and car-dependency. Greater Seattle, then, is mapped as a key US urban region inscribed spatially by the uneven search for a more sustainable order. Historically-sensitive, theoretically-informed and empirically topical, this book is of interest to scholars and students at all levels in regional planning, urban geography, political science, sustainability studies, urban sociology and public policy.

This book examines smart growth entrepreneurs—innovators in government, development companies, architectural firms, and other organizations, who coalesce to shift policies and markets toward green planning and building practices. Cities across the world are trying to manage their population and economic growth by implementing the design principles of Smart Growth and New Urbanism, developing green buildings that are compact, mixed-use, and in close proximity to transit services. How do innovators, governments, and markets interact in this planning and development process? The book profiles smart growth entrepreneurs and their projects in both Southern California and the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. The author highlights the unique obstacles, political and economic, that these actors encounter and details the centrality of markets and regulations in sustainable urban development.

This book is intended to help explore the field of smart sustainable cities in its complexity, heterogeneity, and breadth, the many faces of a topical subject of major importance for the future that encompasses so much of modern urban life in an increasingly computerized and urbanized world. Indeed, sustainable urban development is currently at the center of debate in light of several ICT visions becoming achievable and deployable computing paradigms, and shaping the way cities will evolve in the future and thus tackle complex challenges. This book integrates computer science, data science, complexity science, sustainability science, system thinking, and urban planning and design. As such, it contains innovative computer–based and data–analytic research on smart sustainable cities as complex and dynamic systems. It provides applied theoretical contributions fostering a better understanding of such systems and the synergistic relationships between the underlying physical and informational landscapes. It offers contributions pertaining to the ongoing development of computer–based and data science technologies for the processing, analysis, management, modeling, and simulation of big and context data and the associated applicability to urban systems that will advance different aspects of sustainability. This book seeks to explicitly bring together the smart city and sustainable city endeavors, and to focus on big data analytics and context-aware computing specifically. In doing so, it amalgamates the design concepts and planning principles of sustainable urban forms with the novel applications of ICT of ubiquitous computing to primarily advance sustainability. Its strength lies in combining big data and context–aware technologies and their novel applications for the sheer purpose of harnessing and leveraging the disruptive and synergetic effects of ICT on forms of city planning that are required for future forms of sustainable development. This is because the effects of such technologies reinforce one another as to their efforts for transforming urban life in a sustainable way by integrating data–centric and context–aware solutions for enhancing urban systems and facilitating coordination among urban domains. This timely and comprehensive book is aimed at a wide audience across science, academia industry, and policymaking. It provides the necessary material to inform relevant research communities of the state–of–the–art research and the latest development in the area of smart sustainable urban development, as well as a valuable reference for planners, designers, strategists, and ICT experts who are working towards the development and implementation of smart sustainable cities based on big data analytics and context–aware computing.

Which new institutions do we need in order to trigger local- and global sustainable urban development? Are cities the right starting points for implementing sustainability policies? If so, what are the implications for city management? This book reflects the situation of cities in the context of global change and increasing demands for sustainable development. The book introduces core findings, new methods, and international experience related to sustainability innovations and the social transformation of cities, synthesizing insights from megacity research, sustainability science, and urban planning. Written by a team of more than fifty leading researchers and practitioners from all five continents, it traces general urban transformations and introduces new approaches such as: smart growth strategies; cross-sectoral, transdisciplinary urban transition management; rubanisation; and city syntegration. The book reveals the potential of new, networked agencies of sustainability transformation, and discusses the role of science institutions in the diffusion and implementation of institutional and social innovations. This comprehensive book is of immense value to students, researchers, and professionals working on issues of sustainable development, in environmental programs in human geography, planning and the built environment, sociology and policy studies, institutional economics, and environmental politics.

More than half of the world's people now live in cities. In the United States, the figure is 80 percent. It is worthwhile to consider how this trend of increased urbanization, if inevitable, could be made more sustainable. One fundamental shortcoming of urban research and programs is that they sometimes fail to recognize urban areas as systems. Current institutions and actors are not accustomed to exploring human-environment interactions, particularly at an urban-scale. The fact is that these issues involve complex interactions, many of which are not yet fully understood. Thus a key challenge for the 21st century is this: How can we develop sustainable urban systems that provide healthy, safe and affordable environments for the growing number of Americans living in cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas? To address this question, the National Research Council organized a workshop exploring the landscape of urban sustainability research programs in the United States. The workshop, summarized in this volume, was designed to allow participants to share information about the activities and planning efforts of federal agencies, along with related initiatives by universities, the private sector, nongovernmental groups, state and local agencies, and international organizations. Participants were encouraged to explore how urban sustainability can move beyond analyses devoted to single disciplines and sectors to systems-level thinking and effective interagency cooperation. To do this, participants examined areas of potential coordination among different R&D programs, with special consideration given to how the efforts of federal agencies can best complement and leverage the efforts of other key stakeholders. Pathways to Urban Sustainability offers a broad contextual summary of workshop presentations and discussions for distribution to federal agencies, regional organizations, academic institutions, think tanks and other groups engaged in urban research.

This book enhances the reader’s understanding of the theoretical foundations, sociotechnical assemblage, and governance mechanisms of sustainable smart city transitions. Drawing on empirical evidence stemming from existing smart city research, the book begins by advancing a theory of sustainable smart city transitions, which forms bridges between smart city development studies and some of the key assumptions underpinning transition management and system innovation research, human geography, spatial planning, and critical urban scholarship. This interdisciplinary theoretical formulation details how smart city transitions unfold and how they should be conceptualized and enacted in order to be assembled as sustainable developments. The proposed theory of sustainable smart city transitions is then enriched by the findings of investigations into the planning and implementation of smart city transition strategies and projects. Focusing on different empirical settings, change dimensions, and analytical elements, the attention moves from the sociotechnical requirements of citywide transition pathways to the development of sector-specific smart city projects and technological innovations, in particular in the fields of urban mobility and urban governance. This book represents a relevant reference work for academic and practitioner audiences, policy makers, and representative of smart city industries. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology.

Rev. ed. of: From sprawl to smart growth.

While technology is developing at a fast pace, urban planners and cities are still behind in finding effective ways to use technology to address citizen’s needs. Multiple aspects of sustainable urbanism are brought together in this book, along with advanced technologies and their connections to urban planning and management. It integrates urban studies, smart cities, AI, IoT, remote sensing, and GIS. Highlights include land use planning, spatial planning, and ecosystem-based information to improve economic opportunities. Urban planners and engineers will understand the use of AI in disaster management and the use of GIS in finding suitable landfill sites for sustainable waste management. Features Explains the process of urban heritage conservation, including the process of urban renewal and its regeneration and the role of citizens in urban renewal, planning, and management. Includes several case studies highlighting urban environmental problems and challenges in developed and developing countries and the ways for converting urban areas into smart cities. Focuses on urban resources, the supply of energy in smart cities, and their proper management practices. Introduces the role of remote sensing, GIS, and IoT in making a smart city and meeting sustainable goals. Analyzes unique case studies, their challenges and obstacles, and proposes a set of factors to understanding smart city initiatives and projects.

Untangling Smart Cities: From Utopian Dreams to Innovation Systems for a Technology-Enabled Urban Sustainability helps all key stakeholders understand the complex and often conflicting nature of smart city research, offering valuable insights for designing and implementing strategies to improve the smart city decision-making processes. The book drives the reader to a better theoretical and practical comprehension of smart city development, beginning with a thorough and systematic analysis of the research literature published to date. It addition, it provides an in-depth understanding of the entire smart city knowledge domain, revealing a deeply rooted division in its cognitive-epistemological structure as identified by bibliometric insights. Users will find a book that fills the knowledge gap between theory and practice using case study research and empirical evidence drawn from cities considered leaders in innovative smart city practices. - Provides clarity on smart city concepts and strategies - Presents a systematic literature analysis on the state-of-the-art of smart cities' research using bibliometrics combined with practical applications - Offers a comprehensive and systematic analysis of smart cities research produced during its first three decades - Generates a strong connection between theory and practice by providing the scientific knowledge necessary to approach the complex nature of smart cities - Documents five main development pathways for smart cities development, serving the needs of city managers and policymakers with concrete advice and guidance