Description

A Urban city is an urban area designed to reduce its social, economic, and environmental impact by addressing challenges like climate change and resource depletion through smart urban planning. Key features include efficient public transit, green building practices, waste reduction, conservation of natural resources, and inclusive economic and social development. The book is about the success stories as well as failures in sustainable urban development and management. Students are exposed to both the best management practices as well as the mistakes so that they can learn the good practices and avoid the bad ones. Sustainable Cities and Communities” aims to be a comprehensive resource highlighting the latest advancements, strategies, and best practices in creating environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable urban environments. Sustainable cities and economies are essential pillars for global prosperity, addressing pressing environmental concerns while ensuring inclusive growth and societal wellbeing. This book explores the inter-connectedness between urban development and economic sustainability, advocating for holistic approaches to foster resilient, equitable, and environmentally friendly urban landscapes. This book describes how new digital technologies could be used to design digital and physical twins of cities that are able to feed into each other to optimize their working and ability to create new wealth and wellbeing. The book also describes how to increase cities’ social and economic resilience during crisis time and addressing their almost fatal weaknesses – as it became all too obvious during the recent COVID 19 crisis. Also, the book presents a framework for a critical discussion of the concept of “smart-city”, suggesting its development into a “cyber” and “meta” one– meaning, not only digital systems can allow physical ones (e.g. cities, citizens, households and companies) to become “smarter”, but also the vice versa is true, as off line data and real life behaviours can support the optimization and development of virtual brains as a sum of big data and artificial intelligence apps all sitting “over the cloud”.