Contributions of Smart City Solutions and Technologies to Resilience against the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Literature Review

Since its emergence in late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has swept through many cities around the world, claiming millions of lives and causing major socio-economic impacts. The pandemic occurred at an important historical juncture when smart solutions and technologies have become ubiquitous in many cities. Against this background, in this review, we examine how smart city solutions and technologies have contributed to resilience by enhancing planning, absorption, recovery, and adaptation abilities. For this purpose, we reviewed 147 studies that have discussed issues related to the use of smart solutions and technologies during the pandemic. The results were synthesized under four themes, namely, planning and preparation, absorption, recovery, and adaptation. This review shows that investment in smart city initiatives can enhance the planning and preparation ability. In addition, the adoption of smart solutions and technologies can, among other things, enhance the capacity of cities to predict pandemic patterns, facilitate an integrated and timely response, minimize or postpone transmission of the virus, provide support to overstretched sectors, minimize supply chain disruption, ensure continuity of basic services, and offer solutions for optimizing city operations. These are promising results that demonstrate the utility of smart solutions for enhancing resilience. However, it should be noted that realizing this potential hinges on careful attention to important issues and challenges related to privacy and security, access to open-source data, technological affordance, legal barriers, technological feasibility, and citizen engagement. Despite this, this review shows that further development of smart city initiatives can provide unprecedented opportunities for enhancing resilience to the pandemic and similar future events

The Social, Economic, and Environmental Impacts of Ridesourcing Services: A Literature Review

The proliferation of ridesourcing services has raised both hopes and concerns about their role in cities. The impacts of ridesourcing services are complex and multi-faceted. Through reviewing the literature, this study aims to identify the social, economic, and environmental impacts of these services and highlight opportunities and challenges that lay ahead of them for resolving issues related to urban transportation. According to the results, ridesourcing services offer safe modes of transport that provide convenient mobility options, improve transit availability in disadvantaged and remote areas, and respond to taxi demand fluctuations. They can create new job opportunities by employing new human resources that have not been used before, provide flexible working hours for drivers, and are more efficient than taxi cabs. These services provide other opportunities to extend or complement public transit, reduce car ownership and congestion, and minimize parking supply. However, they are criticized for unfair competition with traditional taxis, limited compliance with social legislation, and lack of affordability. They are not available in all places and exclude some vulnerable and socially disadvantaged groups. Labor rights are not secure in this industry, and driver income is not stable. Finally, there is also evidence showing that, in some cases, they contribute to the growth of VMT, energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and congestion in cities

From Garden City to 15-Minute City: A Historical Perspective and Critical Assessment

The 15-minute city concept was introduced as a post-COVID strategy to support more sustainable recovery from the pandemic and develop complete, climate-sensitive, and resilient neighborhoods. This review examines key neighborhood planning movements to identify the origins of the 15-minute city concept. These include the garden city, neighborhood unit plan, modernist urbanism, post-modern urbanism, and eco-urbanism, which have emerged since the late 19th century. The results of the study show that the concept of the 15-minute city has ten basic characteristics: proximity, density, diversity, mixed-use, modularity, adaptability, flexibility, human-scale design, connectivity, and digitalization. The concept has been successful in advancing theoretical debates on sustainable urbanism. However, some criticisms of past planning movements also apply to the 15-minute city. Similar to the neighborhood unit and modernist urbanism, the concept follows a philosophy of physical determinism, setting goals without specifying how or by what means they will be achieved. At this point, one can only speculate about the future of the concept. A more detailed study of the real-world applications of the concept is needed before one can thoroughly discuss its strengths and weaknesses

Transformative Resilience: An Overview of Its Structure, Evolution, and Trends

Transformational resilience is at the forefront of academic and policy initiatives on sustainable development, climate adaptation, and disaster risk reduction as a result of successive and complex changes in global dynamics. While the literature on transformative resilience is growing, there is no comprehensive analysis of its trends and development. This paper aims to close this knowledge gap by presenting a multifaceted bibliometric overview of transformative resilience literature, revealing its trends, focus areas, transitions, and intellectual foundations. This is based on 415 Web of Science-indexed articles published between 1996 and 2021. According to the findings, the concept has developed primarily around four key presentive domains: vulnerability and climate change adaptation, urban and regional disaster resilience, sustainability management and institutional transformation, and COVID-19. While priorities and subjects of research have evolved over time, key concepts such as resilience, adaptation, and climate change have recurred. Influential authors and documents from three interrelated resilience schools, including sustainable development, climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction, have shaped the field’s intellectual foundations. We contend that a greater variety of contexts is required to facilitate transformative resilience’s investigation, description, and experimentation

Transformative Resilience: An Overview of Its Structure, Evolution, and Trends

Transformational resilience is at the forefront of academic and policy initiatives on sustainable development, climate adaptation, and disaster risk reduction as a result of successive and complex changes in global dynamics. While the literature on transformative resilience is growing, there is no comprehensive analysis of its trends and development. This paper aims to close this knowledge gap by presenting a multifaceted bibliometric overview of transformative resilience literature, revealing its trends, focus areas, transitions, and intellectual foundations. This is based on 415 Web of Science-indexed articles published between 1996 and 2021. According to the findings, the concept has developed primarily around four key presentive domains: vulnerability and climate change adaptation, urban and regional disaster resilience, sustainability management and institutional transformation, and COVID-19. While priorities and subjects of research have evolved over time, key concepts such as resilience, adaptation, and climate change have recurred. Influential authors and documents from three interrelated resilience schools, including sustainable development, climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction, have shaped the field’s intellectual foundations. We contend that a greater variety of contexts is required to facilitate transformative resilience’s investigation, description, and experimentation

Enhancing Memorable Experiences, Tourist Satisfaction, and Revisit Intention through Smart Tourism Technologies

Global connectivity facilitated tourism and redefined economic landscapes, highlight an interest in better understanding tourism retention factors. Today, in view of the global COVID-19 pandemic, this is made even more important as the world prepares to lift lockdown restrictions and to re-engage in cross border circulation; reiterating needs to understand tourism satisfaction and revisit intentions. This study thus sheds light on the predictors of tourists’ intention to the explorative and exploitative use of Smart Tourism Technologies (STTs) and memorable experiences in tourism destinations via an integrated model and a self-administered questionnaire—distributed among domestic tourists visiting Tehran—employing the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). The results indicated that tourists’ attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control toward STTs had significant positive impacts on their explorative and exploitative intentions. Furthermore, tourists’ explorative/exploitative intention and perceived behavioral control exercised significant, positive effects on their memorable experiences. Finally, the results demonstrate that tourists’ memorable experiences significantly influence their satisfaction and intention to revisit smart destinations. This study expands existing literature by exploring a new model for enhancing memorable experiences and revisit intention using STTs, and presents findings applicable to the city of Tehran, while adopting a model which can be replicated in other geographies looking at better understanding its tourism landscape. Finally, the results in this study can be helpful for both researchers and policy makers in their quest to rejuvenate local post-pandemic economies via tourism measures

COVID-19 Spatial Policy: A Comparative Review of Urban Policies in the European Union and the Middle East

This article reviews existing research and discussions on urban policy in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis focuses on the first pandemic period in the European Union and the Middle East. A search was conducted in available databases and search engines (Scopus, Google Scholar). A critical bibliometric analysis of publications from the first pandemic period was carried out. The most frequent topics covered were spatial organization, transport, environment, and social issues. The analysis showed that the quantitative scope and depth of the selected topics in the European Union and the Middle East differ. Activities defined as “exploitative” should be considered a particularly interesting point of reference in both analyzed regions

Unintended maladaptation:how agritourism development policies in Iran have increased vulnerability to climate change

Abstract Implementing appropriate policies is crucial for adapting the agricultural sector to climate change. However, adopting incorrect policies can exacerbate unsustainable development. Hence, this study investigated the unintended consequences of agritourism development policies as a climate change adaptation strategy in the villages of Shahrud, Iran. It demonstrated how such policies have inadvertently heightened farmers’ vulnerability to climate change impacts. Data were collected through 44 semi-structured interviews, which underwent thematic analysis to identify emerging patterns. The study’s findings indicate that the rapid expansion of Agritourism in Iran, aimed at addressing climate change, has failed to achieve its intended goals. Inadequate government support, increased supply, legal gaps, and lack of empowerment were identified as contributing factors leading to unsustainable development and financial losses. Consequently, smallholder farmers were found to harbor negative perceptions of agritourism and expressed dissatisfaction with existing policies. These findings underscore the necessity of comprehensive policies and support systems to facilitate the effective implementation of sustainable agritourism by stakeholders in Iran