3.3.1.1. Compact Design of Urban Form

Urban form denotes the physical aspects that characterize the built-up areas. The form of the city is seen as a salient factor for enacting more sustainable, efficient, equitable, and livable urban environments though design. It is associated with the development strategies related to urbanization dimensions, namely physical (land use change), geographical (population), economic (agglomeration), and societal (social and cultural change). These largely pertain to the design strategies of the compact city, namely compactness, density, multidimensional mixed-land use, sustainable transformation, and green open space.

The strategies for development planning are based on a number of important challenges, notably increasing population, plans to create more jobs, new demands from the business sector, the possibility of a simpler daily life for more people, measures to decrease social inequality and socio-spatial segregation, the development of urban areas for a more closely connected city, plans to enhance transport infrastructure, and the even distribution of green areas and parks. These are at the core of the compactness of the built form.

Main Directions for Compactness

To attain the compactness of the built form of the data-driven smart sustainable city of the future with the expected benefits of sustainability, there are four main directions to take:

• Develop central points:
  • - Densify and supplement with more housing and businesses around the central points to make use of the particularly good conditions for a more local city life based on the idea of enabling people to manage day-do-day life by walking, cycling, and public transport.
  • - Gather shops and services so that the central points function as local magnets.
  • - Make good use of the situation at the central points, with densification in mind.
  • - Use the land in a carefully thought-out and efficient manner so that the places take on more city character.
• Make use of what already exists:
  • - Use existing resources and investments already made as efficiently as possible.
  • - Reinforce, supplement, and further develop in the closely connected building structure already in place.
  • - Use the existing infrastructure more efficiently to reduce the effects of traffic on the environment.
  • - Counteract traffic congestion.
  • - Coordinate the locations of new houses, workplaces, and services with extensions and reinforcements in public transport.
  • - Retain and reinforce closely connected public walk-ways between the areas, functions, and buildings.
• Make the biggest effort and muster strength where it makes a difference at most:
  • - Prioritize between development areas.
  • - Promote brownfield development.
  • - Develop new areas on the basis of a holistic approach and overall way of thinking, instead of smaller or scattered supplementary projects.
  • - Create variety through more functions in each district, quarter, and building.
  • - Cooperate on a broad scale with other stakeholders.
  • - Involve different stakeholders in planning measures over a longer period of time to ensure an overall perspective.
• Regulate compact urban development:
  • - Increase the effectiveness of regulatory tools.
  • - Set minimum density requirements for new development.
  • - Establish mechanisms to reconcile conflicts of interests.
  • - Strengthen urban rural linkages.
  • - Harmonize business policies with compact city policies.

Staged Expansion and Intensification of Urban Fabrics

To pursue these directions, it is important to stage an expansion of the city based on the current level of its compactness with respect to the extent to which land areas can be used close to existing development, or urban development can take place adjacent to existing urban fabrics and structures. This relates to the intensification strategy of compaction, which encompasses a range of substrategies for urban renewal, infill, development, and redevelopment. These substrategies in the context of the data-driven smart sustainable city of the future are to be applied on the six specific urban fabrics that were identified based on the case studies conducted on compact cities and eco-cities (Bibri, Krogstie and Kärrholm 2020; Bibri and Krogstie 2020a). An urban fabric denotes the physical characteristics of urban areas in terms of components, materials, buildings, spatial patterns, scales, streetscapes, infrastructure, networks, and functions, as well as socio-cultural, ecological, economic and organisational structures. The identified urban fabrics together with the applied substrategies of the intensification strategy are presented below:

Build and Develop Centrally

The Central Renewal Area

• Build mixed developments.
• Create attractive meeting places and new parks.
• Prioritize public transport, walking, and cycling.
• Create robust and interconnected urban structure by improving connections.
• Enhance the cultural environment.

The Inner City

• Strive for a living center with attractive and safe city spaces.
• Develop a mix of densely built dwellings, workplaces, shops, businesses, facilities, and public services together with well elaborated public spaces for a pleasant and comfortable everyday life.
• Increase the number of homes.
• Prioritize public transport, walking, and cycling.
• Protect cultural heritage and be respectful in new development.
• Improve green areas and parks.

Concentrate on Strategic Nodes

• Analyze the potential for greater density, which should be based on the existing housing forecast in order to be able to plan for a long-term development of the city.
• Develop brownfield sites first.
• Create and complement with a mix of functions combined with varied public.
• Build with higher densities around interchanges (with good accessibility) and public transport corridors.
• Prioritize density close to the central points of strategic nodes.
• Encourage high quality design to lower perceived density.
• Create good opportunities for walking and cycling.
• Improve transport infrastructure and services and increase accessibility.
• Implement multi-model travelling to support the density and mixed land use of the central points of strategic nodes
• Make use of valuable green areas and corridors.
• Recognize that the green areas are important for the preservation of nature’s own integrity, and a significant recreational factor for inhabitants.

Complement and Mix

• Complement the areas that have good access to public transport and are easy to reach by walking and cycling by additional homes, workplaces, and commercial functions, thereby greater variety and a more vibrant city.
• Ensure a mix of housing types and forms as well as of functions.
• Increase diversity and vitality through new development and re-development.
• Improve the match between residents and local services and jobs.
• Encourage the greening of built-up areas.

Reserve Outer Areas for Future Consideration

The outer area, which is not yet developed or about to be developed, should be strategically planned based on the core strategies of the compact city in terms of density, diversity, mixed land use, sustainable transportation, green space, and other design features pertaining to the eco-city with respect to various types of sustainable buildings.

• Unlock the potential for the development of new homes and workplaces in the areas located on the outer edges of the city.
• Provide the opportunity for new development in the long term.
• Invest in urban infrastructure and services prior to new development, especially transport.
• Ensure the feasibility of high quality public transport in order to achieve a certain level of density.
• Have regard to valuable natural, cultural, and recreational heritage.
• Consider developing passive, low-energy, net zero energy, energy efficient, and green buildings.

Build New Districts

Building new districts should be based on the integration of the core strategies of the compact city and the eco-city as planning systems as regards designs and buildings, with support of new technologies.

• Create great diversity of the scales and designs of building densities.
• Make larger and medium scale buildings more frequent as to the distribution of building footprints.
• Create great variety of buildings and building techniques, notably passive solar, low energy, net-zero, energy efficient, and green buildings.
• Use sustainable materials in building construction.
• Use recycled material with the potential of future reuse and long life span in the underlying layers of the streets, alleys, and public spaces.
• Develop multidimensional mixed land use: physical land use mix, economic mix, and social mix.
• Encourage focused investment in public space and foster a sense of place.
• Support various types of housing tenures: the conditions under which buildings or dwellings are held or occupied, with a planning approach focused greatly on safety and equality aspects via the design of different meeting places.
• Develop and implement measures to stimulate the development of affordable housing for all income groups, not too high to serve low and moderate income residents through inclusionary zoning.
• Create a diversity of job–housing balances, household sizes, household structures, cultural diversity, and age groups.
• Invest in and continuously work on reducing socio-economic disparity and social segregation within the new city districts to unlock its full potential and the city’s population and cultural structure.
• Create robust and interconnected urban structure by developing good connections: physical links within and between the different parts of the new city districts, as well as their connection with the existing city districts.
• Forge the physical links between communities within the different parts of the new city districts.
• Remove physical barriers isolating certain areas by improving public transportation infrastructure and services.
• Prioritize public transport, walking, and cycling.
• Make use of valuable green areas Recognize that the green areas are important for the preservation of nature’s own integrity, and a significant recreational factor for inhabitants.
• Protect national parks with regard to their specific and sensitive flora and fauna and their cultural heritage
• Create new and evenly distribute parks across the new city districts.
• Develop relevant structures for collaboration between these stakeholders within the city departments.
• Involve local communities in planning and decision–making processes in ways that enable the residents to have a say in the development of the new city districts by inviting them to attend a series of planning workshops, e.g., exploration of strategic options, community planning sessions, and capacity building.
• Collect and analyze data on the movement of residents to plan the new city districts.

3.3.1.2. Ecological Design of Urban Form

Ecological design is a design form which integrates itself with living processes to minimize environmentally negative or destructive impacts. It is associated with the green structure in the city and how it should be developed, distributed, and managed (e.g., Austin 2013; Bibri and Krgostie 2020a; Beatley 2010; Beatley 2000; Farr 2008; Mostafavi and Doherty 2010). The green and blue structure strategy can be broken into eleven substrategies, namely:

1. Greening
2. Rainwater harvesting
3. Ecological diversity
4. Biodiversity
5. Green parks
6. Green streets and alleys
7. Green factor and green points
8. Green roofs
9. Rain gardens
10. Bioswales
11. Permeable Pavements

The green structure strategy relates to the idea of letting nature do the work by designing multifunctional green structure to provide important ecosystem services of various categories, including provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting services. To let nature do the work entails ensuring that greenery and water are used as active components in the design and operation of the city. The green structure replaces and complements technical systems, creates a richer plant and animal life, and contribute to human health and well-being. Important to note is that the green structure strategy as an integrated approach is best to be implemented in new urban areas or outer areas with development potential. Also, a number of the aforementioned substrategies can be implemented as part of the individual urban development projects related to the other urban fabrics mentioned earlier, when it is feasible from a design perspective. However, below are the key pathways needed for executing the green structure strategy:

• Ensure the use of greenery and water as active components in the design and operation of the city districts.
• Provide incentives to the residents in the existing city districts to install their own rainwater harvesting systems.
• Design the drainage system in the new city districts to be aesthetically pleasant, with waterfalls, canals, ponds, and various elements for purifying and buffering the water.
• Divert the rainwater through aboveground gutters surrounding the buildings of the new city districts as part of public space design.
• Build permeable pavements to reestablish a more natural hydrologic balance and reduce runoff volume by trapping and slowly releasing precipitation into the ground instead of allowing it to flow into storm drains and out to receiving waters as effluent.
• Build bioswales to slow and reduce stormwater runoff while removing debris and filtering out pollutants.
• Build rain gardens to collect and hold rainwater from downspouts, driveways, and sidewalks for a short time, allowing the water to slowly seep back into the ground.
• Implement ‘green space factor’ as an instrument to guarantee a certain volume of greenery in residential courtyard and to ensure that green qualities are achieved in connection with the city’s new construction projects.
• Use green space factor where appropriate.
• Monitor and improve the effects of green space factor pertaining to such ecosystem services as recreation, reduced risks of flooding, improved local climate, and noise reduction.
• Reinforce ecosystem services in urban various urban practices so that their benefits and functions do not deteriorate.
• Supplement the green factor system with green points, a list of a number of wide–ranging environmental measures, that can be implemented to promote biodiversity in the existing and new city districts.
• Transform the existing green and water views across the new city districts into liveable waterfront areas offering plaza, green space, and promenade, allowing for a variety of activities to take place and providing great opportunities for the social mix and interaction of the residents of the new city districts.
• Use the waterfront footpath as linkages to several landscape nodes.
• Create and distribute parks across the new city districts by ensuring 100% of the existing apartments have access to a park and natural environment within 200 meters, as well as by reserving a sufficient number of hectare for parks and dividing them between these apartments.
• Develop and implement advanced technologies for monitoring the condition and composition of green space in the city districts.
• Develop and implement new technologies to stimulate biological and ecological diversity and conservation.

3.3.2.1. Smart Sustainable Transportation

To be able to effectively improve and strategically advance the contribution of the city to the goals of sustainability, it is necessary to fully integrate sustainable transportation system with smart transportation system. Accordingly, the smart sustainable transportation strategy encompasses seven substrategies, namely:

1. Walking and cycling
2. Public transport
3. Car-pooling (biogas and electric)
4. Electric vehicles
5. Smart transport management
6. Smart traffic management
7. Smart mobility management

Sustainable transportation: Sustainable transportation is a major strategy for achieving sustainability. It denotes any means of transportation that is green and has low impacts on the environment. Below are the key pathways for executing the sustainable transportation strategy.

• Implement the hierarchy of sustainable transportation, namely walking and cyclin, public transport, car pools, and private cars.
• Set clear targets for reducing car journeys with the long long–term objective of establishing the hierarchy.
• Provide a range of opportunities for walking and cycling through increased densities and short distances, i.e., proximity to workplaces, shops, services, and facilities in densely residential areas.
• Improve the public transport system by creating new connections, enhancing existing networks, and influencing habits and movements through soft measures.
• Improve the capacity, comfort, waiting time, and service quality of the public transport system.
• Build and enhance pedestrian paths/walking tracks and bike paths/cycle lanes linking different areas of the city districts to local workplaces, shops, businesses, and facilities.
• Build new cycle bridges linking the new city districts to the city center and the inner city.
• Make good availability of bicycle parking throughout the city.
• Provide incentives that give priority to cycling by offering a higher than average number of cycle parking spaces per apartment, house, and building.
• Restrict car parking by limiting parking spaces per apartment, house, and building.
• Close public spaces to cars and provide further opportunities for walking and cycling along pleasant routes.
• Provide incentives for electric and biofuel cars and taxis.
• Develop and implement strategic plans for the transition from private-owned cars to a plug-in hybrid, to mobility as a service with electric taxis, to biofuel diesel, and to public transport:
  • - Private cars can be changed to a plug-in hybrid and then replaced by mobility as a service with electric taxis, a small alteration of self-driving electric taxis. An important precondition for the expansion of this traveling mode is the charging stations for electric cars that should be in place across the city.
  • - Private cars can be changed to a biofuel diesel cars and then to public transport for everyday mobility and renting or sharing a biodiesel for longer trips.
  • - Gradually increase the percentage of the private cars leaving the different districts of the city and allow a fleet of more and more self-driving electric taxis to circulate in these districts.
• Make buss stops within reasonable distance from blocks of building and with shortest possible running time intervals (e.g., operating on a five-minute schedule).
• Provide hassle–free usage of multiple modes of shared and public transport.
• Use biogas-fuel powered and hybrid busses as well as solar-powered screens showing times of arrival at bus stops.
• Combine measures and initiatives for shaping the physical structure of sustainable transportation as well as influencing behavior.
• Implement mobility management as a soft measure to build, develop, and maintain transport infrastructure and to create and keep the dialogue with different stakeholders as to how to make choices for travel modes.
• Introduce economic, social, and environmental policies through the congestion charges and Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), and allow the residents to tangibly see the impacts of automobile use across all three pillars of sustainability.

Smart Transportation: Smart transportation is one of the main ways modern cities can improve the daily lives of citizens and sustainability. It involves information systems that collect data about traffic, vehicles, and the use of different modes of transport for further processing and analysis in city operations center. Transport and traffic management is one of the most common areas that use data-driven technology solutions. The key pathways for executing the smart transportation strategy are:

• Develop and implement the unified public transport system with ticketing system.
• Develop and implement the bus transit system based on the orthogonal network of bus lines.
• Manage all the transport services of the city in realtime based on the data received from the situational centers.
• Develop and implement the smart traffic light system.
• Develop and implement the smart parking system.
• Encourage businesses and consumers to use vehicles equipped with telematics.
• Raise awareness of the options and benefits of intelligent transport systems.
• Apply disincentives to alter demand for carbon intensive vehicles. Equip public transport with advanced sensors to monitor mobility and movement and collect related data (e.g., precise geo-positioning, times, delays, number of passengers, etc.) for mining and visualization
• Use mobility and movement data for planning in terms of determining the need for launching new public transport routes or developing new road infrastructure.
• Implement the smart board for displaying information about the roads conditions in real time.
• Ensure seamless, efficient, and flexible multi–modal transport system.
• Support equity and inclusion using smartphone apps in sustainable urban transport.
• Develop and implement new business models for “Mobility–as–a–Service” for sharing systems.
• Develop and implement the bicycle sharing system for short trips across the city.
• Develop and promote smart apps for other modes of sustainable mobility to keep the citizens up-to-date and connected.
• Use sensed mobility data to understand how mobility behavior and traffic variation from one day to another is linked to the network topology for developing smart apps to influence travel behavior towards sustainable mobility.
• Integrate real–time mobility data and large–scale datasets that simultaneously record and calibrate dynamical traces of individual and collective movements across various spatial scales and over different temporal scales to understand the dynamic interplay between individual and collective mobility and social interactions.

3.3.2.2. Smart Sustainable Energy

The smart sustainable energy strategy aims to reduce energy consumption, increase renewable energy adoption, and decrease carbon footprint. Here technological innovations can play a prominent role in the light of the high predicted rate of urbanization. Integrating sustainable energy with smart energy will drive data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future to become fossil fuel–free and climate positive. Therefore, the energy system should combine green energy technologies and energy efficiency technologies. Accordingly, the smart sustainable energy strategy involves five key substrategies, with some overlaps among them, namely:

1. Renewable energy sources and technologies
2. Smart power grid and advanced metering infrastructure technologies
3. Smart building technologies
4. Smart home monitoring technologies
5. Smart environmental monitoring technologies.

The key pathways for executing the four last substrategies have already been addressed in (Bibri 2020e). This paper specifically provides the key strategic pathways for achieving the goals of energy efficiency and pollution reduction. The identified data-driven smart solutions are found to have significant potential to improve and advance environmental sustainability in the context of emerging smart sustainable cities.

Renewable Energy Sources and Technologies: It is important to strongly advocate renewable energy generation and usage in order to enable the city to become fossil fuel–free by 2050. Renewable energy is derived from naturally replenished and zero-emission sources such as solar, wind. biomass, hydropower, and geothermal), using a number of industrial and technological systems. Below are the key pathways needed for implementing the substrategy of renewable energy sources and technologies:

• Install solar collectors on the top of new and retrofitted buildings throughout the city to produce heat (see Figure 2)
• Install pumps (aquifer and sea water) to produce heat.
• Use aquifer and heat pumps for cooling.
• Combine solar collectors and pumps to aggregate heat production.
• Promote and install solar panels/photovoltaic cells throughout the city to produce electricity.
• Install stations of wind turbines to produce electricity for heat pumps as well as dwellings.
• Complement windmill farms by installing wind generators, smaller versions of massive power generators, in the different parts of the city districts.
• Perform solar thermal installations for energy monitoring to aid in understanding the solar thermal energy produced and consumed.
• Link diverse energy plants to the city’s energy system for district heating, district cooling, and power grid.
• Build large scale bio–fueled combined heat and power (CHP) system for producing electricity and heat by renewables and organic household waste. The incineration of waste is used to produce energy for heating systems.

It is worth noting that some of the above installations depend on the geographical location and climate of the city as well as its energy needs. Figure 2 illustrates an example of a renewable energy system integrating wind turbine, solar collectors, and photovoltaics cells for heating and cooling. Today, solar panels often cost less than on-grid electricity. Moreover, if all buildings’ electricity is produced with solar energy, carbon emissions can be reduced by more than 50% compared to baseline in sustainable cities by 2030. Therefore, it is important to aim for shifting electric supply from 100% large-scale to 100% local solar power.

The main goal of the renewable energy sources and technologies strategy is to phase in renewables and phase out fossil fuels by 2050, resulting in 100% locally produced electricity and heat from clean sources in most districts and ultimately supporting the entire geographical area of the data-driven smart sustainable city of the future. This kind of transformational change requires a strategic roadmap, i.e., a time-based plan that defines a future outcome and determines and assesses the decisive steps needed to reach it.

3.3.2.3. Smart Sustainable Waste Management

To achieve far more resource-efficient use of waste that has minimal impacts on the environment requires developing and implementing a number of measures and solutions as part of smart sustainable waste management. This strategy encompasses seven substrategies, namely:

1. Convenient and smart waste collecting system
2. Vacuum waste chutes
3. Food waste disposers
4. Biogas digesters
5. Wastewater and sewage treatment system
6. Biological waste separation procedures

Sustainable waste management: The key pathways needed for executing the sustainable waste management strategy are:

• Standardize the planning of sorting facilities for separating packaging, food waste, and mixed waste, and ensure that all properties have access to these facilities.
• Build and evenly distribute large waste sorting stations throughout the city districts, and connect them to the city’s waste infrastructure.
• Create and implement the relevant regulatory instruments with respect to waste management, and monitor progress to ensure the effective use in terms of the extent they yield desired results.
• Adhere to the waste hierarchy that reduces the quantity of the produced waste and the hazard it poses and prioritizes material-efficient products, thereby placing emphasis on recycling, reuse, and minimization of consumption in all its cycles.
• Use ICT to substitute for physical products.
• Design the waste sorting system in a way that is accessible and makes it easy for the residents to sort their waste in a safe and sustainable manner.
• Develop and disseminate easy-to-understand guidelines for sorting waste at the source.
• Ensure a high degree of waste separation in the city districts.
• Consider converting the food waste collected throughout the city districts into bio–fertilizer that can replace artificial fertilizer on agricultural fields.
• Build wastewater and sewage systems in the city districts, and integrate them in the city treatments plants
• Recognize that wastewater and sewage fractions are important energy resources (i.e., biogas fuels) and integrate them in the sustainable energy system.
• Develop and implement measures for influencing behaviors through engaging residents as part of environmental stewardship, as well as promoting sustainable habits and lifestyles.
• Set the following targets for sustainable waste management when planning new districts:
  • - 100% of the kitchen of the dwellings have waste disposal units.
  • - 100% of the properties have access to a vacuum waste chutes system in the residential courtyards that is able to transport non-organic waste underground.
  • - Waste separation units are close to home for sorting paper and packaging materials, food waste, and mixed waste.
  • - Wastewater and sewage treatment systems are installed and operate effectively in the city.
  • - Closed eco–cycles function properly.

Smart Management of Waste Collection: Smart waste collection systems are becoming more and more wide-spread, and many cities across the globe are already implementing this solution in the city management programs. Typically, smart management of waste collection involves adopting data-driven resolutions intended to improve the efficiency of the city management, especially in relation to the city districts with no vacuum waste chutes systems. The key pathways for executing the strategy of smart management of waste collection are:

• Install smart waste collection system in the city districts:
  • - Use sensors to allow to determine the degree of the fulness of waste containers, the level of the collected waste, independent of the nature of the recoverable waste.
  • - Transmit the information received from these sensors via the mobile network to cloud storage for processing, analysis, and visualisation.
  • - Use the obtained results to allow the sanitation workers to plan the collection routes of their waste disposal trucks in the real-time mode based on the degree of fullness.
• Implement the smart waste collection system where needed.
• Develop and implement the BigBelly solution.

3.3.2.4. Smart Urban Metabolism

As a model used for describing and analysing energy and materials flows in the city and their relationship with its infrastructure and activities, urban metabolism serves to maintain the functional and evolutionary states of the city as a socio-technical organism. Looking at the data-driven smart sustainable city of the future through a metabolic lens, a framework through which to successfully model the flows of its systems becomes of high importance and interest. This aids in understanding the relationship between human activities and the natural environment by studying the interactions of human systems and natural systems in the sphere of the city. Indeed, urban metabolism provides a platform through which the implications of the different dimensions of sustainability can be considered.

• Develop and implement a smart urban metabolism framework based on real-time data, high temporal resolution, high spatial resolution, and continuous visualization of materials and energy flows to different city stakeholders and at different social scales.
• Use multiple key performance indicators (KPIs) which need to be based on real-time data generation from heterogenous sources and to be fed back on five spatial scales (household, building, neighborhood, district, and city) on the relevant interfaces developed for different audiences.
• Use dynamic and high resolution meter data for the evaluation of energy consumption in households and buildings. This is to increase the level of detail in the evaluation results and ease the detection of deviations in the performance of structures.
• Find more effective and innovative ways to deal with the challenges, barriers, and issues pertaining to the smart urban metabolism framework:
  • - Access to and integration of siloed data from the different owners of data.
  • - Privacy to motivate people to be actively involved in providing data.
  • - The technical issues related to sensor technology, big data analytics, and emission factors.
  • - Shortcomings concerning the use of dynamic and high resolution meter data for the evaluation of energy consumption, data collection and management, preservation of personal integrity, and incentives to react to the given evaluation information.
• Use diverse communication tools and methods for behavioral change, including:
  • - Sustainable human computer interaction (HCI);
  • - Eco-visualization;
  • - Augmented reality;
  • - Computersand smartphones;
  • - Persuasive technology; and
  • - Climate pervasive services.
• Use data-intensive scientific methods for studying urban metabolism to provide harmonized indicators for environmental sustainability assessment and for quantifying GHG emissions of the city, as well as for urban planning and policy analysis.

3.3.2.5. Smart Street Lighting

The city-wide street lighting system provides tremendous opportunities for modern cities to collect huge amounts of data from urban environments and to transfer them to special centers for their subsequent processing and analysis for enhancing decision making associated with numerous uses and applications. This can be used to make urban living more environmentally sustainable and to enhance the quality of life for citizens. Street lighting is one of the most interesting pathway to using and exploiting the IoT and big data analytics in future cities. Thus, it can be expanded beyond what is originally used for. The key pathways needed for executing the strategy of smart street lighting:

• Develop and implement the smart street lighting system and integrate it into the city-wide lighting infrastructure to enable the use of numerous innovative solutions related to transport, traffic, mobility, air and noise pollution, parking, safety, public Wi-Fi, and so on.
• Leverage the city-wide lighting infrastructure in achieving ambitious environmental goals at a lower cost given the pervasiveness, high visual impact, and cost-effectiveness of the street lighting system, in addition to its connection to the smart power grid system.
• Replace the street lights across the city with LED-based lighting system together with an IoT-based sensor network for advanced programmable features related to energy and the environment.
• Use the smart street lighting system to reduce the operational costs and optimize the energy efficiency of public-lighting system, as well as to reduce the risk of traffic collisions.
• Use smart street lights for night-time cycling based on context-aware technologies.

3.3.2.6. Smart Urban Infrastructure Management

Advanced ICT will be focussed on defining critical problems and events that might emerge rapidly and unexpectedly across the city. Analysing and identifying such problems and events is of great importance to urban sustainability and resilience. The smart management of the essential urban infrastructure involves monitoring and controlling its structural conditions in terms of potential changes that can increase risks and hazards as well as compromise safety and quality. In this context, data-driven smart technologies and solutions tend to be mostly justified by the high significance of the natural resources such infrastructure utilizes or involves in its operation. The key pathways needed for employing the strategy of the smart management of urban infrastructure:

• Support smarter transport, electricity, water, waste, and lighting networks in ways that can optimize resource efficiency and reliability and achieve more benefits with less expenditure and investment.
• Develop and implement new technologies for enhancing incident management, improving emergency response coordination, harnessing synergies between different components, minimizing risks, ensuring safety and service quality, and reducing operational costs.
• Develop and implement new technologies for coordinating activities between various operators and service providers of the essential urban infrastructures in regard to scheduling repair and maintenance in a more efficient and effective way.
• Relate sustainable and smart urban infrastructures to their operational functioning, operational management, and short-term planning through monitoring, automation, control, optimization, and improvements using advanced ICT, especially the IoT and big data analytics.
• Analyze and investigate longer term sustainable and smart urban infrastructure needs and demands up to 2050—and use new technologies to meet them in a timely manner.
• Use joined-up planning to develop and implement new urban intelligence and planning functions that generate the kind of structures, systems, and forms that improve and maintain the sustainability, efficiency, and resiliency of the city.

3.3.3.1. Smart Citizens: Participation and Consultation

The social infrastructure is about people. Therefore, the involvement of citizens in the management and planning of the data-driven smart sustainable city of the future using information systems is crucial to the progress towards its ultimate goal. Such involvement is associated with the adoption of the most important resolutions related to living, which intend to improve the level of satisfaction and increase the level of confidence and trust among citizens in the city administration. The strategy “participation and consultation” aims to stimulate citizens’ interest in taking part in the planning and development of the city. Research, knowledge development, and experience feedback are important preconditions for solving complex challenges. The key pathways for executing the participation and consultation strategy are:

• Develop online platforms to engage citizens and make it easier for them to find out about different issues of planning and land use.
• Develop crowdsourcing platforms to address important city issues related to different areas.
• Establish a platform to enable citizens to influence their experience of the city by providing feedbacks and ratings.
• Create a platform where citizens can participate in the surveys organized by the city administration which can use the related data to adopt the resolutions in relation to the different domains of city life.
• Create a platform to engage more citizens in dialogue so as to gather input on their needs and demands (e.g., buss timing, playgrounds, parking lots, parks, ICT system reliability, and mobile coverage indoors), to evaluate all their suggestions, and to identify and solve important issues. Citizens can suggest ideas which can be put to a vote among the registered users of digital platforms for polls.
• Create a platform to enable citizens to communicate as well as track the status and control the execution of their complaints related to city issues.
• Create special portals to enable citizens to report the economic problems existing in the city in response to the adverse effects of urbanisation, pandemics, and disasters.
• Create diverse platforms to allow citizens to participate in urban technologies and policies, including:
  • - Classrooms for learning about the uses and applications of and innovating in emerging digital technologies;
  • - Entrepreneurial spaces for attracting startups and skilled innovators to create and promote new technologies;
  • - Co-innovation centers for enabling close collaboration among different city stakeholders;
  • - Participatory platforms for connecting city stakeholders to support decision-making processes; and
  • - Democracy platforms for enabling citizens to discuss government proposals as well as submit their own.
• Create city councils for remote service provision by public agencies and mobile kiosks.
• Develop and implement new technologies which offer the prospect of ending the digital divide, provided that they do not open up other kinds of divides.
• Develop data-driven projects to identify public trends that can be considered when developing programs and initiatives for urban development.
• Support and strengthen the technologies that ensure widespread citizen participation through enhanced security measures and privacy mechanisms.

3.3.3.2. Smart Public Safety

It is highly important to develop a much deeper and more informed understanding of the risks, threats, and hazards surrounding the city. This requires a new set of data-driven technologies and collective decision-making processes. Data-driven approaches to urbanism enables understanding the city as strongly interlinked and coupled systems that generates unexpected and surprising dynamics. Emerging technologies are increasingly changing the nature of such dynamics by predicting them on multiple scales in terms of the properties and processes which stimulate change within the city system, thereby outsmarting it. The key pathways needed to execute the smart public safety strategy are:

• Use cutting-edge tools through established platforms to create awareness of situations, provide realistic scenarios for hazards, and strengthen resilience by integrating artificial intelligence, expert knowledge, and human experience.
• Make use of data-intensive science in decision-making processes with respect to natural disaster preparedness, responsiveness, and recovery.
• Monitor urban environments to inform authorities as well as alert citizens of potential risks, hazards, and vulnerabilities.
• Use environmental monitoring systems to track air pollution (e.g, harmful substances) in real time to prevent or mitigate adverse effects on public health.
• Use advanced simulation models to predict disease outbreaks and act accordingly to save lives and resources through taking preventive measures.
• Use data-driven approaches to hazard identification and risk assessment to provide immediate responses to potential threats.
• Use data-driven sentient computing to improve security by denying access to suspicious users to public places.
• Use data analytics to investigate transportation–related safety and health issues and inform the responsible public and private entities to make improvements accordingly.

3.3.3.3. Smart Healthcare

One of the key areas targeted by technological advancements and innovations is human health. Medical systems and healthcare services are at the core of the IoT and big data applications. Healthcare management is one of the areas where the highest level of technology development and adoption is observed. The use of data analytics and personal wearable devices in medicine for the diagnosis and treatment of patients is one of the most promising areas of applied data-driven solutions in modern cities. Therefore, the focus should be on the electronization of medical services to enhance the quality of healthcare provided to all citizens and thus their well-being, as well as to upraise the effectiveness and efficiency of health system management. This entails using advanced tools, powerful computational processes, and innovative systems, such as embedded sensors and actuators, database system integration, management and monitoring software, simulation models, and decision support systems. The key pathways for executing the smart healthcare strategy are:

• Inform citizens about new healthcare policies and medical discoveries and rapidly disseminate information about disease outbreaks.
• Use advanced analytics techniques to analyze and interpret the huge datasets on health to improve the outcomes of healthcare with respect to those conditions that play out over longer times.
• Implement applied data-driven solutions in medicine for diagnosis and treatment by actively involving healthcare institutions, medical agencies, think tanks, and biotechnology companies as partners.
• Implement applied data-driven solutions to influence legislators on changes in regulating the medical and pharmaceutical industry.
• Encourage public and private medical organizations to adopt big data technology in their activities in terms of the implementation of eHealth platforms to accumulate, store, and deliver access to information about citizen health and medical history. The state-of-the-art technologies of big data analysis can be used to:
  • Perform accurate forecasts of the load on medical services and activity planning;
  • Evaluate the efficiency of educational programs, the quality of the obtained data, and the level of satisfaction of employers; and
  • Conduct health trend analysis of citizens.
• Connect medical centers, doctors, and patients with health data repositories and management software programs and sensing and communication capabilities to optimize the efficiency and performance of healthcare systems in terms of monitoring, traceability, and accessibility.
• Employ monitoring medical devices to remotely detect anomalies, gather patients’ behavioral information, detect changes in their normal parameters to help improve the quality of recommendations and the accuracy of diagnosis.
• Gather all information about human health and treatment in electronic health record (EMRs) to allow physicians from different medical institutions to access patients’ medical records and to enable patients to participate fully in healthcare decisions.
• Gather and analyze information on health indicators from non-specific devices, such as bracelets, smart watches, and sensors, as well as special medical devices.
• Establish a situation center to monitor the availability of and demand for medical services by analyzing the amount of appointments to doctors.
• Define inspection priorities and schedules based on the analysis of data on health standards in terms of checking the condition of hospitals and procedures and the execution of business rules.
• Inspect the recipients of health benefits based on the analysis of data to determine the level of compliance.
• Develop and implement the unified medical information and analytical system for healthcare. Such system comprises communication center, electronic registry, electronic health record, electronic prescription, disability certificates, laboratory services, and personalized record-keeping. It allows combining a variety of medical services and digitally collecting and analyzing data.
• Set the following targets prior to implementing the large-scale system of electronization:
  • - Increase the transparency of medical facilities for citizens.
  • - Raise the trust of citizens in health care system
  • - Reduce queues in polyclinics by collecting and analyzing information on the flow of patients and the demand for medical services using a system of electronic records to set up appointments.
  • - Distribute workers and doctors in healthcare centers based on data-driven decisions.

3.3.4.1. Sensor Infrastructure and Wireless Network for Data Transfer

• Develop and implement measures for modernizing the infrastructure of the city to make it ready to integrate data-based management.
• Implement and exhaustively deploy the sensor infrastructure and increase the number of Wi-Fi hotspots to cover the city areas to form a dense network of sensors.
• Build and extend the city Wi-Fi to increase the communication capabilities of the sensors deployed across the city areas as well as the data transfer processes.
• Ensure the fastest rate of wireless networks across the city areas.
• Ensure that all citizens have access to the Internet.
• Provide free Wi-Fi to all public buildings and facilities.
• Prioritize affordable high-speed digital connectivity for the city and provide free Wi-Fi to all citizens.
• Digitize businesses and organizations and increase the number of people working in the technology and service sectors.

3.3.4.2. IT Architecture Layers

• Set the basics of the IT architecture defining the strategies and policies allowing the sustainable city to become a data-driven smart sustainable city. This endeavor should be based on the joint cooperation of the city government, ICT companies, and academic institutions.
• Design, develop, implement, and maintain the IT architecture of the data-driven smart sustainable city of the future based on three main layers, namely (1) the information layer, (2) the middleware layer, and (3) the application layer:
  1. The information layer is based on the whole complex of data sources, data routinely generated about the city and its citizens by a range of public and private organizations. This layer collects raw data from different sources within the framework of the data-driven smart sustainable city of the future. These sources include sensors, cameras, transponders, meters, actuators, GPS, transduction loops monitoring various phenomena, and computerized databases, as well as a multitude of smartphone apps and sharing economy platforms generating a range of real-time location, movement and activity data. This layer also includes technologies and solutions allowing the transfer of the collected data for their further processing and analysis. The sensor platform of this layer isolates the applications that are to be developed to exploit the information generated by the city of the future. It also provides openness and interoperability. The data infrastructure standardization and data integration in a unified system significantly simplify the further usage of data.
  2. The middleware layer collects raw data from the information layer and standardizes them for further processing and analysis. It provides tools for the storage, processing, and analysis of the collected data, which allow interpreting data, making forecasts on their basis, and identifying interconnection between different data ranges. This set of data analytics techniques enables obtaining the meaningful information from the resulting vast deluge of real-time, fine-grained, contextual, and actionable data for numerous applications. It represents the operation system for the data-driven smart sustainable city of the future, a platform that offers a comprehensive and transversal connectivity to serve citizens and other stakeholders. It is an open-code IoT platform that is accessible and open for use by third parties to download, develop, and/or modify data.
  3. The application layer is the set of applications that use the meaningful information made available from the lower layers, and that provides services for the data-driven smart sustainable city of the future. It serves for the exchange of data among all the interested parties and the adoption of solutions based on the obtained data. It is based on the idea of using data to predict situations in order to make better decisions and reactions. This layer includes platforms with open data and tools of data visualization (e.g., dashboards and smart board) applied by the city administration for control over the city management system, automated systems of response to city-wide events (e.g., situation centers and control rooms), as well as a plethora of application developers, including city governments, state agencies, and private developers.

The ICT infrastructure for the data-driven smart sustainable city of the future comprises a collection of smart solutions for various spheres of its administration. It includes novel applications and services for city agencies and departments to serve different stakeholders, and demonstrates the innovative use and integration of the IoT, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence to solve problems within the aforementioned domains of urban life.