Data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future: An evidence synthesis approach to a comprehensive state-of-the-art literature review

Sustainable cities are currently undergoing unprecedented transformative changes in light of the recent paradigm shift in science and technology brought on by big data science and analytics. These marked changes are motivated by the increased need to tackle the problematicity surrounding sustainable cities as quintessential complex systems in terms of their development planning, operational management, and fragmentary design strategies and technology solutions. That is to say, sustainable cities are increasingly embracing and leveraging what smart cities have to offer in terms of big data technologies and their novel applications in an attempt to effectively deal with the complexities they inherently embody and to monitor, evaluate, and improve their performance with respect to sustainability—under what has been termed “data-driven smart sustainable cities.” This new area is a significant gap in and of itself—as it is still in its infancy—that this paper seeks to fill together with to what extent the integration of sustainable urbanism and smart urbanism is addressed and what directions and forms it takes. Using a compelling evidence synthesis approach, this paper provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art literature review of the flourishing field of data-driven smart sustainable cities. This study corroborates that big data technologies will change sustainable urbanism in fundamental and irreversible ways, bringing new and innovative ways of monitoring, understanding, analyzing, planning, and managing sustainable cities. It reveals that the evolving development planning approaches and operational management mechanisms enabled by data-driven technologies are of crucial importance to increase and maintain the contribution of sustainable cities to the goals of sustainability in the face of urbanization. However, what smart urbanism entails and the way it functions raises several critical questions, including whether the policy and governance of data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future will become too technocentric and technocratic respectively, but also with regard to other aspects of social and environmental sustainability. Addressing these important contemporary concerns is of equal importance in achieving the desired outcomes of sustainability. This review and critique of the existing work on the prevailing and emerging paradigms of urbanism provides a valuable reference for scholars and practitioners and the necessary material to inform them of the latest developments in the burgeoning field of data-driven smart sustainable cities. In addition, by shedding light on the increasing adoption and uptake of big data technologies in sustainable urbanism, this study seeks to help policymakers and planners assess the pros and cons of smart urbanism when effectuating sustainable urban transformations in the era of big data, as well as to stimulate prospective research and further critical debates on the topic.