Urenio Watch Watch: Publications on Intelligent Cities / Smart Cities

Smart Cities Series Elsevier: books published

Launched in 2017, the smart cities book series publishes a collection of insights into the diverse constitution of smart cities. In collecting these insights, the series publishes research, which improves both theory and practice of smart cities and transfers the knowledge acquired to scholars, policymakers and practitioners alike.

The book series also publishes original research on the current transformation of cities, metropolitan regions, and rural communities, driven by the twin digital and green transition. Books in these fields may not have the label “smart”, nevertheless, they address the same drivers of 21st-century cities and planning, investigating how different types of intelligence in cities produce innovations and transitions towards a digital and green future.

The following titles have been published up to now.

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.

Digitally Disrupted Space: Proximity and New Development Opportunities for Regions and Cities develops an analytical framework of the key structural elements in relation to the digital space and its impact on existing spatial interactions at a regional and urban level. The book puts forth the argument that the digital space is a new form of space acting complementary to existing spatial structures and creating novel interactions between and/or within them. It explores how digital space enhances connected intelligence by combining knowledge-intensive activities, cooperation between organizational and institutional actors, and smart environments of knowledge creation and diffusion.

Smart City Emergence: Cases from around the World analyzes how smart cities are currently being conceptualized and implemented, examining the theoretical underpinnings and technologies that connect theory with tangible practice achievements. Using numerous cities from different regions around the globe, the book compares how smart cities of different sizes are evolving in different countries and continents. In addition, it examines the challenges cities face as they adopt the smart city concept, separating fact from fiction, with insights from scholars, government officials and vendors currently involved in smart city implementation.

Implementing Data-Driven Strategies in Smart Cities is a guidebook and roadmap for practitioners seeking to operationalize data-driven urban interventions. The book opens by exploring the revolution that big data, data science, and the Internet of Things are making feasible for the city. It explores alternate topologies, typologies, and approaches to operationalize data science in cities, drawn from global examples including top-down, bottom-up, greenfield, brownfield, issue-based, and data-driven. It channels and expands on the classic data science model for data-driven urban interventions – data capture, data quality, cleansing and curation, data analysis, visualization and modelling, and data governance, privacy, and confidentiality. Throughout, illustrative case studies demonstrate successes realized in such diverse cities as Barcelona, Cologne, Manila, Miami, New York, Nancy, Nice, São Paulo, Seoul, Singapore, Stockholm, and Zurich.

Smart Cities and Artificial Intelligence offers a comprehensive view of how cities are evolving as smart ecosystems through the convergence of technologies incorporating machine learning and neural network capabilities, geospatial intelligence, data analytics and visualization, sensors, and smart connected objects. These recent advances in AI move us closer to developing urban operating systems that simulate human, machine, and environmental patterns from transportation infrastructure to communication networks. Exploring cities as real-time, living, dynamic systems, and providing tools and formats including generative design and living lab models that support cities to become self-regulating, this book provides readers with a conceptual and practical knowledge base to grasp and apply the key principles required in the planning, design, and operations of smart cities.

The Metaverse and Smart Cities: Urban Environments in the Age of Digital Connectivity explores the intersection between the rapidly growing metaverse and the future of cities. The metaverse is a virtual world that is increasingly gaining attention as a new frontier for human interaction and commerce. At the same time, cities are undergoing significant transformation as they face challenges such as population growth, urbanization, and environmental degradation. Urban planners and city administrators will find valuable insights on how the metaverse can be integrated into the planning and development of smart, sustainable, and future cities.

Smart Cities for Technological and Social Innovation establishes a key theoretical framework to understand the implementation and development of smart cities as innovation drivers, in terms of lasting impacts on productivity, livability and sustainability of specific initiatives. This framework is based on empirical analysis of 12 case studies, including pioneer projects from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and more. It explores how successful smart cities initiatives nurture both technological and social innovation using a combination of regulatory governance and private agency.

Management of IoT Open Data Projects in Smart Cities demonstrates a key project management methodology for the implementation of Smart Cities projects: Principles and Regulations for Smart Cities (PaRSC). This methodology adopts a basis in classic Scrum soft management methods with carefully considered expansions. These include design principals for high-level architecture design and recommendations for design at the level of project teams. This approach enables the deployment of rule-based linguistic models for IoT project management, supporting the design of high-level architecture and providing rules for Scrum Smart Cities team.

Shaping Smart for Better Cities powerfully demonstrates the range of theoretical and practical challenges, opportunities and success factors involved in successfully deploying digital technologies in cities, focusing on the importance of recognizing local context and multi-layered urban relationships in designing successful urban interventions. The first section, ‘Rethinking Smart (in) Places’ interrogates the smart city from a theoretical vantage point. The second part, ‘Shaping Smart Places’ examines various case studies critically. Hence the volume offers an intellectual resource that expands on the current literature but also provides a pedagogical resource to universities as well as a reflective opportunity for practitioners.

Humane and Sustainable Smart Cities explores how to develop emergent smart cities that are rooted in humane, innovative and sustainable values (CHIS). The book considers the move from technocratic and idealized smart metropole to humane cities as a product of fundamental demographic changes, the development of a usage-based rather than an ownership economy, the novel implications of digitalization, decentralization and decarbonization, and Internet-enabled changes in public opinion towards democratization and participation. The book’s authors explore seven dimensions and characteristics of humane, sustainable and innovative cities in the developing world: the economy, people, the place, energy and the environment, mobility, social inclusion and governance.

Smart City Governance examines public domain activities and services in the digital age, evaluating all facets of smart city e-governance that fosters a cohesive understanding for the emerging generation of advanced “digital natives.” Exploring the tensions between political science and jurisprudence theories with the principles of societies and their alignment with legal systems, the book examines how governance systems can translate into the digital domain, addressing both the technical and legal dimensions. It offers a model for the technological foundation of governance, discussing existing technological components.

To propose a book, please use this template.

Series editors

Tan Yigitcanlar
Professor of Urban Studies and Planning
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

Nicos Komninos
Professor of Urban Development and Innovation Policy
URENIO Research, Aristotle University, Greece

Mark Deakin
Professor of Built Environment
Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland