Smart Cities and Urban Sustainability: two complementary and inter-related concepts

The concept of smart cities constitutes a central issue in the field of spatial planning. Numerous studies have been recorded in the relevant literature concerning the comprehension of the concept as well as the strategies connected to the development of smart cities. In an effort to understand and record the way that smart city strategies influence the objectives of urban sustainability, this paper explores the basic components of their interrelations and underlying connections. Initially, the main concepts of this research, smart cities and urban sustainability, are being clarified and their individual components are analyzed in order to better understand the way they influence urban environment.  In this process it is of particular interest to record the way these two concepts could connect and complement each other to create more efficient spatial planning policies and the role of planners in relevance to the challenges that come with the implementation of a smart city approach. The paper concludes that these two concepts have essentially common goals since smart cities approach is about achieving sustainability, efficiency and high quality of life while technology does not play a prominent but a mediatory role in improving and streamlining processes. Therefore, what makes a city both "smart" and "sustainable" is the creation of processes that with the help of ICTs have the potentiality to make the city operate more effectively in all its areas and at the same time to protect the environment, enhance economic growth and improve quality of life. Other qualitative factors such as changing the citizens’ behavior towards more sustainable patterns are essential to the making of smart-sustainable cities

Towards sustainability: An assessment of an urbanisation bubble in China using a hierarchical - stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis - Choquet integral method

Urbanisation bubbles have become an increasingly serious problem. Attention has been paid to the speed of urbanisation; however, the issue of quality has been neglected, particularly in the case of China. Therefore, the aim of this research is to evaluate China’s urbanisation bubbles by employing a hierarchical - stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis (SMAA) - Choquet integral method. In order to highlight regional disparities, we measure the urbanisation bubbles at a provincial level. Our study aggregates the urbanisation bubble indices using the Choquet integral preference model, and considers the interactions between various indicators. Furthermore, robust ordinal regression and SMAA are applied to resolve the robustness issues associated with the entire set of weights assigned to the urbanisation bubble composite indicator. In addition, by employing a multiple criteria hierarchy process, the study aggregates urbanisation bubble indices not only at the comprehensive level, but also at the intermediate levels of the hierarchy. Our findings suggest that the ranking of urbanisation bubbles is positively related to the level of regional development. This study contributes to the evaluation of regional urbanisation and sustainable development