Data-driven smart sustainable urbanism and data-intensive urban sustainability science: New approaches to tackling urban complexities

Abstract

There is much enthusiasm currently about the opportunities created by the data deluge and its new and more extensive sources in the domain of sustainable urbanism. This involves mainly its ability to respond to the challenges of sustainability and urbanization thanks to thinking in a data-analytic and data-intensive scientific fashion and thus using powerful computational processes to generate useful knowledge for enhanced decision-making and deep insights. Indeed, smart sustainable cities as complex systems are characterized by wicked problems and hence need more innovative solutions and sophisticated approaches. This chapter sheds light on the kind of wicked problems that are associated with smart sustainable urbanism, and explores the usefulness of big data uses within this domain. Further, it analyzes the role of urban science and data-intensive science, as informed and enabled by big data science and analytics, in transforming what has been termed as urban sustainability science as an integrated scientific field. In doing so, it offers a conceptual framework integrating all these components. We argue that the upcoming advancements in big data science and analytics, coupled with the ever-increasing deluge of urban data, hold great potential for enhancing smart sustainable urbanism and revolutionizing urban sustainability science.