Transportation is a key domain to address for promoting sustainability as it accounts for about one third of the energy consumption in the EU and in the US. Nevertheless, changing the transportation habits of citizens is a hard challenge. In this Special Issue of the EAI Endorsed Transactions on Ambient Systems, we present a selection of high-quality papers presented at the workshop on “Urban S...

The Chinese government started an important project “Geographical conditions monitoring (GCM)” in 2012, which aims at fully revealing the spatial pattern of natural resources, and economic and social development. Urban development assessment and analysis are an important topic of the comprehensive statistics in GCM project. This study quantitatively evaluates the sustainable development level o...

Global cities, the command and control centres of the integrated world economy, are facing a sustainability paradox of greater global competition and greater environmental pressure. This study explores the policy approaches to the sustainability paradox by integrating environmental sustainability and economic competitiveness into the development strategy for “the global city”, based on a case s...

rapid urbanization has brought environmentally, socially, and economically great challenges to cities and societies. to build a sustainable city, these challenges need to be faced efficiently and successfully. this paper focuses on the environmental issues and investigates the ecological approaches for planning sustainable cities through a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. the re...

The SUPERHUB project (SUstainable and PERsuasive Human Users moBility in future cities) promotes the creation of a new urban mobility services ecosystem to facilitate the take-up of environmentally sustainable behaviours. It will design and test an open platform able to combine in real time all mobility offers from the relevant stakeholders together with a set of enabling mobility services able...

urban design problems have become so complex that no single designer is able to consider all aspects of a design area simultaneously. lately the application of computerized and scientific methods have helped designers analyze complex problems. one of these new methods is space syntax. the purpose of this study is to first investigate the strengths and weaknesses of this method and then suggest ...

ICT potentially plays an important part in achieving sustainable urban development. Subsequently, ICT could be expected to have a central role in the general discourse of urban development, and in specific development projects, both as a means in the planning process itself and as an end product, i.e. smart city solutions. By exploring a case study of a local urban development project (Urb@n) i...

As China is becoming more urbanized, about 3.5 million units of housing are built every year. It is very important to develop sustainable urban housing in China. A team of researchers and developers from the USA and China have worked together to develop several housing projects in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. These designs are neither “hi-tech” solutions nor “super-advanced” technologies. I...

A continuing trend of global urbanization leads to a geographical concentration of population and social activities that causes a regional compression of concomitant resource and energy consumption. This paper argues that a Sustainable Living Lab infrastructure (SusLab) in urban areas facilitates a systematic integration of user’s consideration in the design and development of Product-Service S...