traditional social science often fails when deployed to explain complex human action. in each specific social field of human endeavour, including planning, experienced actors draw on a range of conscious and unconscious performative knowledges to act with effect: the experts simply ‘know’ what to do. some thinkers, suggests that to understand these complex human dispositions framing practice re...

This study injects sustainability into competitiveness to inform policy making and planning for contemporary urban development. This is built upon the recent advancement in the scholarship on urban competitiveness that demonstrates a clear deviation from an economic-centric approach to incorporate multiple dimensions of a city’s progress. This study has an explicit concern for environmental sus...

This paper explores how policy documents carry and institutionalize smart city ideas from high policy level to concrete policy level in an urban development context. We analyze the national urban development vision for Sweden and documents in a local urban development project in a Swedish city, in order to explore what kind of roles and expectations ICT is given in these documents. We contrast ...

The rapid development of urban ‘sprawl’ surrounding many North American cities has many potentially detrimental effects including enhanced energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from increasing private vehicle use. Over the past 5 years in Canada a number of studies have been undertaken to address transportation-related energy consumption with the view to formulating relevant policies ...

Assessment of landscape change is critical for attainment of regional sustainability goals. Urban growth assessments are needed because over half the global population now lives in cities, which impact biodiversity, ecosystem structure and ecological processes. Open space protection is needed to preserve these attributes, and provide the resources humans need. The San Francisco Bay Area, Califo...

The wisdom of ‘smart’ development increasingly shapes urban sustainability in Europe and beyond. Yet, the ‘smart city’ paradigm has been critiqued for favouring technological solutions and business interests over social inclusion and urban innovation. Despite the rhetoric of ‘citizen-centred approaches’ and ‘user-generated data’, the level of stakeholder engagement and public empowerment is sti...

Smart cities are emerging fast and they introduce new practices and services which highly impact policy making and planning, while they co-exist with urban facilities. It is now needed to understand the smart city’s contribution in the overall urban planning and vice versa, to recognize urban planning offerings to a smart city context. This chapter highlights and measures smart city and urban p...