Smart Cities and Urban Sustainability: A Data-Driven Analysis

Abstract

The high-rate urbanization has complicated the problems with the resources outflow, environment impoverishment, and efficient delivery of the social services, this is why all the cities of the world discuss the models of smart and sustainable urban development. The analytical paper will study the manner in which smart city projects contribute to improving the urban sustainability in a data-driven analytical framework. The article is dedicated to the level of improvement in the environmental results, economic effects, and social well-being of urban areas where the integration of digital technologies, big data analytics, and smart infrastructure is underway. In establishing the trends and correlation between smart governance practices and sustainability outcomes, secondary sources of data, including world smart city rankings, city sustainability reports, and city open-data sites, will be reviewed. These are energy efficiency, waste management, mobility system, water resource optimization and citizen involvement as some of the indicators that can be used to ascertain the effectiveness of data driven decision making in urban management. It has also been found that those cities which have used the opportunity of real-time data, Internet of Things (IoT) application, and predictive analytics are those which have demonstrated the measurable increase in the resource usage, decrease in emissions, and reactivity of services. However, the research also mentions such challenges as the privacy of the data, differences in the availability of technologies, and inability to control them at a large scale that can be a barrier to the sustainability of the smart cities project in the long-term perspective. The paper says that the technological aspect of the equation is lacking; institutional coordination, inclusion policies and ethical data governance are essential components to achieve sustainable outcomes. The paper presents empirical evidence of the interaction of smart technologies and urban sustainability to the body of existing evidence based urban planning. The study gives policy implications to policy makers, urban planners and city administrators who desire to make smart cities resilient, inclusive and environmental friendly as the city complexities rise.